Uruguayan leader passed away after months of treatment against esophagus cancer
SYLVIA COLOMBO
Buenos Aires, Argentina (Folhapress) – “What will happen the day Indians have the same proportion of cars per family as the Germans?” Asked the then Uruguayan president José “Pepe” Mujica in Rio+20, the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development in June 2012.
Dead at the age of 89 on Tuesday (13), after months of treatment against esophagus cancer, Mujica began to become a political figure of global reach precisely from this speech in Brazil. At a time when the green agenda did not have as many advocates as today, his request drew his request to humanity so as not to be seduced by consumption, by contaminating the environment and creating an extra need for people to have “the younger car, the younger phone, the younger radio.”
The Uruguayan leader, who ruled from 2010 to 2015, became the first of the leftist “rose wave” from Latin America to put the conservation theme among the priorities of the agenda, something rare among his peers. Names like Brazilian Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva and Venezuelan Hugo Chávez were only incorporating this flag later, still shyly.
José Alberto “Pepe” Mujica Cordano, who would be 90 years old on the 20th, never ceased to cultivate his simple lifestyle, even with international projection. It came from a family of small agricultural owners around Montevideo. When president, he refused to live in the beautiful official residence, the Suárez Y Reyes Palace. He preferred to continue at his site in Rincón Del Cerro, where he liked to take care of the earth, driving tractor until the end of his life. The times when he needed to go to the capital, he used his unfailing blue Beetle, in which Lula took a ride during a visit in 2023.
During the presidency, he gave his security work for ignoring the protocols. It was common to see him going out for an escort to eat barbecue or have an ice cream with his wife, Lucía Topolansky, 80, in cheap restaurants. He donated two thirds of his salary to a project of popular housing.
The formality of the position bothered him. “The big problem for me is to wear a jacket. When I do it, usually in international appointments, it is without a tie,” he once told Folha. At home, ordinary clothing was a blouse and sweatpants, often dirty mud. He was almost always accompanied by Manuela, a three -legged dog who died in 2018 and accompanied him for over 20 years – her fotos could be seen on the farm walls.
Political militancy began as a student, when he joined the youth that supported the National Party (Blanco), a traditional grouping born to defend the rights of the field. It was never a leftist acronym, but it contained, as to this day, a progressive current.
Over the years, Mujica failed to identify with the party flag and was building his left -wing profile through Marxist and Anarchist readings. In the 1960s, he joined the National-Tupamaros Release Movement (MLN-T), one of the many South American guerrillas created in the Esteio of the 1959 Cuban Revolution.
The Tupamaros brought together socialists, maoist, anarchists and communists. They emerged as a resistance group, but still during the democratic period. Mujica and the other guerrillas who designed in politics made a kind of silence pact about the period, but biographers confirm his participation in robberies, for example, to finance the movement. He would also have been present when the Tupamaros took the city of Pando in 1969 and shot the security forces. There are no reports that you have been involved in kidnapping or murders.
A striking passage from this time occurred when Mujica and a group of Tupamaros escaped twice, through tunnels, from the old prison of Punta Carretas, where today is the main mall of Montevideo.
Arrested the above time, he lived his longest jail from 1972, during the management of Juan María Bordaberry (1928-2011), a civilian who would implement a military dictatorship the following year. Mujica underwent torture, mistreatment, isolation, in a nightmare that only ended with the end of the regime in 1985. Neither he nor his companions were ever judged.
With the redemocratization, the former guerrillas abandoned the armed struggle and entered the political game by the vote. The Tupamaros combined themselves with the Broad Front Coalition, which brought together progressive parties. Out of prison, Mujica moved to Rincón Del Cerro, where he finally lived with his fighting companion, Lucía, who was also trapped for a long time. The couple had no children.
In the broad front, he helped create the MPP (Popular Participation Movement), currently the force with more congressmen within the alliance. In 1995, he was elected deputy. Ten years later, socialist Tabaré Vázquez (1940-2020) would become the first president coming from the left coalition-and would return to a second term from 2015 to 2020. His possession was a real party for left-wing governments in the region. Lula and Chávez were present, as well as Nestor Kirchner (Argentina) and Alejandro Toledo (Peru).
Mujica’s turn arrived on November 29, 2009, when he won the elections for the period 2010 to 2015. His deputy, Danilo Astori, had been Vázquez’s minister of economy. Thus, it gave markets a sign of continuity in this area.
One of the main achievements of the double Vázquez-Mujica was the reduction of poverty, from 32.6% in 2006 to 8.1% in 2018. With the focus on improving the lowest salary and state assistance programs, there was social ascension and reduced inequalities.
In 2012, a project that was already debated in Congress reached the hands of Mujica. It was the proposal to decriminalize the production and marketing of marijuana. The measure reverberated worldwide. The government was willing not only to regulate the market, including selling in pharmacies, but also to take care of cultivation. Approved the following year, the standard has undergone light changes over the years, but it is still a landmark among the forms of combating drug trafficking.
Another law that marked its management was that of abortion only by the will of women, with free care in the public health system. Recognition of same -sex marriage was also approved under mujica. Neither Tabaré Vázquez – that was the same coalition but against these measures – nor the right -wing Luis Lacalle Pou, current president, acted to reverse these legislation.
For Uruguayans, it is possible that he will be seen in the future as a continuator of the work of Battle & Ordóñez (1856-1929), avant-garde and reformist president. In his two terms (1903-1907 and 1911-1915), he legalized the divorce, established the working day of eight hours, created indemnity laws for dismissed workers and a robust retirement plan.
Mujica was also an enthusiast of regional integration and Mercosur. With Brazil, he kept a strong bond because of his friendship with Lula. The last meeting of the two was during the inauguration of the Uruguayan President, Yamandú Orsi, in March. Shortly before, in December 2024, Lula was in Uruguay for the regional block summit. He took advantage and went to the place of his friend already weakened and granted him the great necklace of the National Order of Cruzeiro do Sul, one of the greatest honors of the Brazilian state to foreigners.
Despite his proximity to his “pink wave”, Mujica maintained his independence and has never been shrunned with criticizing the left of the region, who considered to be in a “ideal crisis,” as he told Folha in May 2024. For him, Nicolás Maduro’s Venezuela and Daniel Ortega’s Nicaragua “play with democracy, they will then put people, then put people, then put people, then put people in people, then put people, then put people in people chain”.
This interview, at its site, was granted shortly after he announced the discovery of the tumor in the esophagus. At the time, Mujica was on the second day of radiotherapy and was hopeful. Last September, his doctor even claimed that cancer was in a “step of remission.” But complications led him to surgery and several hospitalizations.
In January, he told the local newspaper that the disease had spread to the liver and was no longer expecting it. “I’m dying,” he said, with his usual frankness.
In the last conversation with Folha, he also naturally faced his situation. “Death is perhaps what gives value to life. … Our way of fighting death is an impossible struggle that we will always lose, but we fight with love.”
