Gremialismo

Gremialismo, or guildism, is a social, political and economic ideology, inspired in the Catholic social teachings, which claims that every correct social order should base itself in intermediary societies between the persons and the state, which are created and managed in freedom, and the order should serve the purposes for which they were created and no other.[1]

In Chile, gremialismo was the main doctrine of the liberal-conservative movement that emerged in the second half of the 1960s and led the opposition to the University Reform in the Catholic University of Chile. Thus, it opposed the Chilean left and centre. The principal thinker of gremialism was the lawyer and professor and later an advisor of Pinochet, Jaime Guzmán.

There has been a dispute on whether or not gremialismo thought has been influenced by Juan Vázquez de Mella.[2]

Gremialist Javier Leturia wrote about the origin of the movement as:[3]

We [the gremialistas] were orderly, we were those that were not hippie, those that were not left-wing, those that were not potheads. I would say they [sic] were participative people. That is why former school union leaders and people from school unions, the scouts and religious movements were picked up. We were openly pro-coup. We published a manifesto in the newspaper that read: "Towards a new institutionality through the renounce of Allende". [...] What we said was that the crisis was insurmountable and that the only solution was to have the armed forces take charge. We did that manifesto as university students and it was signed by student unions from the catholic universities of Santiago and Valparaíso, that were headed by gremialismo. I would say that from the moment Allende was elected many turned pro-coup. I mean, we were not going to accept that this country fell into communism.

Role in military dictatorship youth policy

One of the first measures of the military dictatorship that came to power though the 1973 coup d'etat was to set up a Secretaría Nacional de la Juventud (SNJ, National Youth Office). This was done on October 28, 1973, even before the Declaration of Principles of the junta made in March 1974. This was a way of mobilizing sympathetic elements of the civil society in support for the dictatorship. SNJ was created by advise of Jaime Guzmán, being an example of the dictatorship adopting a gremialist thought.[3] Some right-wing student union leaders like Andrés Allamand were skeptical to these attempts as they were moulded from above and gathered disparate figures such as Miguel Kast, Antonio Vodanovic and Jaime Guzmán. Allamand and other young right-wingers also resented the dominance of the gremialist in SNJ, considering it a closed gremialist club.[4]

From 1975 to 1980 the SNJ arranged a series of ritualized acts in cerro Chacarillas reminiscent of Francoist Spain. The policy towards the sympathetic youth contrasted with the murder, surveillance and forced disappearances the dissident youth faced from the regime. Most of the documents of the SNJ were reportedly destroyed by the dictatorship in 1988.[3]

References

1. "El Gremialismo y su postura universitaria en 27 preguntas y respuestas" (mayo de 1980).
2. Díaz Nieva, José (2008). "Influencias de Juan Vázquez de Mella sobre Jaime Guzmán" (PDF). Verbo (in Spanish). 467–468: 661–670. Retrieved 11 October 2015.
3. González, Yanko (2015). "El "Golpe Generacional" y la Secretaría Nacional de la Juventud: purga, disciplinamiento y resocialización de las identidades juveniles bajo Pinochet (1973-1980)" [The "Generational Putsch" and the National youth Office: Purge, disciplining and resocialization of youth identities under Pinochet (1973-1980)]. Atenea (in Spanish). 512 (512): 10.4067/S0718–04622015000200006. doi:10.4067/S0718-04622015000200006. Retrieved December 4, 2017.
4. Allamand, Andrés (1999). La Travesía del Desierto (in Spanish). Editorial Alfaguara. pp. 29–30. ISBN 978-956-239-078-1.