My Afternoon with José Mujica
On May 13, José Alberto “Pepe” Mujica Cordano, who served as president of Uruguay from 2010 to 2015, died of cancer at his farmhouse in Rincón del Cerro outside the capital city of Montevideo.
If you’ve never heard of Mujica, that’s not surprising. Uruguay is a small nation of only 3.5 million people, squeezed between the comparatively behemoth countries of Brazil and Argentina. The country holds little political power within South America. Its major exports are beef, soy, and some of the best professional soccer players in the world.
But for a brief period after his election, Mujica was an international celebrity, the subject of glowing profiles by journalists and filmmakers from around the world. One writer for The New Republic even described the attention that surrounded him as a “global Mujica cult.”
“As chief of state and representative of Uruguay to the world, he was extraordinary,” says 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.”
In some ways, Mujica’s international notoriety 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 a way that was, well, un-presidential. He refused to move into the presidential residence in the capital city of Montevideo. He preferred his small farmhouse at the end of a dirt road outside of town, surrounded by poor and working-class neighbors. His selected mode of transportation was not a stately black Mercedes, but a light blue Volkswagen Beetle that he drove to the presidential office each day. He gave away 90 percent of his presidential salary to charity causes and small entrepreneurs. The pomp and ceremony of high office was abandoned, as well as the usual retinue of fawning political aides.
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 the eighteenth-century Peruvian revolutionary Túpac Amaru II. The group robbed banks, bombed government buildings, and kidnapped and killed people. Garcé describes the Tupamaros as a “crazy enterprise” that contributed to Uruguay’s 1973 military coup d’état.
Mujica was convicted in 1971 of killing a policeman—a charge he denied—and spent nearly fifteen years in prison during the military dictatorship that ruled Uruguay between 1973 and 1985. He spent ten of those years in solitary confinement. After being released from prison in 1985, he turned from revolution to democracy, helping to expand a broad leftwing political coalition called the Frente Amplio, or “Broad Front” in English.
In 2015, not long after Mujica’s presidential term ended, 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 read “This way to the former president’s house.” Driving there, I thought about how difficult it would be to arrange a conversation at the home of any former U.S. President.
After stopping to ask a neighbor where “El Pepe”—Mujica’s nickname—lived, we were directed to a small dirt lane where a stop sign stood about fifty yards from a tiny makeshift guard shack. There, a guard named Turco stood, wearing 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, as well as a small round cup full of yerba mate, Uruguay’s national drink.
We walked to Turco’s guard house just across from Mujica’s cement-walled home topped by a light green corrugated aluminum roof. Grass, plants, dense shrubbery, and radiant flowers grew wildly in the former president’s front yard. The famous blue Beetle was parked snugly 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, inadvertently pointed towards the chair I was provided for the interview. Given Mujica’s politics and his radical past, he certainly still had 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 it. He asked Turco to let him know if his wife Lucía Topolansky—also a former Tupamaro rebel and the former vice president of Uruguay—might be approaching the shed. She didn’t approve of him smoking. Between drags he glanced out the window towards his house.
We talked for an hour about using tools, theories of history, technology, and the growth of consumerism, his dark eyes narrowing as he drilled down on his ideas. Raising his hands in front of his face as he spoke, Mujica suggested that using your hands in work has a “profound impact on the way we reason about the world around us,” and that the way that human hands evolved allowed trades and crafts and culture to develop. When I brought up the writer Matthew Crawford, who has written about the “cognitive richness” required in the skilled trades, Mujica agreed.
“When I talk to people,” he 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 car tire. He added, “Manual ability should be a component in education, and it is a disaster for society when this is lost.”
Mujica also spoke about the “pathology” of growing worldwide inequality that has left so many living on the margins of society. He evoked social-democratic Sweden rather than his once beloved Cuba. “With a more equal distribution of wealth, there are fewer people who are going to become criminals,” he said. “This is not a coincidence.”
Mujica spoke with the passion of the self-educated philosopher at a youthful debating club. “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.”
During his time in office, Mujica was sometimes criticized for talking about big ideas while lacking the personal or political shrewdness needed to turn them 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 tells me.
As president, Mujica wasn’t much of a hard-line socialist, a fact that disappointed his more orthodox leftwing 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 worker’s committees. While he presided over a healthy economy and a reduction in poverty, his most memorable achievements were in social policy. Gay marriage and abortion were both legalized during his term, as was the sale and use of marijuana through a deeply controversial law.
As an outsider, I don’t know what Mujica’s long-term legacy will be in Uruguay, one of the most stable democracies in South America. Uruguay is also, like most democratic countries, increasingly polarized between left-leaning and right-leaning political factions. While neighboring Argentina is experimenting with the libertarian capitalism of Javier Milei, Mujica’s Broad Front party won back the presidency in last November’s Uruguayan elections after five years of conservative government under Luis Lacalle Pou.
Garcé and Silva both believe that Mujica’s legacy is the attention he gained for Uruguay on the global stage. “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 “frightening abstract hatred,” according to writer Alma Guillermoprieto, Mujica insisted that carrying around resentment of others was unproductive. “Hatred doesn’t make any sense. It’s a poison,” he told The Guardian 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, Mujica is deeply mourned in the poorest sections of Montevideo and among the broad political movement he helped to create. People around the world are now pausing to remember the unconventional 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 once 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 cannot know all of the 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 offered a hopeful solution to those impulses.
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A version of this article previously appeared on the website of the International Democracy Community. You can also view a portion of Candaele’s interview with Mujica on YouTube.