Leadership Quote by Fernando Flores

What looks like magnanimity is really a claim of authorship. By refusing to “blame Pinochet, or my torturers, or external circumstances,” Fernando Flores doesn’t absolve a dictatorship so much as deny it the final victory: the power to define his inner life. The line is calibrated for the moral marketplace of post-authoritarian politics, where victimhood can confer legitimacy but can also trap a public figure in a single story. Flores performs a kind of anti-victim rhetoric, positioning himself as someone who endured state violence without making his identity dependent on it.

The specificity matters. Naming Pinochet sets the historical temperature: Chile’s coup, repression, and the long shadow those years cast over democratic transition. “My torturers” tightens the lens from regime to intimacy, from ideology to hands-on cruelty. Then he widens it again to “external circumstances,” a phrase that quietly folds in exile, surveillance, betrayal, and the everyday machinery of authoritarianism. The progression suggests he’s not denying the harm; he’s rejecting the explanatory frame that makes harm the center of the narrative.

Subtextually, it’s also a political posture: accountability redirected inward. In a society still negotiating truth commissions, amnesties, and competing memories, “I never blamed” can sound like emotional self-discipline, even stoicism. It can also read as strategic: a way to avoid reopening partisan wounds, to signal pragmatism, to keep alliances possible. The sentence walks a tightrope between personal resilience and public convenience, making its power - and its risk - impossible to miss.