Pepe Mujica. The sobriety of a true leader

Democracy loves to collect disappointing leaders. The great electoral campaigns are periods when the regime, without explaining whatever it may be, surrenders efusively to illusion, and simulates a certain innocence, giving, in its most auspicious moments, a certain degree of delirium. In a mercantilist society that lives bewitched by illusions, politicians study advertising campaigns, and seek to appeal to the same ideology of consumption, which is always done more on impulse, for adherence to values ​​that are difficult to need, and less and less bind to political measures. In fact, those who know to last are politicians who learn to manage not exactly expectations, but the disappointment of voters. The exceptions are increasingly rare. José Mujica has been the most exalting in recent decades. The former guerrilla and symbol of the Latin American left died at the age of 89 leaving Uruguay washed in tears. With his impetuous charisma, this self -adventured philosophical anarchist became known as ‘the poorest president of the world’, and earlier this year he announced that he had abandoned treatments to a cancer in the esophagus diagnosed in April 2024. «I am dying. I just want you not to ask me more interviews, nothing more. My cycle is over. A warrior is entitled to his rest »he then told the Uruguayan newspaper.

Known as Pepe, Mujica was elected president in 2009 at the age of 74 when a generation of Latin American left-American governments was losing his populist splendor. If so many leaders have pathetic slips and consider themselves headlights of their nations, in the case of this Uruguayan leader what made him so popular was his coherence between his speech and his actions, having affirmed himself as a sobriety oracle and leading a frugal lifestyle, while denouncing the economic system and consumerism, which he considered incompatible with freedom.

The informal style of his governance has made the ruling classes a little all over the world. Upon assuming the presidency of Uruguay in 2010, he rejected moving to the official residence in order to continue to take care of the land on a small Thursday around the capital, he also continued to travel in a Blue Volkswagen Carocha, and donated 90% of his salary to social solidarity institutions. Although he could not go as far as he expected, he took a series of progressive policies with little or no precedents in Latin America, such as cannabis legalization, abortion and homosexual marriage.

Born in Montevideo on May 20, 1935, within a family of Basque and Italian root farmers, ranked from youth in left-wing organizations and joined the 1960s to Tupamaros, a Marxist-Leninist-inspired guerrilla. In 1972, he was captured and sentenced to 14 years in prison during which he suffered acts of torture and mistreatment that would leave him sequelae for the rest of his life. It would be amnesty and released with the return of democracy. It eventually became the democratic regime, becoming one of the Broad Front Figures and integrating the government of Tabaré Vázquez, between 2005 and 2008, protecting the folder of rural matters and fishing.

His detractors never forgive him the years spent in the ranks of the Tupamaros, who were appointed ‘guerrillas Robin Hood’. And if he lamented the excesses of his period of greatest revolutionary fervor, he attributed to the years that spent a major role in consolidating his political ideas in prison. «In prison I had a lot of time to think and found this: either we can be happy with little or we will never be happy. This is not an apology of poverty, it is an apology of sobriety. But as we created a consumerist society and the economy has to grow because if it is not a tragedy, we invented a mountain of superfluous consumption and the idea that we must buy and waste and buy and waste: this society wasted, wasted and wasted. See our country: there are 3.5 million people and matters 28 million pairs of shoes a year! What madness is this? We live in an unconscious society, accumulate garbage and spend our lives paying bills; People are sacrificed to pay bills (why) subliminarily believe that progressing is buying new things. And if one job is not going to look for another one, and it takes a better car and I don’t know what, but it’s never enough, you never have enough. The problem is that the only thing you can’t buy is life, life is spent and when you wake up you are an old man and life has passed. The world does not think like me, but in the future it will give me reason and it will be too late ».