The term imagocracy was likely first coined in Spanish (as imagocracia) by Peruvian politician Manuel Dammert in 2001 to describe Alberto Fujimori's style of governance: A dictatorship that constructs and dominates the images of social life to perpetuate the hidden power of a corrupt mafia that keeps sterilized the vacuous institutions of representative democracy ... its source of power lies in the domination of the image, whose representation alienates individuals.
[5]The informational autocracy concept was proposed by Russian economist Sergey Guriyev and British-American political scientist Daniel Treisman in a 2020 paper (later as spin dictatorship in their 2022 book):Dictators survive not by means of force or ideology but because they convince the public—rightly or wrongly—that they are competent.
Citizens do not observe the leader's type but infer it from signals in their living standards, state propaganda, and messages sent by an informed elite via independent media.
The dictator can invest in making convincing state propaganda, censoring independent media, co-opting the elite, or equipping police to repress attempted uprisings—but he must finance such spending at the expense of the public's consumption.
"[2]Alberto Fujimori's campaign against the Shining Path, a Maoist guerrilla group, was marked by harsh measures, including the stigmatization of the Andean population as "leftist terrorists".
This strategy exploited historical biases against small ethnic minorities, particularly those associated with terrorism, allowing Fujimori to leverage public fear to his political advantage.
By the early 1990s, six of Peru's seven major television stations were privately owned, and Montesinos bribed these media moguls to ensure self-censorship and favorable coverage of the government.
When one of his aides suggested making death threats against Ivcher, Montesinos dismissed the idea, citing the negative consequences faced by Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet.
[2] Despite Montesinos' aversion to overt violence in this instance, he was not above using bloodshed when it served his purposes, as evidenced by his earlier deployment of death squads against peasants during the conflict with the Shining Path.