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. 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. Gremialist Javier Leturia wrote about the origin of the movement as:
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. 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. 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. 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.
