Uruguay's modest revolutionary and president has died
Above video from Kelly Candaele's interview.
José Mujica died Tuesday at age 89. If you don’t know the name, it’s not surprising. Mujica was the President of Uruguay from 2010 to 2015, leading a country of only 3.5 million people squeezed between two behemoths– Brazil and Argentina. Not a South American political power, its major exports are beef, soy and some of the best professional soccer players in the world.
For a time after his election as President, Mujica was an international celebrity, the subject of glowing profiles by journalists and filmmakers from around the world who flocked to Uruguay to talk with him. There was a “global Mujica cult,” according to one writer.
In some ways, his notoriety abroad was understandable. It is easier to idealize political leaders who are not your own, distanced from the day-to-day compromises that tarnish even the most compelling political figures. But Mujica drew acclaim by behaving in such a, well, un-presidential way. “ As Chief of State and representative of Uruguay to the world, he was extraordinary,” said Adolfo Garcé, Professor of Political Science at the University of the Republic in Montevideo.
“When he was president, the world talked about Uruguay not only because of soccer.”
Mujica refused to stay in the Presidential residence in the capital city of Montevideo. He preferred his small farmhouse outside of town at the end of a dirt road, surrounded by poor and working-class neighbors. His preferred mode of transportation was not a stately black Mercedes, but a light blue Volkswagen Beetle that he drove each day to his presidential office. He gave away most of his presidential salary. The pomp and ceremony of high office was abandoned, as well as the usual retinue of fawning political aides.
Despite a “humble” approach to his presidency, Mujica’s personal background was deeply alienating to many Uruguayans. He wasn’t a manufactured politician with a resume designed to appeal to so-called swing voters, who move between parties with each election cycle. In his youth, Mujica was a Marxist revolutionary.
Inspired by Argentinian Ernesto “Che” Guevara and the Cuban revolution, Mujica and his revolutionary colleagues called themselves Tupamaros, after an 18th-century Peruvian revolutionary. The group robbed banks, bombed government buildings, kidnapped and killed people. “The Tupamaros were a crazy enterprise that contributed to the military coup d’état,” Garcé said.
Mujica was convicted of killing a policeman in 1971 – he denied the charge – and spent 15 years in prison during the military dictatorship that ruled Uruguay between 1973 and 1985. He spent ten of those years in solitary confinement. When released from prison, he turned from revolution to democracy, helping expand the Frente Amplio, a broad political coalition of the left.
Not long after Mujica’s presidential term ended in 2015, I drove to his small farm with my Uruguayan wife and a video camera. I had been a union organizer for several years and had documented and written about construction workers for two decades. I wanted to talk to Mujica about why he loved farming and working with his hands and what was lost when a society diminishes the importance of what we call “manual labor.”
There were no signs along the dirt road leading to his home that say “This way to former President’s house.” Driving there, I thought about how difficult it would be to arrange a conversation at the home of any former American President.
After stopping to ask a neighbor where “El Pepe” (Mujica’s nickname) lived, we were directed to a small dirt lane where a small stop sign sat about 50 yards from a tiny makeshift guard shack. A guard named Turco wore a dark blue t-shirt, cargo pants and alpargatas – a casual shoe associated with gauchos or rural workers. He smiled as he walked towards our car. He carried a thermos tucked under one arm, while also carrying a small round cup that contained Yerba Mate, the Uruguayan national drink.
We walked to Turco’s guard house just across from Mujica’s cement-walled home, topped by a light green corrugated aluminium roof. Grass, plants, dense shrubbery and radiant flowers grew wildly in the former president’s front yard. The famous blue Beetle was parked snuggly in a small garage at the side of the house.
As we set up the camera and waited for Mujica to arrive, I noticed a small pistol placed haphazardly on the wooden shelf, unintentionally pointed towards the chair I was provided for the interview. Given Mujica’s radical past and his politics, he certainly still has bitter enemies in Uruguay, but it was hard for me to imagine someone making a serious effort to harm him.
Mujica walked into the shed, sat down on a stool, rolled a cigarette and lit up. He asked Turco to let him know if his wife, Lucia Topolansky – also a former Tupamaro rebel – might be approaching the shed. She didn’t approve of him smoking. Between drags, he glanced out the window towards his house.
For an hour, we talked about using tools, theories of history, technology and the growth of consumerism, his dark eyes narrowing as he drilled down on an idea. Raising his hands in front of his face, Mujica suggested that using your hands in work had a “profound impact on the way we reason about the world around us,” and that the way that our hands evolved, allowed trades and crafts and culture to develop. Mujica agreed when I brought up the writer Matthew Crawford, who has written about the “cognitive richness” required in the skilled trades.
“When I talk to people,” Mujica said, “I like to shake their hands because their hands tell me something about their social position.” He smiled when pointing out that there are brilliant intellectuals who are unable to change a tire on their cars. “Manual ability should be a component in education, and it is a disaster for society when this is lost,” he added.
I thought of my father, an electrician, who occasionally would ask me when I was a child to run my fingers across the callouses of his outstretched hands. He would announce defiantly, “I’m no paper pusher. These are working man’s hands,” a defiant assertion of working-class pride.
Mujica also spoke about the “pathology” of growing inequality in the world that has left so many living on the margins of society. Evoking social-democratic Sweden, not his once beloved Cuba, he noted that “With a more equal distribution of wealth, there are fewer people who are going to become criminals. This is not a coincidence.”
There was an aspect of the self-educated philosopher at a youthful debating club in the way Mujica talked. “What is the sense of an unconscionable accumulation of wealth,” he mused. “No one can buy more than the one life we have.” At a United Nations gathering in 2013, he lectured the delegates, telling them that the “market god…organizes our economy, our politics, our habits, our lives. It seems we have been born only to consume.” It is likely that the diplomats in attendance were less concerned with overconsumption than with how to increase economic growth in their own countries.
When in office, he was sometimes criticized for talking about big ideas but not following bold musings with the personal shrewdness or ruthless political maneuvering to turn ideas into effective legislation. Even some former allies suggested he was a “filósofo de la barra,” a bar philosopher who regales people with grand agendas but then goes home to sleep it off.
Uruguayan journalist Lucas Silva sees it differently. “I think you can be a kind of philosopher and an intelligent politician at the same time, and with Mujica, both things are true,” he said.
As President, Mujica wasn’t much of a hard-core socialist, a fact that disappointed his more orthodox left-wing detractors. He invited business leaders to invest in Uruguay, touting the country’s highly educated workforce. No major industry was taken over by the state or by workers’ committees. While poverty was reduced during his five-year term and the economy was healthy, his most memorable achievements were in social policy. Gay marriage and abortion were legalized during his term, as was the sale and use of marijuana, a deeply controversial law.
As an outsider, I don’t know what his long-term legacy will be in Uruguay, one of the most stable democracies in South America. Uruguay, like most democratic countries, is increasingly polarized between left-leaning and right-leaning political factions. While neighboring Argentina is experimenting with the libertarian capitalism of Javier Milei, in last November's Uruguayan elections, Mujica’s Broad Front party won back the presidency after five years of conservative government.
Garcé and Silva both believe that Mujica’s legacy is the worldwide attention that he gained for Uruguay. “His legacy will certainly not be his early life as a guerrilla fighter,” Garcé said. “He was an authentic politician who did not seek money or prestige or power, but wanted to serve the people.”
If his youthful hero Che was burdened with a “frighteningly abstract hatred,” according to writer Alma Guillermoprieto, Mujica insisted that resentment of others was not a productive emotion to carry around. “Hatred is a poison,” Mujica told the Guardian newspaper in 2014. “You can’t spend life trying to collect debts no one is going to pay. Life is tomorrow.”
Despite his inability to dramatically transform capitalism or bring global capital to heel, in the poorer sections of Montevideo and among the broad political movement he helped to create, he is deeply mourned.
People around the world are also pausing to remember the odd Uruguayan president who spoke like a philosopher, refused the trappings of power and rejected the chimera of endless consumption. “People want to be rich and mirror their peers, which is understandable,” he told me. “These values are not imposed by armies or brute force, but have become the common thinking that the mass media promotes.”
When I look at my own country and beyond, I see the resurgence of authoritarianism fueled by anger, resentment and fear. I don’t pretend to know the deeper motivations of Mujica’s supporters. I only know that in the brief time I spent exchanging ideas with him, I felt like I was talking to a unique politician who had ultimately let go of those dark impulses.
