José died Pepe Mujica This time, at 89, he considered that it was time to leave, as announced on Tuesday the president of Uruguay, Yamandú Orsi, through social networks. But it was not so easy to leave us orphans. Nor 50 years ago, when he received six bullets. Nor during the 10 years he was confined by the military in a well of just over a square meter. The first time, he received 12 liters of blood and was saved. The second, domesticated frogs and fed mice so as not to go crazy. He emerged from the wisest hole, he used to count, and returned to his: politics. In 1994, he was elected deputy for Montevideo; In 1999, senator; In 2010, president of Uruguay with almost 55% of the votes. Pepe Mujica fascinated the world as an oracle of austerity and simplicity, a rara opinion that at the end of his days he threw warnings with pessimism, but without losing faith in man. “I dedicated myself to changing the world and did not change a fuck, but I was entertaining and I gave a meaning to my life. I will die happy. I spent dreaming, fighting, fighting. They screwed up to sticks and everything else. It doesn’t matter, I have no accounts to collect,” “Shy” as I was by the radiotherapy sessions that I received as treatment against cancer.
Winner in a thousand battles, Mujica lost the war against cancer. First in the esophagus, and then in the liver. When metastasis was proven, it was exhausted and decided to throw in the towel. “They gave me 31 bombings [de rayos] At seven in the morning every day. They made it shit [al cáncer]but they left me such a hole, ”he said, drawing with my fingers a large circle like an orange. The sequelae of the treatment prevented him Young hands, whom he invited “to live with sobriety, because the more you have, the less happy you are.”
José Alberto Mujica Cordano, that was his full name, he was born in 1935 in the Paso de la Arena neighborhood, on the rural periphery of Montevideo. His mother was a horticulturist and his father a little dealer who died poor in 1940, when Mujica was six years old. At age 14, the young man already demanded in the streets salary claims for the workers of his neighborhood. In 1964, he joined the guerrillas of the National Liberation Movement-Tupamaros. He was imprisoned four times and participated in two escapes, one of them legendary, in September 1971, when 106 guerrillas fled from the prison of Punta Carretas, in Montevideo, for a long tunnel dug for months. of the military regime: The Tupamaros prisoners would be executed in prison if their organization returned to arms.
The film reconstructs the passage of Mujica and her arms companions through that military prison. “We had to fight with madness, because rather, in that type of prison, they sought that we were leels. And we succeed: we were not leelos,” he said on the occasion of the film’s premiere. Whenever he could, he remembered his efforts to connect with life in a well where he could barely move. “I spent seven years locked in a smaller piece. “To keep me sane, I began to remember things that I had read, things I had thought when young. Then I dedicated myself to changing the world and there I did not read anything. I could not change the world, but what I had read as a young man served me. I speak with the one I carry inside and that rescued me when I fell prisoner and I was in solitude. I went to remember and remember to remember.”
Mujica did not leave that hole. He seriously ill from the bladder and finally lost a kidney. But he survived. In Mujica, A biography written by Miguel Ángel Campodónico, the former president remembered his passage through the barracks, but without victimizing. “I am not affected by talking about torture and how bad I had it. I even give me a little anger because I have seen that sometimes there has been a kind of career measured with a ‘torturometer’. People who are pleased to repeat ‘Ah, how bad I had it.” His detractors recriminate that as president did not do enough to prosecute the military responsible for disappearances and torture during the dictatorship. Mujica replied that he had decided to “not charge” the debt that his jailers had with him. “In life there are wounds that have no cure and you have to learn to continue living. I know that there are people who will not accompany me, but I opt for a more intelligent and less sentimental position. That is why I did not use the power to condemn the militia [militares]. If I am going to collect the ones I have to charge … God free me, ”he told El País. Anyway, he always saw those years as those who” molded “his way of thinking.” The need to exist leads one to think and rethink and ask questions that in everyday life they hardly ask themselves, “he used to say.
Of those questions and the answers that Mujica found that he dazzled the world, that leftist politician who became heard from a small South American country. He reached his first day as a motorcycle senator, dressed as a countryman, directly from his farm in Rincón del Cerro, half an hour by Montevideo road. He lived there surrounded by vegetables, his three -legged dog Manuela and farm animals since he was pardoned in 1985 and until his death. It was in that rural shelter where he led to paroxysm his militancy for frugality and minimum life. He did not get off his tractor or his Volskwagen celest beetle of 87 even when he was president. Those who wanted to interview him had to put their feet in the mud or kings like Juan Carlos de Borbón, whom he received in 2015 hours after leaving office. “They say I am a poor president. Poor are what they need a lot. I learned to live light luggage. You can’t, because you had the misfortune of being king,” he said laughing, while still guarding him.
Mujica used to replicate the common place that meant portraying him as “the poorest president in the world.” “My world is this, neither better nor worse, it is another,” he said on another occasion, in reference to the documentary point of view Pepe, a supreme lifeof the Serbian Emir Kusturica. “The key is in morals,” he repeated. “The problem is that we have to live a consumerist era, where we think that triumphing in life is to buy new things and pay quotas. With which we are building self -exploited societies. You have time to work, but not to live.” That is why I warned young people that freedom is “to do with your life what you want, which suddenly is to boludar, because culture is daughter of bullshit.”
Of his years as a guerrilla is his relationship with Lucía Topozky. They met when he was 37 years old and she 27, during a clandestine operation. During the years of captivity they barely exchanged letters and definitely met in 1985, already in democracy. From those years they remember little, she said, because “this looks a lot like those stories of wars, where human relations have a distortion framework because you are running, you can fall prisoner, they can kill you. It does not have the parameters of a normal life.” Topozky arrived at the Senate in 2005 on the Frente Amplio and in 2010 the presidential band placed her husband, an honor she deserved for having been the most voted legislator. Seven years later, she was vice president of Tabaré Vázquez. Mujica and Topozky never separated. “Love is ages. When you’re young, it’s a bonfire. When you’re old, it’s a sweet custom. If I’m alive it is because she is,” Mujica said shortly before he died.
His first speech as a senator in 2000 dedicated it to cows. In 2005, he was Minister of Livestock of and already as president, proposed to discuss the property of large landowners and solve the problem of labor in the “importing” peasants of neighboring countries. He also promoted an agenda of rights that was avant -garde in the region: he legalized abortion and equal marriage and regulated trade and marijuana consumption. The world began, from one day to the other, to look towards Uruguay. Mujica remembered from those years in power his relationship with Barack Obama, “an intelligent guy who saw the problems.” And, above all, his deep friendship with the Brazilian Lula, whom he considered “a worldwide figure.”
In 2018, Mujica finally left active politics. He left his bank in the Senate with a letter to the president of Congress, his own wife, in which he alleged “personal reasons and tiredness of the long trip.” and think about the news who wanted to listen to it. When he learned that he had cancer, he promised to fight, but it was evident that he was already tired. Until the end of his days he clarified that he did not intend to himself the bronze of history. “Men do not make history, we do cartoon,” he said in one of his last interviews. “Why? Because in the immensity of the universe and time we are too conceited. That of manufacturing a God with figures of human people and everything else, is an old atavism.” Before he died, Mujica asked that you no longer ask for interviews. My cycle is over. Honestly, I’m dying and the warrior is entitled to his rest, ”he told the weekly Search. He then communicated to the world his decision to die in his farm and rest Manuela. “And that’s it,” he said, and thus said goodbye to life.
