"What we are doing in fact is recovering and progressing and sustaining the recovery of our democracy"
About this Quote
“Recovering and progressing and sustaining” is the kind of verbal triathlon politicians run when the terrain beneath them is unstable. Fujimori stacks reassuring verbs as if momentum itself were proof of legitimacy: not just recovery, but forward motion, and not just forward motion, but endurance. The line is engineered to sound like a public service announcement for constitutional health, even as it dodges the obvious question: recovering from what, and at what cost?
The subtext is defensive. “In fact” telegraphs that someone, somewhere, is accusing his government of the opposite - of damaging democratic norms rather than repairing them. Fujimori answers by reframing democracy as a deliverable, a system you can reboot with enough managerial will. That’s a classic technocratic move: turn a messy contest of power, rights, and institutions into an outcome measured in stability and results.
Context makes the phrasing land with extra irony. Fujimori is inseparable from Peru’s 1992 “autogolpe,” when he dissolved Congress and restructured the judiciary, later justifying extraordinary tactics as necessary to defeat insurgency and economic collapse. In that light, “recovery” becomes a rhetorical solvent: it dissolves the memory of democratic rupture and replaces it with a narrative of national convalescence led by a steady hand.
The line’s intent isn’t to persuade skeptics so much as to normalize a storyline: if the country feels safer, if the economy steadies, then democracy must be “sustained” - even if the institutions that define it have been bent. It’s the language of democracy as a brand promise, delivered by executive power.
The subtext is defensive. “In fact” telegraphs that someone, somewhere, is accusing his government of the opposite - of damaging democratic norms rather than repairing them. Fujimori answers by reframing democracy as a deliverable, a system you can reboot with enough managerial will. That’s a classic technocratic move: turn a messy contest of power, rights, and institutions into an outcome measured in stability and results.
Context makes the phrasing land with extra irony. Fujimori is inseparable from Peru’s 1992 “autogolpe,” when he dissolved Congress and restructured the judiciary, later justifying extraordinary tactics as necessary to defeat insurgency and economic collapse. In that light, “recovery” becomes a rhetorical solvent: it dissolves the memory of democratic rupture and replaces it with a narrative of national convalescence led by a steady hand.
The line’s intent isn’t to persuade skeptics so much as to normalize a storyline: if the country feels safer, if the economy steadies, then democracy must be “sustained” - even if the institutions that define it have been bent. It’s the language of democracy as a brand promise, delivered by executive power.
Quote Details
| Topic | Freedom |
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