Jaime Guzmán, who drafted the junta's 1974 Declaration of Principles, had been interested in using law to depoliticise Chilean society since his early days as president of the Catholic University Law School's Student Union. As a student, Guzmán led the ultraconservative Catholic gremialista student group, which united with the Chicago Boys in 1967 to oppose a student revolt demanding democratic selection of the university hierarchy. Guzmán – then a devotee of the fascist corporatism of Franco's Spanish dictatorship and the reactionary anti-liberal Catholic tradition of Juan Donoso Cortés and Joseph de Maistre – was never a friend of democracy. In Chile, that tradition was represented by Jaime Eyzaguirre and Osvaldo Lira, the latter of whom was an early disciple of Jacques Maritain, who contributed to the early stages of the UDHR, and who Lira described as 'one of the greatest neo-Scholastic figures'. For this conservative corporatist tradition, the person was enmeshed in intermediate institutions that were threatened by the intrusions of those Lira termed the 'ignorant, uncultivated and unintelligent' masses. Guzmán's Declaration of Principles reflected this tradition by defining the role of social power as 'securing the independence and depoliticisation of all intermediate societies between individuals and the state'. It was this goal, and a common 'totalitarian' adversary, that facilitated Guzmán's reconciliation of conservative Catholicism with neoliberalism. The ultimate outcome was Chile's 1980 'Constitution of Liberty'.

Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, loc. 357