Tattered clothes swing from a line in the garden. A beat up old car sits in the driveway. The owner,
the world’s poorest President, would fix it up, but as always, he’s given most of his
paycheck away. As he rubs his fingers over one of the many old bullet wound scars on his body,
he ponders his former life of violence and his new life of trying to help the country’s poor.
The former Uruguayan President Jose “Pepe” Mujica
did indeed live the life of a farmer as he ran the country, and not a very well-off farmer.
Of his meager earnings when he was President, he donated 90 percent to the poor and needy.
“I've lived like this most of my life,” he once said, adding “I can live well with what I have.”
But the question is, how did a such a humble man do as President? Was a fella
who really understood the needs of the poor beneficial when push came to shove?
Could a former guerilla fighter really hold his own when it came to international issues?
Let’s now go back to the past. Mujica came into this world on May 20,
1935, to parents who were Italian immigrants. His family wasn’t exactly poor, but his
childhood was suffused with bouts of poverty. Farming wasn’t always easy, which compelled a
young man to take matters into his own hands. When he was eight, his father died not long
after becoming brankrupt. After his death the young Pepe had to work in a local bakery when
he wasn’t trying to sell flowers for the family. One of his biographers said he was a kind kid,
once offering all of his toys to the neighbors, but widespread poverty in his
country would soon drive him to violence. In his early twenties, Mujica joined a
revolutionary group called the Tupamaros, a left-wing urban guerrilla group that
existed in Uruguay in the 1960s and early 1970s. Their mission was to undermine the government,
or better, topple it, and to do so they took drastic action.
They kidnapped and they killed, and like Robin Hood, they would steal from the rich and give
back to the poor, sometimes by robbing banks or local businesses. Their slogan, not surprisingly,
was “Words divide us; action unites us.” Actions also sometimes got them tortured and
killed once they were caught, so the young Jose Mujica was certainly playing a dangerous game.
This is how that game sometimes went down. In the Spring of 1969, he entered a luxury
apartment in the capital of Montevideo and screamed,
“Turn around, shut your mouth and keep your hands above your head!” This, of course, was a robbery.
But then the softer side of Mujica became evident when he took a wheelchair-bound, polio-stricken
woman to one side and said, “Don’t worry. You’ll be fine, this has nothing to do with you.”
There were weapons and valuable documents in that house, owned by the father,
a renowned and notorious judge. His son was in the house that day,
held at gunpoint. Many years later, that son voted for the man that had held him captive that day.
“I might be expected to feel bitter about him,” the son said decades after the attack. “But he
is the only one who practices what he preaches.” In the summer of that same year, Mujica and his
band of merry armed men walked right into an investment bank in Montevideo. They took about
$100,000 in today’s money, but also stole ledgers which showed banking corruption.
Those ledgers subsequently led to some bankers getting arrested for illegal trading.
And that’s kind of how Mujica got into politics. He and his group were undeniably violent,
but they said they were so in an effort to expose corruption and
take back ill-gotten gains that the corrupt wealthy had accrued in such a poor country.
One time they took over an entire town called Pando. They arrived pretending to be a funeral
procession, replete with a hearse with an empty coffin. At one point, Mujica emerged
from a car close to the hearse brandishing a Z-45 submachine gun. In another robbery soon
after at a resort town, they took the money but made sure the staff was sent their tips back.
That’s why over in the USA, Time magazine was calling this group the “The Robin Hood guerillas”,
but you can be sure that the Uruguayan authorities wanted these men and women
to suffer. Better still, die. We should also remember that often when there were raids,
there were dead bodies. The casualty count led to some civilians not supporting the guerillas.
Still, in their defense, the Tupamaros very rarely fired the first shot and often just
fired back when the police escalated violence. In March 1970, Mujica was drinking in a bar when
two cops spotted him. A gunfight ensued, with two cops being shot and Mujica taking six bullets.
Life-saving surgery ensured that Mujica survived, but his next stop was jail.
In 1971, he was one of around 100 guerillas that escaped from prison by digging a tunnel
from the prison grounds all the way to a nearby house. As the story goes, he had to convince a
schizophrenic inmate to protect the tunnel by telling him he was an alien God lording
over the entrance to the Underworld. Mujica was later picked up by police,
but he achieved a similar escape the next year. At the time, he was sleeping rough on the streets.
When the cops picked him up under his dirty clothes they discovered an Uzi machine gun.
This is the guy that would later talk to the United Nations about
love and peace and prosperity. But at the start of the 1970s,
much of the public had had enough of the Tupamaros and the long trail of blood that they often left
behind on the streets. In 1973, the year of a military coup in Uruguay, the Tupamaros were all
but gone. Many of them were killed, and some of them were imprisoned in awful conditions.
In total, Mujica spent 14 years in prison cells from hell, and let’s just say he and
his friends knew what the word torture meant after that. He later said that he was kept
in solitary confinement for years on end, sometimes being held in what was described
as a “trough.” His health was so bad at times that he almost didn’t make it out of prison.
Food was scarce. He had to pee in a bottle, and he’d often let the sediment settle at the bottom
and drink the rest. That’s how bad it was. In a story worthy of a Papillion-style novel,
Mujica went mad in his isolated cell. He believed the place was bugged and all day he thought he
could hear the strange signals. A playwright, who was imprisoned close to Mujica, many years
later told The Guardian, “He would put stones in his mouth to stop himself from screaming.”
One time jailers took away the only thing that Mujica possessed and he truly loved, and that was
his potty. He screamed so much the jailer gave it back. It was the only thing he could say was
his. That playwright said, “He refused to scrub it clean. We all have tics left from that time. When
Pepe came out, he came with all that baggage.” It was a hellish time, but it would set
him up for his illustrious life to come. He was released under an amnesty agreement
and now democracy had returned to Uruguay, he and some of his former band of guerillas decided
it was time to get into real politics and change things from the inside. They formed the political
party, the Movement of Popular Participation. It was popular, too, especially as Mujica had
a personality that really resonated with the public, mainly the less wealthy parts of the
public. He was the real deal. He had the past to prove it, and while he regretted
some of the things he’d done earlier in his life, now he was ready to right some wrongs.
He went from being the Minister of Livestock, Agriculture, and Fisheries to being a Senator,
and then in 2009, he won the presidential election, eventually with 55% of the vote. The
man who’d once slept with an Uzi and had robbed banks at gunpoint, was now leading the country,
thanks to doing things such as ensuring poorer people were able to afford good cuts of meat.
He was now in his 70s, but his age was eclipsed by his stunning resilience. Once asked if he
was angry about the awful torture that he had endured in prison, he replied, “I do not hate.
Do you know what a luxury it is not to hate?” But he was ready to go to war again, this time
his weapon being his brain and his mouth. He was also about to enrage a good amount of citizens.
Right from the start, he was known as a kind of anti-politician, and you could argue that there
hasn’t been a politician like him in modern times. He lived on what the BBC described as a
“ramshackle farm”, where his source of water was a well surrounded by weeds. As for his
security detail, he didn’t have anything to speak of, besides his two beloved dogs.
That didn’t mean he couldn’t have lived in luxury and dined in only the best restaurants
Uruguay had to offer, just as other high-ranking politicians did in the country. Mujica turned
down the President’s 100-year old luxurious accommodation and decided he would prefer to
live in that small house off a dirt road. This was not some sleight of propaganda
to get him plaudits from his people. He just felt more comfortable living as he
had always done. He still actively farmed with his wife but grew mostly flowers. It was enough.
His wage as President wasn’t bad, though, at around $12,000 a month.
If we look at salary websites now, Montevideo is said to have one of the best standards of
pay in all cities in South America, with the average monthly wage at $707. The average wage
throughout all of Uruguay is just $384. Back when Mujica was running things,
you could say if he was to collect his relatively massive paycheck,
he may have felt like a hypocrite given his message was often about supporting the country’s
poorest people. That’s one reason why every month he gave 90 percent of his wage away to charities
supporting the poor and small entrepreneurs. It meant he was taking home $775 dollars.
As is expected, as a politician he had to declare his wealth. In 2010,
he showed that had a grand total of $1,800, which was what his 1987 Volkswagen Beetle was worth.
But his wife had cash, too. When she added up what her land, the tractors,
and the house, was worth, the declaration said she had in the region of $215,000.
That wasn’t bad at all, but it was only one-third of what the future President,
Tabare Vasquez, declared in his statement. This is what Mujica said about his humble lifestyle:
“I'm called 'the poorest president’, but I don't feel poor. Poor people are those
who only work to try to keep an expensive lifestyle, and always want more and more.”
Sounding like a line from the book Fight Club, he added, “This is a matter of freedom. If you
don't have many possessions then you don't need to work all your life like a slave to sustain them,
and therefore you have more time for yourself.” So, he embraced that line, “The things you own,
end up owning you”, but while that seemed noble, it might not have helped the people in his country
that were struggling to get by. Did he put his words into action?
In 2012, he spoke at Rio 20, otherwise known as “The United Nations Conference on Sustainable
Development.” His message was clear. While all people deserved to live with food and resources
and enough money to sustain general well-being, he didn’t think it was a good idea for everyone
in the world to live the unneeded luxuries that many people in the richest countries live with.
He stood up and criticized other world leaders for focusing only on growth and not personal
happiness or the sustainability of the planet. In his usual down-to-earth way, he said,
“Does this planet have enough resources so seven or eight billion can have the
same level of consumption and waste that today is seen in rich societies? It is this level of
hyper-consumption that is harming our planet.” He was also a very divisive figure because of
some of his policies. Those policies were beautifully progressive for some, but in
Uruguay, Mujica had his fair share of haters. He described himself as a leftwing libertarian,
but he also said that in his older years he was way more pragmatic. He wasn’t really interested in
pursuing some far-off utopia. His concern was how to make people’s lives better right now.
He made it a non-criminal matter for women in the country to have an abortion up to 12
weeks into their pregnancy. The old guard in Uruguayan politics had mostly been old
school Roman Catholics, but Mujica came in and upset the apple cart when it came to
giving women more autonomy over their bodies. He and many others pointed out that since the
country had made abortion illegal in 1938, many women had found a way to have one illegally and
the upshot of that was sometimes injury or death. It made no sense keeping it illegal,
not to Mujica the pragmatist. Still, some people were outraged at this,
even though technically, abortion was still illegal, just not something a women could be
charged with. Then something else rankled a lot of hardline folks in Uruguay. Under Mujica’s watch,
the first gay couple were legally married. They were Sergio Miranda and Rodrigo Borda.
Miranda told the press, “This is an historic day for Uruguay. It is a very important moment
and the message that our country gives to the world is very positive, when in others,
like Russia, horrible things happen.” He wouldn’t give Mujica all the credit and said
people had been fighting for this long before the new President came on the scene, but you
can’t argue with the fact that for some people, Mujica was a breath of fresh air for Uruguay.
In his own words, he said, “All we are doing is recognizing something as old as humanity.
The best thing is that people can live as they want to live.”
He also made a point in saying that when people do commit small crimes and are charged for it,
they are usually poor. He seemed to think that wealth for the most part protected people from
falling into the hands of the police. Then came the hate from the community.
He explained, “Those who are sexually ambivalent have a real problem if they are poor. If they
are rich they are tolerated. That sounds crude, but it’s the truth as I see it.”
He said it was the same when poor women are abandoned with kids. They are discriminated
against and they can’t get the help that women with more financial means receive.
That’s why he wanted to change the abortion laws. Rich women were treated,
poor women sought a desperate way out. Why shouldn’t all women receive the same treatment?
As he saw it, another issue where wealth mattered was drugs, the illegal kind.
After all, police very rarely scoured wealthy neighborhoods looking for drugs.
Uraguay’s prisons were full of poor drug users. Mujica said the war on drugs has been a
catastrophic and chronic failure and the ones that suffer from it are mainly the most downtrodden.
He said, “Prohibition has proved itself a splendid failure. If you want change,
you can’t carry on doing the same things.” That’s the definition of insanity, as someone once said.
So, what did he do? He legalized weed
in the country. He said that someone who just smokes marijuana is not a criminal, and anyway,
many heavy drug abusers need help, not prison. He said if people have a problem with weed,
under his new law, they would be given help, not handcuffs. He said at the same time,
the traffickers and dealers would be taken out of the picture and that would lead to
a decrease in violence associated with drugs. Police could now focus more on violent crime.
His entire outlook on the war on drugs mirrored what progressives elsewhere have
been saying for years. Something has to change. That might sound rational,
but it almost cost him his presidency. But he survived, and he was voted in
for a second term - one of only three Paraguayan Presidents to achieve that.
While during his two terms the government debt did slightly go up, Mujica managed to increase
the minimum wage, lessen the wealth gap, and take the national poverty rate from 18%
down to 9.7%. He also invested a lot of time into strengthening union movements, which was
heralded as a great win for the working person. So, how well did he do overall, this former bandit
come prison psycho who grew up dressed in rags? One economist told the media, “His transformation
is basically a triumph for liberal democracy.” A British political journalist who’d studied
Mujica’s two terms said, “Mujica left office with a relatively healthy economy
and with social stability those bigger neighbors could only dream of.”
So, even if those hardliners didn’t much like his take on drugs or abortion or gay marriage, many of
them still voted for him because in general, he was making the country a better place to live,
despite some failures with attempted education reform and the improvement of public facilities.
As his presidency came to an end, he was often philosophical about the way we live
all over the world. He saw too much egoism in societies, people cast adrift from their
communities and sometimes their own families. Mujica said that rather than be slaves to
consumerism, we have to learn how to live a simple life again
based on the community spirit and love for each other. National economic growth, he believes,
is not the only answer to people’s problems, yet this is what politicians mainly concentrate on.
In his own words, he once said to the UN, “Politics, which should rule human relations,
has succumbed to economics and become a mere administrator of
what the financial system does not control.” You’d think saying things so anti-consumerist
would inspire much of the western media to criticize Mujica, but he seems to have come out of
two terms without much international condemnation. If you look at what Uruguans say about him on web
forums, they do indeed say he was well-loved in their country. Some say he could have done more,
but on the whole, many citizens of that country have good things to say about Mujica.
As one Urauguan wrote on Quora about his opinion of the former President:
“As far as opinions go, I'm sure all Uruguayans (me included, living here all my life) have one.
Mine's mostly positive.” Some people criticized his past life of violence, his not doing enough
for the economy and creating debt, and his ideas being a little bit too high-minded.
It was certainly weird to hear a world leader says things such as this, which could prompt
some to say he was a progressive’s wet dream and others to tear at the eye:
“We promise a life of consuming and squandering. But this is a countdown
against nature, against future humankind. It is a civilization against simplicity,
against sobriety, against all natural cycles, and against the most important things:
Adventure. Solidarity. Family. Friendship. Love.” It sounds awfully idealistic and for some,
his words sound too good to be true, but Mujica undoubtedly spoke from the heart
and did a lot of positive things for the people of Uruguay, especially the poorer people. He
knew he wasn’t perfect, but it’s hard to deny that he was the real deal. He wasn’t a pretender
that dressed in rags for the camera. He once told The Guardian, “Some more
cultivated people have a stereotype and think el señor presidente has to be like a statue,
totally inert. He cannot be like any other person. But I am an old man made of flesh and bones,
with nerves and a heart. Yes, I put my foot in it a lot, but always in good faith.”
Now you need to see how the US president lives in “Why Being the President Actually Sucks.” Or,
have a look at “The INSANE Protection Of The President of the United States.”