Mauricio Braun was born in 1865 into a Jewish family from Courland, in today's Latvia, that reached Punta Arenas in 1874. He was working from the age of ten, and at fifteen he was with José Nogueira, his future brother-in-law. He fitted out schooners to hunt seals and to bring sheep from the Falklands, and in 1884 he got his first land concession, at Otway.
When Nogueira died in 1893, Mauricio and his sister Sara turned the lease into the Sociedad Explotadora de Tierra del Fuego. In 1895 he married Josefina, eldest daughter of his rival José Menéndez, and in 1908 the two families merged their trading houses into what became the Sociedad Anónima Importadora y Exportadora de la Patagonia, the most powerful firm in the far south of the continent. By 1906 he already owned or leased more than two million hectares.
That land was Selk'nam country. Chile's 2008 Historical Truth Commission report records that the Explotadora was accused of leading a massacre of the Selk'nam, and historians such as José Luis Alonso Marchante name Braun, with Menéndez, among those chiefly responsible.
His Punta Arenas home, built between 1903 and 1906 just off the plaza, is now the Museo Regional de Magallanes. He died in 1953.
