Jaime Guzmán

Jaime Jorge Guzmán Errázuriz (born June 28, 1946 in Santiago de Chile , † April 1, 1991 in Santiago) was a Chilean university professor, senator and politician.

biography

Guzmán was the son of Jorge Guzmán Reyes and Carmen Errázuriz Edwards. He attended from 1951 to 1962 the Colegio de los Sagrados Corazones in Santiago and then the high school. From 1963, only 16 years old, he studied law at the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile and graduated in 1968 with the highest distinction. He already took on teaching duties during his studies. During his student days, he founded the Movimiento Gremial Universitario , a right-wing conservative political movement, which in 1968 took over the leadership of the student body at the Faculty of Justice at the Catholic University. Guzmán became a research assistant, then assistant professor and later professor of political theory and constitutional law at the law faculty of the Catholic University of Chile. In 1968 he became a member of the Academic Council of the Faculty, in 1972 he became a representative of the university lecturers and then a member of the Supreme Council of the university. At the same time he was a sharp political agitator against the Popular Front government under Salvador Allende, elected in 1970 .

After the 1973 military coup , Guzmán became a close advisor to the dictator and general Augusto Pinochet and an influential shaper of the new political order in Chile, without taking up an official position. Since 1973 he has been involved in the drafting of the new constitution of Chile under the military regime, which came into force in 1980 and, with certain adjustments, remained in force until today after the transition in Chile . 1982 devoted himself to political party work. In 1983 he founded the Unión Demócrata Independiente (UDI) movement, a fighting organization that, according to his ideas, should take over the government in Chile after the end of the military dictatorship. The Renovación Nacional was founded in 1987 as a right-wing collecting party, from which the UDI under Guzmán broke away after a short time.
After the first free elections in Chile on December 14, 1989 , Guzmán entered parliament despite very little support for his right-wing UDI party and made a name for himself there as a right-wing opposition leader against the new democratic government under President Patricio Aylwin . From 1989 he was elected Senator for Santiago .

Guzmán was stopped on April 1, 1991 on the way home from his university by a four-man command of the communist guerrilla organization Frente Patriótico Manuel Rodríguez (FPMR) and shot by Ricardo Palma Salamanca in his car. One of his fatalities was that, unlike other politicians, he never changed his routes. He was buried at the Cementerio General de Chile .

politics

→ Main article : Unión Demócrata Independiente # history

Fonts

• Escritos Personales. JGE, Santiago de Chile 1992, ISBN 956-12-0759-1 .

literature

• Renato Cristi: El pensamiento político de Jaime Guzman. Una biografía intelectual. LOM Ediciones, Santiago de Chile 2014, ISBN 978-956-00-0275-4 (first edition with a slightly different title 2011).
• Cristián Gazmuri: ¿Quién era Jaime Guzmán? RIL Editores, Santiago de Chile 2013, ISBN 956-01-0042-4 .
• Belén Moncada Durruti: Jaime Guzmán. Una democracia contrarevolucionaria. El político de 1964 a 1980. RIL Editores, Santiago de Chile 2006, ISBN 978-956-284-520-5 .

Individual evidence, note

1. ↑ Note: According to the historian Renato Cristi, when writing the new constitution of Chile, he relied on the concept of the pouvoir component ( pouvoir constituant and dictatorship) of the conservative German constitutional lawyer Carl Schmitt .