Marta Vergara Varas was born on 2 January 1898 in Valparaíso, Chile to Clotilde Varas Valdovinos and Pedro Vergara Silva, the youngest of three sisters. Her early years were spent there on the coast, until the 1906 Valparaíso earthquake destroyed her family home and killed her mother. From that time forward, the family moved back and forth between the coast and the capital. By the late 1920s, Vergara was working as a journalist and in 1927 when Carlos Ibáñez del Campo began his leadership after the coup d'état, she fled to Europe. Working as a correspondent for "El Mercurio" she made contact with other journalists.