Wealth & Money Quote by Alberto Fujimori

The confidence here is doing double duty: it’s a promise of economic recovery and a bid for political legitimacy in a country where legitimacy was painfully scarce. Fujimori’s phrasing leans on “we expect” twice, a technocratic incantation that sounds modest while functioning like a guarantee. It’s the language of forecasts and policy briefs, not speeches from a balcony. That choice matters: it frames governance as management, implying that poverty is an input you can drive down with the right settings, not a conflict over power, wages, land, and who gets protected when the costs arrive.

The numbers are the real rhetoric. “22 percent to 11 percent” reads like precision, a clean halving that feels both dramatic and arithmetically inevitable. It converts suffering into a measurable outcome, inviting the public (and especially foreign lenders and investors) to see Peru as a stabilizing project with quantifiable returns. “By the year 2000” adds millennial symbolism and a hard deadline, the kind of horizon that helps sell painful reforms in the present by offering a crisp future payoff.

In context, Fujimori’s Peru was navigating economic crisis, insurgent violence, and an international climate that rewarded market reforms and “poverty reduction” targets. The subtext is that order will be restored and austerity can be justified because the destination is moral: fewer people in extreme poverty. It’s aspiration with a ledger attached, and it asks the audience to trust the state’s math at a time when trust was the scarce commodity.