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Globe and Mail
16-05-2025
- Politics
- Globe and Mail
Uruguay's mourning for a rebel-turned-president brings decades of upheaval into perspective
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.'
Associated Press
15-05-2025
- Politics
- Associated Press
Latin America's leftist leaders remember Uruguay's 'Pepe' Mujica as generous, charismatic leader
MONTEVIDEO, Uruguay (AP) — In the soaring palace of Uruguay's parliament, leftist presidents from the region came to remember former President Jose Mujica on Thursday as a generous and charismatic leader whose legacy of humility remained an example for the world's politicians. 'A person like Pepe Mujica doesn't die,' Brazil's President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva said as he paid his respects to his longtime friend, widely known as Pepe, at the Legislative Palace in Montevideo where his body lay in state, eulogizing the onetime Marxist guerrilla who spent over a decade in prison in the 1970s as a 'superior human being.' 'His body is gone. But the ideas he put forward over the years demonstrate the generosity of a man who spent 14 years in prison and managed to emerge without hatred toward the people who imprisoned and tortured him,' Lula said. Approaching the coffin, tears streamed down his face. Lula pulled Mujica's lifelong and fellow politician, 80-year-old Lucía Topolansky, into a hug and planted a kiss on her forehead. Mujica, a member of Uruguay's leftist Broad Front coalition elected in 2009, and Lula, the standard-bearer of Brazil's Workers' Party who started his second term in 2007, belonged to a generation of leftist leaders elected to office across Latin America in the early years of this century. The movement's power faded in recent years as some governments became embroiled in corruption scandals. But Mujica stood out for keeping his reputation for honesty and humility intact. Lula frequently met Mujica in his three-room farmhouse on the outskirts of Montevideo, where, after retiring from the Senate, the former president tended to his chrysanthemums and dispensed wisdom to a range of visitors — from rock band Aerosmith to philosopher Noam Chomsky. It's also where Mujica died at age 89 on Tuesday, after more than a year spent battling esophageal cancer. Another leftist leader paying tribute to Mujica in Montevideo on Thursday was Chile's president, Gabriel Boric. On learning of Mujica's death on Tuesday, both Boric and Lula jetted to Uruguay from Beijing, where they had been meeting Chinese officials. They were received by Uruguay's moderate left-wing president, Yamandú Orsi, who was Mujica's preferred candidate in last fall's presidential elections. 'Life goes on, causes remain,' Boric wrote on social media. 'Thank you, dear Pepe, we will carry you with us in every fight.'
New York Times
14-05-2025
- Politics
- New York Times
From a Tin-Roof Shack, Pepe Mujica Removed the Pomp from Politics
José 'Pepe' Mujica did not have much use for Uruguay's three-story presidential residence, with its chandeliers, elevator, marble staircase and Louis XV furniture. 'It's crap,' he told me last year. 'They should make it a high school.' So when he became president of his small South American nation in 2010, Mr. Mujica decided he would commute from his home: a cluttered, three-room shack the size of a studio apartment, crammed with a wood stove, overstuffed bookcases and jars of pickling vegetables. Before his death on Tuesday, Mr. Mujica lived there for decades with his lifelong partner, Lucía Topolansky — herself a former vice president — and their three-legged dog, Manuela. They farmed chrysanthemums to sell in local markets and drove their sky blue 1987 Volkswagen Beetle to their favorite tango bars. There was no reason, he said, that a new job should require a move. That meant that, after sitting side-by-side with Barack Obama in the Oval Office or lecturing world leaders on the dangers of capitalism at the United Nations, Mr. Mujica would fly home in coach to a life resembling that of a poor farmer. It was a political masterstroke. His presidency was, by many policy measures, unremarkable. But his austere lifestyle made him revered by many Uruguayans for living like them, while giving him a platform in the international press to warn that greed was eroding society. He insisted it was truly how he wanted to live, but he also recognized that it served to illustrate that politicians had long had it too good. 'We have done everything possible to make the presidency less venerated,' Mr. Mujica told my New York Times predecessor in South America, Simon Romero, in in 2013, sharing with him a gourd of mate, the herbal drink passed back and forth over conversation in this part of the world. I visited Mr. Mujica at his same home last year. He was bundled in a winter coat and wool hat in front of a wood stove, frail and hardly able to eat as a result of radiation treatment for a tumor in his esophagus. But facing a journalist who could spread his ideas to the world for perhaps one of the final times, he held court for nearly two hours, expounding on how to find purpose and beauty in life and how, he told me unprompted, 'humanity, as it's going, is doomed.' He also explained why he believed that the trappings of elected office — the palaces, the servants, the luxury jets — were the opposite of what democracy was supposed to be about. 'The cultural remnants of feudalism remain — inside the republic. The red carpet, the bugles when the feudal lord came out of the castle onto the bridge. All that remains,' he said. 'The president likes to be praised.' He recalled a visit to Germany while he was president. 'They put me in a Mercedes-Benz. The door weighed about 3,000 kilos. They put 40 motorcycles in front and another 40 in back,' he said. 'I was ashamed.' The international press nicknamed him the world's 'poorest president,' noting his net worth was $1,800 when he took office. Mr. Mujica detested the moniker and often quoted the Roman court-philosopher Seneca: 'It is not the man who has too little, but the man who craves more, that is poor.' It would be hard to find a more striking contrast to President Trump, who has made living a gilded life central to his identity. In our interview, three months before the election, Mr. Mujica repeatedly brought up Mr. Trump. 'It seems like a lie — a country like the United States having a candidate like Trump,' he said. 'Democracy at the height of a doormat.' Mr. Mujica entered politics in the 1960s as a bank-robbing leftist guerrilla. His group, the Tupamaros, gained notoriety for their violence. Mr. Mujica said they tried to avoid harming civilians, but added that the leftist struggle sometimes required force. After escaping prison twice, he was imprisoned for 14 years under Uruguay's military dictatorship, much of his sentence spent in solitary confinement. Trapped in a hole in the ground, he said, he befriended rats and a small frog to survive psychologically. He was released as Uruguay re-established democracy and was eventually elected to Congress, drawing attention for showing up to work on a Vespa. In 2009, voters made him president of the nation of 3.3 million. Under Mr. Mujica, Uruguay decriminalized abortion, legalized same-sex marriage, pushed into renewable energy and became the first nation to fully legalize marijuana. Yet many of his goals, like significantly reducing inequality and improving education, fell victim to the realities of politics. But as news of his death spread on Tuesday, people across the world remembered him not for his policies. It was his humility that was his legacy. Earlier this year, his political protégé, a former history teacher named Yamandú Orsi, took office as Uruguay's new president. He has commuted to work from his family home, and Uruguay's presidential mansion has mostly remained empty.
New Straits Times
14-05-2025
- Politics
- New Straits Times
Jose Mujica, Uruguay's former leader, rebel icon and cannabis reformer, dead at 89
MONTEVIDEO: Jose Mujica, a one-time guerrilla and later president of Uruguay who drove a beat-up VW Beetle and enacted progressive reforms that carried his reputation well beyond South America, has died aged 89. The straight-talking Mujica, known to many Uruguayans by his nickname "Pepe," led the small farming country's leftist government from 2010 to 2015 after convincing voters his radical past was a closed chapter. "It is with deep sorrow that we announce the death of our comrade Pepe Mujica," President Yamandu Orsi said in a post on X. "Thank you for everything you gave us and for your deep love for your people." As president, Mujica adopted what was then a pioneering liberal stance on issues related to civil liberties. He signed a law allowing gay marriage and abortions in early pregnancy, and backed a proposal to legalise marijuana sales. The gay marriage and abortion measures were a big shift for Catholic Latin America, and the move on marijuana was at the time almost unprecedented worldwide. Regional leaders, including leftist presidents in Brazil, Chile and Mexico, mourned Mujica's passing and praised his example. "He defended democracy like few others. And he never stopped advocating for social justice and the end of all inequalities," said Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. Mujica's "greatness transcended the borders of Uruguay and his presidential term," he added. During his term in office, Mujica refused to move to the presidential residence, choosing to stay in his modest home where he kept a small flower farm in a suburb of Montevideo, the capital. Shunning a formal suit and tie, it was common to see him driving around in his Beetle or eating at downtown restaurants where office workers had lunch. In a 5 May 2024 interview with Reuters in the tin-roofed house that Mujica shared with his wife, former Senator Lucía Topolansky, he said he had kept the old Beetle and that it was still in "phenomenal" condition. But, he added, he preferred a turn on the tractor, saying it was "more entertaining" than a car and was a place where "you have time to think." Critics questioned Mujica's tendency to break with protocol, while his blunt and occasionally uncouth statements sometimes forced him to explain himself, under pressure from opponents and political allies alike. But it was his down-to-earth style and progressive musings that endeared him to many Uruguayans. "The problem is that the world is run by old people, who forget what they were like when they were young," Mujica said during the 2024 interview. Mujica himself was 74 when he became president. He was elected with 52 per cent of the vote, despite some voters' concerns about his age and his past as one of the leaders of the Tupamaros fighter group in the 1960s and 1970s. Lucía Topolansky was Mujica's long-term partner, dating back to their days in the Tupamaros. The couple married in 2005, and she served as vice president from 2017–2020. After leaving office, they remained politically active, regularly attending inaugurations of Latin American presidents and giving crucial backing to candidates in Uruguay, including Orsi, who took office in March 2025. They stopped growing flowers on their smallholding but continued to cultivate vegetables, including tomatoes that Topolansky pickled each season. BEHIND BARS Jose Mujica's birth certificate recorded him as born in 1935, although he claimed there was an error and that he was actually born a year earlier. He once described his upbringing as "dignified poverty." Mujica's father died when he was 9 or 10 years old, and as a boy he helped his mother maintain the farm where they grew flowers and kept chickens and a few cows. At the time Mujica became interested in politics, Uruguay's left was weak and fractured and he began his political career in a progressive wing of the centre-right National Party. In the late 1960s, he joined the Marxist Tupamaros fighter movement, which sought to weaken Uruguay's conservative government through robberies, political kidnappings and bombings. Mujica later said that he had never killed anyone but was involved in several violent clashes with police and soldiers and was once shot six times. Uruguay's security forces gained the upper hand over the Tupamaros by the time the military swept to power in a 1973 coup, marking the start of a 12-year dictatorship in which about 200 people were kidnapped and killed. Thousands more were jailed and tortured. Mujica spent almost 15 years behind bars, many in solitary confinement, lying at the bottom of an old horse trough with only ants for company. He managed to escape twice, once by tunnelling into a nearby house. His biggest "vice" as he approached 90, he later said, was talking to himself, alluding to his time in isolation. When democracy was restored to the farming country of roughly 3 million people in 1985, Mujica was released and returned to politics, gradually becoming a prominent figure on the left. He served as agriculture minister in the centre-left coalition of his predecessor, President Tabaré Vázquez, who would go on to succeed him from 2015 to 2020. Mujica's support base was on the left, but he maintained a fluid dialogue with opponents within the centre-right, inviting them to traditional barbecues at his home. "We can't pretend to agree on everything. We have to agree with what there is, not with what we like," he said. He believed drugs should be decriminalised "under strict state control" and addiction addressed. "I do not defend drug use. But I can't defend (a ban) because now we have two problems: drug addiction, which is a disease, and narcotrafficking, which is worse," he said. In retirement, he remained resolutely optimistic. "I want to convey to all the young people that life is beautiful, but it wears out and you fall," he said following a cancer diagnosis.
New York Times
13-05-2025
- Politics
- New York Times
José Mujica, Leftist President of Uruguay Known for Humility, Dies at 89
José Mujica, a former president of Uruguay, guerrilla fighter and stalwart of leftist leadership in Latin America, died on Tuesday. He was 89. President Yamandú Orsi announced the death in a statement, which did not say where Mr. Mujica died or cite the cause. Mr. Mujica announced he had esophageal cancer in April 2024. He lived in the rural outskirts of Montevideo, the capital. 'President, comrade, mentor, leader. We'll miss you,' Mr. Orsi wrote. Known as Pepe, Mr. Mujica was elected president in 2009 at the age of 74 as a generation of leftist Latin American governments were losing their populist luster. Though he had a reputation as a savvy leader of Uruguay's progressive coalition, his informal governing style baffled the establishment. A self-described philosophical anarchist, he was known for his brash charisma, his skepticism of capitalism's excesses, his modest way of life and his intent to inject purpose and humility into government during a time when Uruguay's left was ascendant. Although his ambitions were often bigger than his ability to deliver on policy promises, the progressive legislation that his administration did pass earned global praise and paved the way for a leftist ally to succeed him. A flower farmer by trade, Mr. Mujica championed rural communities and was a consummate defender of liberal ideals. Believing world leaders should dispense with the trappings of power, he and his wife, Lucía Topolansky, a senator at the time, opted to live in a single-story home on a plot of farmland instead of on a staffed presidential estate. He sometimes drove to work in his pale blue 1987 Volkswagen Beetle. On his first day as president, Mr. Mujica announced that he would give away most of his salary to help build housing for Uruguay's neglected towns. Called the 'world's poorest president,' he nevertheless saw his standing differently. 'It is not the man who has too little, but the man who craves more, who is poor,' he told The New York Times in 2013, quoting the Roman philosopher Seneca. Under Mr. Mujica, who served from 2010 to 2015, Uruguay become the second country in Latin America to decriminalize abortion and legalize gay marriage, and the first country in the world to legalize and fully regulate marijuana. His speech on the ills of unchecked consumerism were nearly as sensational as his startlingly casual appearance: tieless and disheveled, often as he tended to his chrysanthemum fields with his wife and their three-legged dog, Manuela. Even in a country with an exceptional commitment to social liberalism and cross-party consensus, Mr. Mujica was a singular leader. As a member of the Tupamaro urban guerrilla movement in the late 1960s — a group that robbed banks and kidnapped American hostages to shock a political system out of its creep toward military dictatorship — he spent over a decade in prison. His wife had also been a member of the group. After he and other top Tupamaro guerrillas were released in 1985, when the country had returned to democracy, they began forging their way into mainstream politics. Uruguayans questioned whether former guerrillas were capable of trading in their arms for a more conventional political movement, but Mr. Mujica helped broker the group's entry into the center-leftist coalition, Frente Amplio ('Broad Front'), under the Movimiento de Participación Popular ('Movement of Popular Participation' party). His plain-spoken egalitarianism diverged from the buttoned-down demeanor of the political establishment. But he was shrewd enough to cast a wide rhetorical net while reaffirming the group's socialist aims. 'We are politicians first, not people who favor violence or terrorism' Mr. Mujica told The Times in 1986. 'But we are not going to complicate life in a way that makes democratic liberty unsustainable.' José Alberto Mujica Cordano was born on May 20, 1935, in Paso de la Arena, a neighborhood on the periphery of Montevideo. He was close to his mother, Lucy Cordano, a flower merchant who came from a family of Italian immigrants. His father, Demetrio Mujica, was a traveling salesman in the hinterlands and died when José was 7. Mr. Mujica married Ms. Topolansky, his longtime partner, in 2005. The couple did not have children. His sister, María, died in 2012. Mr. Mujica was a young man in the late 1960s when he joined the Tupamaro movement, inspired by the Marxist revolutionary Che Guevara in Cuba. The group took up arms in response to economic crisis in Uruguay, after years of bitter inflation in a country that had once been known as the 'Switzerland of South America.' The Tupamaros carried out a series of armed heists, including stealing $6 million in jewelry and cash to redistribute to the struggling class. Uruguayans initially applauded their exploits. But the violence began to spiral. In 1970, Mr. Mujica was shot six times in an encounter with the police and sent to prison, one of several times he was incarcerated. Later that summer, the group kidnapped an American adviser, Dan A. Mitrione, and later murdered him when the government refused to release 150 political prisoners in exchange for Mr. Mitrione's freedom. In one of the group's final acts, in 1971, more than 100 Tupamaro, Mr. Mujica among them, escaped from prison through a tunnel dug from a nearby house. As a brutal counterinsurgency ensued and a right-wing military dictatorship took power in 1973, many Uruguayans blamed the guerrillas. Mr. Mujica and other top Tupamaro were captured by the police and spent over a decade in solitary confinement, often being tortured. Mr. Mujica was 49 when he was pardoned and released in 1985. After becoming one of the first Tupamaro to be elected to Parliament, in 1994, he toured the country's sparsely interior regions, making inroads with voters on the political left, to whom most officials had paid little mind. By the time of his first term in the Senate, he was a top leader in Broad Front. The party came to power in the 2004 general elections, resoundingly defeating the two centrist parties that had ruled the presidency since the 1830s. It was a stirring moment of political reconciliation for the former Tupamaros. Appointed by the president, Tabaré Vázquez, to his cabinet to oversee agricultural policy, Mr. Mujica soon made a mark with voters by reducing the cost of beef rib so that lower-income Uruguayans could afford that high-quality cut of meat. During his time as agricultural minister, he worked closely with Danilo Astori, the unsmiling, academic finance minister whom Mr. Vázquez favored as his successor in the 2009 presidential elections, with Mr. Mujica as Mr. Astori's running mate. But in the end, it was the former Tupamaro who led the ticket, with Mr. Astori as his vice president. 'Poor Danilo! He lacked sex appeal,' Mr. Mujica later remarked to journalists, wise to the allure of maverick politics. In the election, Mr. Mujica won in a runoff against a center-right and pro-free market candidate. As president, Mr. Mujica continued many of the social and economic policies of the Vázquez administration. He pushed a plan to transition the country to renewable energies. His global profile grew in 2014 when he offered, months before leaving office, to accept from the United States six detainees who were being held at Guantánamo Bay in Cuba as suspected terrorists, in the hope that it could lead to the closing of the facility. Though many Uruguayans opposed the transfer, six detainees were resettled in Uruguay in December, after the elections, as Mr. Mujica's term was ending. Mr. Mujica was also criticized for not fulfilling promises to equalize access to education and housing and for displaying a disorganized management style. He viewed José Batlle y Ordóñez, a former president who created Uruguay's welfare state in the 20th century, as a model of a leader who treats his countrymen as equals. 'Mujica represents the anti-system man,' Senator Helios Sarthou told Adolfo Garcé, a political scientist in Montevideo, for a book on the Tupamaros. 'His image of the guerrilla hero is fundamental to that: He put his life on the line.' 'That's why people believe in him,' he said. As Uruguay's neighbors were buckling under corruption, violence and financial instability in the 2010s, Mr. Mujica — who was more moderate than Venezuela's Hugo Chávez or Argentina's Cristina Fernández de Kirchner — championed a left wing that worked within capitalism and democracy to improve it. He had grown disillusioned with the Marxist Cuba he had romanticized in his youth. On a presidential trip to Havana, he told officials, 'As atrocious as capitalism is, it's the system that can help create growth.' After his presidency, Mr. Mujica rejoined the Senate, serving for three years before stepping down in 2018. He made his final public appearances last fall campaigning for his protégé Yamandú Orsi, Broad Front's presidential candidate. 'Goodbye, I give you my heart,' he said at a rally about a week before the elections. Mr. Orsi narrowly won, bringing the center-left back to power. In one of his last interviews, in 2024, Mr. Mujica reflected on the responsibility of world leaders. 'The problem is that the world is run by old people,' he said, 'who forget what they were like when they were young.'
