Family and education
He was born in Santiago on 9 August 1940, the eldest of three children of Luis Maira Orrego, a civil engineer and employee of the Empresa de los Ferrocarriles del Estado (EFE), and María Aguirre Aguirre, a homemaker. His father studied architecture at the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile, although he did not complete the degree and instead received the professional title of civil engineer. While at the university, he was a classmate of future deputy Tomás Reyes Vicuña. In the early 1950s, both he and his wife joined the National Falange.
He was first married to Gabriela Peña Díaz and later to Chilean writer Marcela Serrano, with whom he had two daughters.
He completed his primary education at Public School No. 220 and his secondary education at the Internado Nacional Barros Arana. He then enrolled at the University of Chile Faculty of Law, where he earned his law degree with a thesis entitled The Road to the Nationalization of Copper: Negotiations Between the Chilean State and the Anaconda Company.
Professional career
While attending university, he worked as a teaching assistant in courses on Roman law, legal history, Chilean constitutional history, political economy, and economic policy at the University of Chile.
In 1965, he traveled to England to participate in a roundtable on the development of industrial society held in Oxford, and in 1966 attended a seminar on economic and social development at Harvard University in the United States.
Following the 1973 Chilean coup d'état, he went into exile in 1974 and lived in Mexico for ten years, where he specialized in international relations.
During his years in exile, he taught postgraduate courses in international relations at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), the Institute of International Relations of the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro in Brazil, the FLACSO campus in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile.
Between 1975 and 1984, he organized and served as the founding director of the Institute for United States Studies at the Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económicas (CIDE) in Mexico City, while also serving as executive secretary of the Latin American Research Unit (ULA) from 1978 to 1982. Between 1984 and 1987, he was director of the Academic Division of the Joint Program on Latin American International Relations (RIAL), where he also oversaw the publication of its Yearbook of International Studies.
From 1990 to 1993, he served as president of the Center for the Analysis and Transformation of Chilean Society (CENAT) and directed the project on the Latin American impact of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) at the Santiago office of the Instituto Latinoamericano de Estudios Transnacionales (ILET).
In 2003, he was a research professor affiliated with CIDE in Mexico and coordinator of international cooperation for the social development and poverty reduction programs of the government of the Mexican state of Chiapas.
