Pedro Félix Vicuña

Pedro Félix Vicuña Aguirre (February 21, 1805, Santiago, Viceroyalty of Peru – May 24, 1874, Santiago) was a Chilean journalist and one of the founders in 1827 of the newspaper El Mercurio de Valparaíso, the oldest existing newspaper in Spanish language.

Vicuña's father served two brief terms as acting president of Chile in 1829, and was widely considered as the head of the Liberal party.

In 1825, at the age of 20, he moved from Santiago to Valparaíso, where he bought a printing press and began publishing El Telégrafo Mercantil y Político.

In 1827, at the age of 21, he founded the newspaper El Mercurio de Valparaíso, together with typographers Thomas Wells and Ignacio Silva.

As the result of ideas he expressed in Paz perpetua, he gained the enmity of Conservative Interior Minister Diego Portales.

The same year his son Benjamín Vicuña Mackenna, a future journalist and historian, was born to him and his wife.

In 1852 he wrote El porvenir del hombre (The Future of Man), considered his greatest work.