Francisco Javier Cuadra

Francisco Javier Cuadra Lizana (born 23 June 1954) is a Chilean lawyer, academic, and politician. He was a minister under the military dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet, dean of the Faculty of Law, and later rector of Diego Portales University.

Biography The son of Francisco Javier Cuadra Cornejo – lawyer of El Teniente mine – and María Cristina Lizana Alvear, Francisco Javier Cuadra spent his childhood and adolescence in his hometown of Rancagua with his brothers Cristián, Juan Pablo, Gonzalo, and José Miguel. There he studied at the Instituto O'Higgins and then went to university in Santiago: he first entered Adolfo Ibáñez University, where he took five semesters of Commercial Engineering, but after the coup of 1973 he changed to Law at the Pontifical Catholic University, where he received a degree in that discipline.

Recently graduated, he worked at the now-defunct Banco Continental, the only one to be the subject of an intervention by the at the time. One of the delegates of this era was , but on 31 January 1983, he was dismissed after a conflict related to the manner in which negotiations with the entity's workers were handled. which he held from 1984 to 1987. He was then ambassador of Chile to the Holy See until the end of the regime (1987–1990).

After the return to democracy, he devoted himself mainly to the academic field and political analysis.

In an interview with the magazine Qué Pasa, in its 13 January 1995 issue, Cuadra said that there were "parliamentarians and other people who exercise public functions who use drugs." For this he was prosecuted under the , and was eventually sentenced to 540 days in prison. The incident led him to renounce National Renewal (RN), the party to which Andrés Allamand had brought him (and in doing so, he had appointed him director of the Liberty Institute). where he had worked sporadically as a teacher since 1983, and where two of his eight children, José Francisco and José Antonio, had studied. On 14 November 2005, he was forced to resign that position due to pressures exerted by certain sectors of Chilean society, especially by the student community of that house of studies. His departure came after some statements Cuadra made to , in which he claimed that under Pinochet, for whom he was minister, some people were detained - particularly Ricardo Lagos, after the 1986 attack on the general

Cuadra was an advisor to Horacio Cartes, elected president of Paraguay in 2013, since he was a precandidate to lead the country for the Colorado Party.

Cultural references Cuadra was featured as the main character of the novels Baila hermosa Soledad (1991) by and La patria (2012) by Marcelo Leonart.