Background
Enrique Mac Iver was born on 15 July 1845 in Constitución.
Enrique Mac Iver was born on 15 July 1845 in Constitución.
He got his law degree in 1869.
In 1876 he was first elected to the Chamber of Deputies in which he served until 1900. The rest of his life, Maclver was a senator and, on several occasions, a minister. He signed the document “deposing” President José Manuel Balmaceda Fernández and spent most of the 1891 civil war in exile.
Maclver, a very distinguished lawyer and a large landowner, led the “free enterprise” faction of the Radical Party. The faction was defeated in the party’s Third Congress in 1906, which committed the party toan ill-defined “socialism.” In spite of that defeat, Maclver remained in the party. As late as 1920 he was one of three contestants for the presidential nomination of the Liberal Alliance, of which the Radical Party was the core, losing out to Arturo Alessandri Palma.