"We have shown, given these last three years, that we were succeeding in fighting terrorists. While during the first 30 years of the former governments they didn't"
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The line tries to smuggle a verdict into the grammar: three years equals proof; thirty years equals failure. Fujimori isn’t just defending a policy record, he’s compressing Peru’s recent trauma into a clean before-and-after story where urgency excuses everything. The rhetorical move is blunt but effective: “we have shown” frames counterinsurgency as a measurable result, not a moral argument, and “given these last three years” implies an almost scientific trial period that has already delivered the data.
The subtext is transactional. Security becomes the master currency, purchased at the price of weakened checks and balances, militarization, and the normalization of emergency politics. By invoking “terrorists” rather than naming Sendero Luminoso or the MRTA, he keeps the enemy abstract enough to cover a wide target set: insurgents, sympathizers, critics, inconvenient institutions. That vagueness is a feature, not a bug, because it widens what can be justified as “fighting.”
The “first 30 years” jab aims at the entire democratic establishment, flattening different administrations into one long era of incompetence. It’s an argument for exceptional leadership: the old rules couldn’t handle the threat, so a new kind of leader had to break them. In early 1990s Peru, with bombings, assassinations, economic collapse, and public exhaustion, the promise of visible results had enormous cultural force.
What makes the line work is its emotional arithmetic: fear plus fatigue equals consent. It asks listeners to remember how bad it felt, then offers a simple ledger where success absolves methods.
The subtext is transactional. Security becomes the master currency, purchased at the price of weakened checks and balances, militarization, and the normalization of emergency politics. By invoking “terrorists” rather than naming Sendero Luminoso or the MRTA, he keeps the enemy abstract enough to cover a wide target set: insurgents, sympathizers, critics, inconvenient institutions. That vagueness is a feature, not a bug, because it widens what can be justified as “fighting.”
The “first 30 years” jab aims at the entire democratic establishment, flattening different administrations into one long era of incompetence. It’s an argument for exceptional leadership: the old rules couldn’t handle the threat, so a new kind of leader had to break them. In early 1990s Peru, with bombings, assassinations, economic collapse, and public exhaustion, the promise of visible results had enormous cultural force.
What makes the line work is its emotional arithmetic: fear plus fatigue equals consent. It asks listeners to remember how bad it felt, then offers a simple ledger where success absolves methods.
Quote Details
| Topic | War |
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