Uruguay's mourning for a rebel-turned-president brings decades of upheaval into perspective

Globe and Mail

16-05-2025

He usually arrived the minute the ballot boxes opened, surrounded by the press, voting credentials in hand. But on this crisp election Sunday in a working-class neighbourhood of Montevideo, Uruguay's most famous and modest man was conspicuously absent.
There was a presence to that void, a solemn understanding of what it all meant.
'As if the old man's not going to vote. Nothing stops him,' one voter called out.
Indeed, not much could stop José (Pepe) Mujica, former president of Uruguay, a political lion of Latin America's left, with a life that has marked seismic shifts in his tiny nation, and across the continent.
He died Tuesday, on the simple ranch where he and his wife, Lucía Topolansky, tended to flowers, after a year-long battle against cancer of the esophagus. He was days shy of turning 90.
Up until his death, he remained a unique force in Uruguay, a country of some 3.4 million that has adopted some of the most socially progressive policies in the region, many of them shaped by him.
He was famously dubbed the world's most humble president for his austere life, shunning the presidential palace for the rustic homestead that he loved to roam with his three-legged dog, Manuela, donating most of his salary to build housing for the poor. Graced with a philosopher's tongue, he sunk his hands into the earth and retrieved lessons on living.
'Every day, if I can, I ride my tractor for an hour because I find myself that way,' he said in an interview last year.
Mr. Mujica considered that tendency to converse alone his salvation, a sort of fingerprint left by years spent in solitary confinement, as a hostage of the military dictatorship that ruled Uruguay in the 1970s and 80s. It's a fact that belies an extraordinary life, punctuated by dreams of revolution, prison breakouts, and a mission focused on the most marginalized.
'The problem is that the world is run by old people,' he said last year, 'who forget what they were like when they were young.'
Mr. Mujica was a descendant of Basque and Italian immigrants. His father died when he was a child and he cultivated a close relationship with his mother, who sold flowers in Montevideo. As a young man, Mr. Mujica joined the urban guerrilla group Movimiento de Liberación Nacional-Tupamaros (Movement for National Liberation-Tupamaros) in the 1960s, inspired by the Cuban revolution. He took up arms as Latin America was rife with military coups and upheaval. In one confrontation with police, Mr. Mujica took six bullets to the body.
He was captured multiple times, and on two occasions escaped from jail, including alongside more than 100 other prisoners who dug a tunnel out of a city prison. His last capture was in 1973, when he and eight other Tupamaros were held alone in squalid conditions and tortured. He wouldn't be freed until 1985, with the fall of the dictatorship. He was pardoned, renounced violence, and reunited with his long-time partner, Ms. Topolansky, another member of Tupamaros who had also been imprisoned by the dictatorship. The pair were never separated again, becoming Uruguay's most prominent political couple.
'Poor me if I didn't have her,' Mr. Mujica said of his partner. 'When you are young, love is stormy, full of fire and explosive. When you enter into older age, it is a refuge. A sweet custom.'
The couple formed a party called Movimiento de Participación Popular (Movement of Popular Participation), which in 1989 joined the Frente Amplio (Broad Front), a unique coalition stretching from the centre to the far left in Uruguay. Mr. Mujica was elected president of Uruguay with the Frente Amplio in 2010. During his five-year term, the country legalized same-sex marriage, marijuana and abortion. He turned Uruguay into a renewable-energy powerhouse, and drove down unemployment, poverty and infant mortality.
When he bid farewell as president in 2015, he told the masses: 'I'm not leaving, I'm arriving,' a reference to his continuing commitment to politics. He grew older, but no less influential. His ranch became a sort of headquarters for Latin America's left, welcoming everyone from students to the region's most prominent leaders. Well into his 80s, he and Ms. Topolansky, who was a senator and served as vice-president in a subsequent administration, would hold large public chats on the country's future.
After he was diagnosed with cancer, a parade of dignitaries, journalists and stars came to pay their respects, and hear one more morsel of wisdom from 'el viejo,' the old man, as he was affectionately known. Chilean President Gabriel Boric planted an olive tree with Mr. Mujica. Brazilian President Luiz Inácio (Lula) da Silva bestowed upon him his country's highest award to a foreigner. 'We cannot choose a brother. We cannot even choose a mother. But we can choose a comrade,' Lula said in an emotive visit to Mr. Mujica's farm in December.
I also went looking for Pepe. My earlier attempts at an interview had failed. In January, he told a radio station that he was, understandably, done with journalists: 'This warrior has the right to rest.'
But the truth is that I did find Pepe this weekend. He was in the Frente Amplio flags that draped out of balconies in Montevideo, outnumbering the Uruguay ones. He was in posters that hung in the neighbourhood hubs where residents meet every week to debate political ideas, T-shirts that bore his face, and a memorial outside the former prison from which he escaped, which is now a shopping mall. But mostly, he was in people's stories.
'We still don't realize the impact that he had,' said Esther Chalá, a retired teacher and Frente Amplio volunteer.
Lilian Flores, 60, remembered the first time she heard Mr. Mujica speak. It was 2002 and Uruguay was in the middle of an economic crisis. The pain of the dictatorship and those who were murdered or disappeared still echoed in its streets. She saw this man, at a local outpost for his party, speaking to the crowd with a 'freshness' that struck her. 'His message was, if we unite, we can get out of this. There wasn't one drop of hate there,' she said. 'He never used us to try to silence his possible, and justifiable, resentments.'
'For me, Pepe is su pueblo,' said Luciana Claveri, 44, using a term that does not have a perfect translation in English, meaning literally village, but mostly a people. Selling clothes at a vintage fair, Ms. Claveri recalled the 'asado de Pepe' – a scheme he came up with while in government to ensure that beef remained affordable for Uruguayans in the cattle- and beef-exporting country. 'Who would have thought that a revolutionary would be president?' she said.
Outside the small school where Mr. Mujica was supposed to vote, Ruben Picochet said the same thing. 'I am lucky the dictatorship didn't get me,' said the 77-year-old, with yerba mate, the popular South American infusion, in hand. 'I might have been doing the same things as Pepe. I was more of a union man than a politician. They caught him, because he gambled more.'
For Mr. Mujica, it was not so much about gambling, but about living. Any chance he got, he would talk about the beauty and essential preciousness of life, reminding young people especially to cradle it, find meaning in the doing – not the having – and love, always love. He was militant in his critique of capitalist, consumer-driven society. His austerity, he explained as freedom.
'I dedicated myself to changing the world, and I didn't change a damn thing! But I was entertained. And I've made many friends and many allies in that madness of changing the world to improve it. And I gave meaning to my life,' he said. 'I didn't have a wasted life, because I didn't spend my life just consuming things. I spent it dreaming, fighting, struggling.'
Even after his diagnosis, he remained committed to his political cause, campaigning to secure victory for Frente Amplio in last year's presidential elections. He paid homage to the particular joy he found 'with my vegetables, with my chickens, because you don't change your horse at the end of the river.'
'Life is beautiful, and it wears thin and goes,' he said at the press conference he gave announcing his illness. 'The crux of the matter is to start over every time you fall, and if there's anger, transform it into hope and fight for love, don't let yourself be fooled by hate. No one is saved alone.'