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AMONG political leaders in the 21st century, it would be hard to conjure up a greater contrast than the one bet-ween the grift-addicted Donald Trump and the man described as “the world’s poorest president”.
Jose “Pepe” Mujica, who died last week at the age of around 90, resented the frequent references to his relative poverty. He failed to see why a nation’s president should live more ostentatiously than the majority of his constituents. The trappings of power did not attract Mujica when he became president of Uruguay in 2010 — receiving the presidential sash from the senator who polled the highest votes — his wife, Lucia Topalansky.
“This world is crazy because it is surprised by the normal,” he once proclaimed. “The poor are those who want more.” As head of state, he continued to live in a humble abode on the vegetable and chrysanthemum farm he co-owned with Topalansky, and drove to work in his sky-blue 1987 Volkswagen Beetle, rejecting the presidential palace with its 42 staff members, as well as the black limousines he was offered. He saw these and other unnecessary luxuries as representing the trappings of a monarchy.
His frills-free austerity won him fans worldwide, but not all of them understood exactly why he was so keen to establish a remarkably different leadership model in a relatively tiny Latin American state. Had they paid adequate attention to his speeches and interviews, they might have realised that El Pepe recognised the resilience of capitalism — and, much like Marx, appreciated its historical significance — but also understood that the culture of consumerism and accumulation of wealth it had ushered in needed to be dismantled. He knew this could not be accomplished overnight.
There are lessons to be learned from a Uruguayan guerrilla.
As a young man, Mujica played a prominent part in the Tupamaro insurgency that flourished in the ’60s and ’70s — named, like Tupac Shakur, after Tupac Amaru II, a Peruvian rebel executed in the 18th century by Spanish colonialists. It initially focused on robberies aimed towards the redistribution of wealth, which inevitably earned comparisons with Robin Hood. But when the state resorted to violence, the Tupamaros did not turn the other cheek.
In 1970, the Tupamaros kidnapped Daniel Mitrone, an American associated with USAID but accused of teaching torture techniques to the Uruguayan police. The rebels demanded the release of 150 prisoners. The government in Montevideo, advised by Washington, refused. Mitrone was executed, and in the crackdown that followed, Mujica was among those arrested after a clash in which he sustained six bullet wounds. Luckily, the surgeon who operated on him was a fellow Tupamaro.
An audacious prison break followed the next year, but Mujica and many of his comrades were rearrested as a 1973 military coup tarnished Uruguay’s record as a long-standing token democracy. El Pepe endured more than a decade of torture and solitary confinement during which rodents and frogs were his only companions, and he observed the endeavours of ants, later describing the latter as “one of the true communists out there” who “will outlive us”.
Democracy returned to Uruguay in 1985, and Mujica and Topalansky were both released from prison alongside many other comrades. The two of them, unlike many others, dived right back into politics, and 40 years later, after stints as a legislator and a minister of agriculture, Mujica won the presidency in 2010 as a Movement of Popular Participation stalwart on the Broad Front ticket. On his inauguration, the presidential sash was conferred on him by the senator who had won the highest number of votes. She added a kiss.
As president, Mujica was uncomfortable with the ceremonial aspects of his visits abroad, not least the elaborate motorcade that conveyed him to a meeting with Angela Merkel in Berlin.
His five-year presidency couldn’t possibly have achieved all its aims, but managed to substantially reduce the levels of poverty in Uruguay, apart from advances on abortion rights, same-sex marriage, and even the legalisation of marijuana in an effort to curb the drug trade. He also gave away almost 90 per cent of his presidential salary to a housing charity, and declined a post-presidential pension. After his term ended in 2015, he focused on farming but remained involved in politics, and was instrumental in last year’s return to power of the Broad Front.
He also realised in 2024 that his time was up, after his oesophageal cancer returned. And he didn’t resent it, despite having no faith in any afterlife. Mujica did not expect the excellent example he set, by natural inclination rather than motivated pretence, to be emulated anywhere. But he did expect that younger generations would realise the necessity of the cultural changes required for transcending capitalist greed. One can only hope that he will eventually be proved right.
Published in Dawn, May 21st, 2025
