Money in Peruvian political discourse: a case study

As an incident, anecdote or outburst, the allusion to money has always been present in the speeches of Peruvian politicians, in a context of generalized distrust in politics and where certain of these terms and phrases will swell the popular lexicon. In this study, three emblematic expressions about money uttered by three politicians were scrutinized, on the one hand, from six perspectives of discourse analysis: formalist, enunciative, materialist, ideological, social and rhetorical; and, on the other hand, from the design of axial coding, under five pre-categories: relations, conditioning, contextual links, mediations and prospective, via interviews with experts. The discourse analysis showed that the phrases "For God's sake, for the money", "Money in abundance" and "The money arrives by itself", with money at the center of their messages, not only delineated the actions of their authors, but also reflected the general Peruvian political class in a framework in which the citizenship judges political-money relations but ends up accepting and normalizing them. From the interviews to the experts, more than their analysis of each political phrase has delineated specific cases, the three expressions survive in the Peruvian collective memory, subjugating a complex and obscure relationship between politics and money. It is necessary for both politics and other social actors to promote strategies that support the improvement of the aforementioned relationship for the sake of democratic governance.