Declassified visits the former ‘philosopher president’ of Uruguay at his farm on the outskirts of the capital Montevideo to talk about war and peace, England’s role in his country’s history, and how to be happy.
October 18, 2024
Source: Declassified UK
Pepe Mujica at his farmhouse. (Photo: Matt Kennard/DCUK)
Pepe Mujica at his farmhouse. (Photo: Matt Kennard/DCUK)
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A friend who knows tells me it’s impossible to organise an interview with José ‘Pepe’ Mujica in advance. It’s not how he operates.
The best thing to do, she says, is to turn up at his farm on the outskirts of Uruguayan capital Montevideo unannounced and see if you get lucky.
When I was in the South American country earlier this year, I thought I’d try my luck.
On one drizzling Saturday morning, I drive along the motorway leading out of Montevideo into what is locally called gaucho country.
Rain is streaming into the car as the previous night my car window had been smashed while parked outside my hotel.
Mujica’s charca (ranch) is about 20 kilometres west from the centre of the city along the Ruta 1-Brigadier General Manuel Oribe motorway, named for the country’s 2nd president.
Turning off the highway you are immediately surrounded by farms as far as the eye can see. Uruguay’s largest exports throughout history have been beef and wool.
A couple more kilometres into this sleepy corn-grey landscape, I go up a long road with more arable land on either side. Barns sit on the side of the track and telephone wires run overhead.
Eventually I come to a large triangular shaped brown-brick building. A Uruguay flag is fluttering in the breeze. The building next to it has a sign saying Centro Educativo Agrario – the Agricultural Educational Centre. This is Mujica’s school, which he inaugurated in 2015 days after stepping down as president. I’ve arrived.
Just in front there’s a small cabin. A man inside comes out to greet me. I introduce myself and say I would like to interview Pepe Mujica.
“He doesn’t do unannounced interviews,” he says.
I tell him there was no way to pre-organise an interview.
“Sorry, there’s no way you can do it,” he replies. “Anyway, he’s sick today.”
“Is he in?” I ask.
He is, he replies and he points to the house shrouded by plants opposite the cabin. “You can have a look from here but don’t go further.”
There’s no budging him, so I accept my luck is not in.
“I’ll try again tomorrow?”
“You can try, but it will be the same result,” he says.
A friend who knows tells me it’s impossible to organise an interview with José ‘Pepe’ Mujica in advance. It’s not how he operates.
The best thing to do, she says, is to turn up at his farm on the outskirts of Uruguayan capital Montevideo unannounced and see if you get lucky.
When I was in the South American country earlier this year, I thought I’d try my luck.
On one drizzling Saturday morning, I drive along the motorway leading out of Montevideo into what is locally called gaucho country.
Rain is streaming into the car as the previous night my car window had been smashed while parked outside my hotel.
Mujica’s charca (ranch) is about 20 kilometres west from the centre of the city along the Ruta 1-Brigadier General Manuel Oribe motorway, named for the country’s 2nd president.
Turning off the highway you are immediately surrounded by farms as far as the eye can see. Uruguay’s largest exports throughout history have been beef and wool.
A couple more kilometres into this sleepy corn-grey landscape, I go up a long road with more arable land on either side. Barns sit on the side of the track and telephone wires run overhead.
Eventually I come to a large triangular shaped brown-brick building. A Uruguay flag is fluttering in the breeze. The building next to it has a sign saying Centro Educativo Agrario – the Agricultural Educational Centre. This is Mujica’s school, which he inaugurated in 2015 days after stepping down as president. I’ve arrived.
Just in front there’s a small cabin. A man inside comes out to greet me. I introduce myself and say I would like to interview Pepe Mujica.
“He doesn’t do unannounced interviews,” he says.
I tell him there was no way to pre-organise an interview.
“Sorry, there’s no way you can do it,” he replies. “Anyway, he’s sick today.”
“Is he in?” I ask.
He is, he replies and he points to the house shrouded by plants opposite the cabin. “You can have a look from here but don’t go further.”
There’s no budging him, so I accept my luck is not in.
“I’ll try again tomorrow?”
“You can try, but it will be the same result,” he says.
The road leading up to Pepe Mujica’s farm. (Photo: Matt Kennard/DCUK)
Farmhouse
The next day I’m getting the ferry back to Buenos Aires from the port town of Colonia del Sacramento, which sits 60 kilometres across the Río de la Plata.
The boat is in the late afternoon and Pepe’s house is on the way back west. I conclude there’s nothing to lose in trying again, although my chances seem slim.
I drive up the long road again and park in the same place. But this time no-one comes out of the cabin. I wait for a few minutes and then walk up to it myself. I peer in. No-one inside. He must not work on a Sunday.
I glance at the house opposite. The guard had said Pepe was ill, but that wasn’t convincing. I wonder if knocking unannounced on the door of an 88-year-old man relaxing on a Sunday morning was a bit off.
But this chance would not come again so I walk down the tree-lined path and see his small bungalow. It looks like something out of Little Red Riding Hood. A ramshackle but magical one-story farm house.
I knock on one door and get no reply. He must not be in. It is difficult to work out what is the front door. Then I find another door and knock again. I wait, thinking about getting back in the car. Then I hear the bolt unlock.
A small, old woman opens, smiling.
“Hi there, what do you want?” she asks, looking surprised.
I tell her I’d like to interview Mujica, would this be possible, I’ve come all the way from England.
She laughs, opens the door, and calls behind her.
“Pepe, there’s a journalist here from England, he’s come all the way to talk to you.”
There is a pause. “Tráelo adentro,” a voice comes from behind her. Bring him in.
The next day I’m getting the ferry back to Buenos Aires from the port town of Colonia del Sacramento, which sits 60 kilometres across the Río de la Plata.
The boat is in the late afternoon and Pepe’s house is on the way back west. I conclude there’s nothing to lose in trying again, although my chances seem slim.
I drive up the long road again and park in the same place. But this time no-one comes out of the cabin. I wait for a few minutes and then walk up to it myself. I peer in. No-one inside. He must not work on a Sunday.
I glance at the house opposite. The guard had said Pepe was ill, but that wasn’t convincing. I wonder if knocking unannounced on the door of an 88-year-old man relaxing on a Sunday morning was a bit off.
But this chance would not come again so I walk down the tree-lined path and see his small bungalow. It looks like something out of Little Red Riding Hood. A ramshackle but magical one-story farm house.
I knock on one door and get no reply. He must not be in. It is difficult to work out what is the front door. Then I find another door and knock again. I wait, thinking about getting back in the car. Then I hear the bolt unlock.
A small, old woman opens, smiling.
“Hi there, what do you want?” she asks, looking surprised.
I tell her I’d like to interview Mujica, would this be possible, I’ve come all the way from England.
She laughs, opens the door, and calls behind her.
“Pepe, there’s a journalist here from England, he’s come all the way to talk to you.”
There is a pause. “Tráelo adentro,” a voice comes from behind her. Bring him in.
Pepe Mujica’s agricultural school next to his farmhouse.
(Photo: Matt Kennard/DCUK)
‘Very dangerous’
Stepping through the cramped antechamber, I’m led into a ramshackle kitchen. Sitting at the table near the entrance is Pepe. He’s reading a book about his friend Lula, the two-time president of neighbouring Brazil.
I say I’m sorry to bother him on a Sunday, but I had to give it a try.
“Don’t worry, not a problem, sit down, let’s talk,” he tells me.
I turn the dictaphone on. Sitting opposite him is the woman who opened the door, who I now realise is his wife, Lucía Topolansky, herself a formidable social activist and politician.
She smiles at him, aware of the absurdity of the situation.
I begin the questions straight away, not wanting to lose any time. The previous night the Iranian military had sent a swarm of drones to bomb Israel. I start with that. What did he think of it?
“There must be a cause, an intention, I thought, to unleash so much stupidity,” Mujica says. “Because the attack that Israel carried out, killing an important member of the Iranian army in another country, it was obvious that it was going to generate a response. It was obvious—and that response was being sought. That is to say, behind that, are they not looking for a conflict with Iran?”
“I wonder whether we are heading towards a catastrophe. No one knows if we will end up with nuclear explosions.”
He says he was surprised by the Iranian response.
“I had speculated, and I was wrong, that Iran was going to measure what is at stake and was going to use another path, not this brutish way. I thought it was going to use the Strait of Hormuz, that it would look for a different way to strike, but for me, it fell into a trap. Because Israel’s response is not Israel’s response, it has half the West behind it and punishes Iran. They were looking for that. That’s the suspicion.”
Do you think maybe it could be a world war?, I ask.
“It’s very dangerous,” he replies. “Very dangerous. Because Iran is not a secondary country, it is an important country. In terms of resources, and technology, but it is also in an important location. Much of the world’s oil passes through there. This will have an immediate impact on oil and will hit the economy. I think the people who are running things must be thinking these things.”
But Mujica says this is part of a wider Western policy inflaming war and conflict around the world.
“We saw it previously with Ukraine,” he says. “They could have stopped that war in time. This war has had 15 years of incubation and warning. Putin is a beast who gave a very clear warning, he put the tanks on the border. He waited. Nothing happened. So now I wonder whether we are heading towards a catastrophe. No one knows if we will end up with nuclear explosions.”
Domination
Mujica tells me these bloody conflicts are all a result of imperial dynamics and the quest to dominate the world.
“The second president of the United States said that there were two ways to dominate,” he says, referring to John Adams. “One with swords, and the other with debt. Empires have used both.”
Mujica argues that it has created a world without a real international community. Strength is the only thing that matters.
“We have created a civilization that covers the entire planet, but there is no international politics,” he tells me. “International politics is the promotion of the interests of the strongest countries. There is no policy that thinks about the planet, globally, even though we are increasingly interdependent – what happens on one side, happens on all of us.”
He pauses for a moment then adds: “For example, Europe is paying for the stupid war in Ukraine with more expensive fuel, with more expensive gas, with economic problems—and with the development of the arms industry everywhere. Specifically with Iran, it will probably bring a blow to the price of oil and fuel, and it will have repercussions everywhere. You couldn’t be more stupid.”
“We do not have international weight because we each go with our own position.”
Mujica is talking principally about the American empire which, in terms of scope and military power, is the most powerful in history.
“The closer to the United States, the worse,” he tells me. “That’s Mexico’s problem.”
But in recent history there have been successes for the left in Latin America and a movement away from US control. Things have surely changed over the past 25 years, I suggest.
“There are changes, yes, but we are resistant to believing, to learning to defend ourselves as a continent,” he says. “It’s an old dream that comes from [Latin American independence leader Simón] Bolívar, but we do not have international weight because we each go with our own position.”
Mujica says this lack of unity in the continent was exposed during the Covid-19 pandemic.
“We are 6.7% of the world population, but we accounted for 30% of the deaths,” he continues. “There was no meeting of presidents to make a continental proposal to pharmaceutical companies because there were five countries that manufacture vaccines.”
He adds: “We should have made a continental proposal to say that you are not going to sell a pill in Latin America if you do not negotiate the patent, the knowledge. We are balkanised, everyone scrambled and did what they could. You can’t fight like that in this world.”
This balkanisation was also compounded by foreign interference. US documents revealed, for example, that Washington had pressured the Brazilian government not to buy Russia’s “malign” Sputnik V vaccine – a decision which may have cost thousands of lives.
The pink tide
Since the election of Hugo Chavez in Venezuela in 1998, Latin America has seen a host of democratic socialist governments rising up. This included Mujica’s own presidency in Uruguay which ran from 2010-15.
This is often called the “pink tide” – and with Colombia, Bolivia, Chile and Mexico currently under left-wing leaders we are now in what is sometimes called Pink Tide 2.0. I ask Mujica if he thinks Latin America has a critical role in the future of the world and whether that future is going to be good and healthy.
“I would like to believe so, but there are contradictions,” he says. “Latin America cannot bring together its own personality, we lie on the horizon of our countries but there is no Latin American conscience to declare ourselves as a continent.”
Mujica adds that the continent adopted many of the most reactionary elements of the political and economic culture of the colonising powers Portugal and Spain.
“We are descendants of two feudal powers that transplanted feudal values when they went out to colonise. Latin America was distributed in a feudal sense.”
He continues: “Then the process of political independence occurred at the same time that the world framework was organised to be dependent on the English Channel. It was not inward independence. We paid for our political independence with economic dependence. We began to depend on England and France, and the advent of industrial society.”
“Our independence coincides with an economic dependence, when debt began.”
Mujica says you can see the legacy of this with the geography of the countries, and the fact they were set up to suck wealth and resources back to Europe.
“Almost all capitals are located in a port. That doesn’t happen in Europe, except in England, which is an island. The capitals have a meaning. They are in the centre. In Latin America the only ones that remain in the centre are those in which there was an old culture like the Inca, but the rest, the first capital of Brazil was Bahia, which was a port for export of sugar and the entry of slaves.”
Another way Latin America was kept under control after independence was debt.
“Our independence coincides with an economic dependence, when debt began,” Mujica says. “The first loan that England gave was here in the Río de la Plata to Rivadavia for £5m. It cost more or less £115m and it took 100 years to pay. That gives an idea of how we started.”
Bernardino Rivadavia was the first president of Argentina, which was then called the United Provinces of the Río de la Plata and included present-day Uruguay.
“That dependence on the [English] Channel led us to look at Europe and developed countries culturally. To succeed culturally you had to go to Paris. The best singer of the Río de la Plata, Gardel, had to go to Paris. There was a cultural dependency in every sense. Until 1920, Brazil sent students to study in Europe, until 1920 it did not have a university, it’s incredible.”
Mujica says Latin American colonisation was predicated on dependency more than some other examples.
“It is very different from English colonisation in the United States,” he says. “There the bourgeois revolution had triumphed in England and they distributed what a family more or less needed to live. Then a rapid middle class and a strong internal market were created that pushed industrialisation. Here it was the other way around, here the class issue was created, a very privileged minority imported every luxury from Europe.”
A mural of legendary Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano in Montevideo.
(Photo: Matt Kennard/DCUK)
England as guarantor
Uruguay’s early history was shaped by the fight between the British, Spanish and Portuguese for control of the La Plata Basin.
The Anglo-Spanish War raged between 1796-1808 and during this time the British invaded and took Buenos Aires in 1806, which was soon liberated by forces from Montevideo.
But in 1807, a new attack left Montevideo occupied by a 10,000 strong British force, but they were unable to retake Buenos Aires.
In May 1825, a revolutionary force named the Treinta y Tres Orientales (Thirty-Three Orientals or Thirty-Three Easterners) reached Montevideo and declared a provisional government.
The newly elected provincial assembly soon declared Cisplatine province’s secession from the Empire of Brazil and allegiance to the United Provinces of the Río de la Plata. In response, Brazil launched a war which raged for three years.
At the end of this long conflict, the Treaty of Montevideo was signed in 1828 under the tutelage of Viscount Ponsonby, a British diplomat. Brazil and Argentina agreed to recognise the independent state of Uruguay as a buffer between them.
Ponsonby was in many ways the architect of Uruguayan independence.
“This area of the world was treated in a privileged way by England, in its exchange relationship, in terms of what England did in other places,” Mujica says. “We were tributaries. We know that it was the first expression of modern capitalism that occurred in Uruguay.”
He adds: “Corned beef was made here and it travelled through India, Australia, South Africa. Where the British Empire went, it took the corned beef made here…It is curious because until the 1940s this area of the world was different from the rest of Latin America, we had per capita wealth like Belgium or France. Exchange relations were quite good.”
“England very intelligently calculated that the entire Atlantic coast would be in the hands of two countries, which didn’t suit it.”
“In the train station where the English were, to this day they have statues of the English,” his wife adds.
Ponsonby was particularly interesting.
“He was the English ambassador who orchestrated our independence,” Mujica says. “They sent him to the Río de la Plata as a punishment. He was a foreign relations official, but they discovered that he was in love with the king’s mistress, and they sent him here under sanctions. And here he did a spectacular job,” Mujica says.
Britain’s desire to create a buffer state between Brazil and Argentina had roots in its own imperial ambitions.
“England very intelligently calculated that the entire Atlantic coast would be in the hands of two countries, which didn’t suit it because Uruguay is at the exit of the great rivers,” Mujica says. “England has always been characterised by having power in key places, right? That’s why it went there to the Strait of Magellan, the Falklands, and Gibraltar.”
Mujica adds, “It’s guarantor of our independence, I always tell ambassadors that.”
Guerilla fighter
Mujica joined the armed left-wing resistance in Uruguay as a young man in the mid-1960s, becoming a member of the newly formed MLN-Tupamaros movement, a group inspired by the recent Cuban revolution. Named for the revolutionary Túpac Amaru II, who in 1780 led a major indigenous revolt against the Viceroyalty of Peru, the group pushed for redistribution of wealth to the poor.
He participated in the brief 1969 takeover of Pando, a town close to Montevideo, leading one of six squads assaulting strategic points in the city.
In March 1970, he was shot six times while resisting arrest at a Montevideo bar while two policemen were injured in the exchange.
Mujica was captured by the authorities on four occasions. He was among the more than 100 Tupamaros who escaped Punta Carretas prison in September 1971 by digging a tunnel from inside the prison that led to the living room of a nearby home. He was captured but escaped again.
The Tupumaros had also in 1971 kidnapped the British ambassador to Uruguay, Sir Geoffrey Jackson, who they held captive for nine months.
Two years later, the 1973 coup d’etat in Uruguay installed a vicious military junta that ruled the country until 1985. This rightwing regime outlawed political parties, dissolved unions, and censored the media in order to preserve its control. It was also a key player in the continent-wide CIA-backed terror network in the region codenamed “Operation Condor”.
“Well, now, we lived a very hard experience,” he tells me. “I was imprisoned for more than 12 years but I spent seven years without a book, nothing, almost no visits. This was from 1972 to 85.”
What impact did that have on him?, I ask.
“I had to learn to resist as best I could and to revalue certain things, I learned a lot,” he says. “I learned because when I was very young I read a lot. But I hadn’t thought about what I had read. And not having books or anything, but with time…I started to think.”
“I was imprisoned for more than 12 years but I spent seven years without a book, nothing, almost no visits.”
Mujica was released when democracy was restored in 1985.
“When we were released, we emerged from a very strong dictatorship and we collectively decided that we had to adhere to the law, because otherwise we would be like a provocation to a society that had gotten rid of the dictatorship.”
He pauses and restarts: “And, well, then a lot of things happened in the world, right? We reviewed some issues, and I personally still have socialist thinking but I believe that the Leninist theses failed because they were a gateway to creating a new bureaucracy.”
Mujica’s ideas about socialism have become more heterodox with age.
“I do not believe that socialism can develop in poor societies, which does not mean that a rich society will be socialist, that’s another story,” he says.
“I find the roots of socialism in anthropology. Sapiens were a historically socialist animal, they lived in groups for more than 200,000 years. Agriculture began 10 or 15,000 years ago. Yesterday. And that’s where yours and my history began. Inside we carry that nostalgia and one day it will be proven whether genetic memory exists.”
Does he think it’s still there?
“I see traces of that genetic memory. People who live in an apartment and have a little plant or a dog. Or have a stove, right, which is something that stands in for firewood, even if it is gas. Or when a man goes with a car to the supermarket, he looks like a hunter.”
Throughout the conversation, Mujica’s wife, Lucía Topolansky, who answered the door, sits across the table from him listening attentively, helping with my Spanish difficulties.
She has her own remarkable story, serving as vice-president from 2017 to 2020. Raised in an upper-class family, in 1969 Topolansky also joined the Tupamaros and went underground. Under the dictatorship she was also arrested and imprisoned in a military jailwhere she endured physical and psychological torture.
A mural at Pepe Mujica’s agricultural school. (Photo: Matt Kennard/DCUK)
Philosopher president
As president, Mujica gained international fame for his abstinent existence. He continued to live on his farm, spurning the presidential palace, and gave 90% of his wage away.
It is very rare to have such a deeply human person in the position as president, I say. What lessons did he learn over the five years?
“The lesson I learned is that changes need collective forces,” he says. “This was accompanied by trying to help build a political party, knowing it did not begin with us nor end with us.”
The Frente Amplio, or Broad Front, was created in 1971 just a few years before the coup. It sought to bring together all the disparate left-wing forces in the country, from communists to social democrats and everything in between.
“We have been part of the construction of Frente Amplio,” Mujica says. “We try to grow it because that’s what’s going to remain. We pass, but we must hand the baton to another generation, because the fight did not begin with us nor does it end with us, it continues. As long as there is life on earth, there will be people. Triumph. It’s getting up and starting again every time you fall.”
“Now, the problem is how to attract people, how to multiply the number of people.”
There are two ways of looking at politics: as a fight or a negotiation. Mujica, despite his history as a guerilla fighter, now falls firmly on the side of negotiation.
“In our current society, there is no point in fighting because people would not understand it,” he says. “Now, the problem is how to attract people, how to multiply the number of people. True power is not in gestures, but the level of the masses who support us. In the long run, that is what is decisive.”
He continues: “Some people think that power is nothing more than the rifle. No. Power comes from those who handle the rifle. The rifle is useless, the problem is the people who handle it. It is a question of capturing wills.”
During Mujica’s time as president, Uruguay legalised marijuana and abortion, both moves that were extremely unpopular in right-wing opposition circles.
“Now, we cannot detach ourselves from the immediate needs that ordinary people have, because otherwise we isolate ourselves from the problems that people have. We have to live their vicissitudes alongside them to multiply influence.”
“Believing that with an intellectual vision that is isolated from people we are going to lead them to paradise is a utopian dream.”
He continues his stance against this old Leninist conception of power.
“Believing that with an intellectual vision that is isolated from people we are going to lead them to paradise is a utopian dream,” he says. “We have to build with the people, and the march will be marked by the difficulties that the people have. So we seek active participation in the society in which we live. Democracy is not perfect or anything close to it, it is deceitful. But for now it is the best thing we have been able to achieve.”
But how can you have democracy within capitalism and its obscene levels of inequality of wealth, I ask.
“It is very far from being an economic democracy, it is a lie, and there is growing inequality. The worst thing is that, in the world, what is growing the most is inequality. And it’s not that the world is poorer, the world is richer than ever. But there are also richer people than ever, with a degree of wealth that cannot even be imagined.”
He continues: “This is leading to a brutal waste of energy. The worst thing about consumerism is that it is the gateway to degrading nature. We don’t need so much waste to live. The concept of planned obsolescence is nonsense. Making things calculated to last a short time is the wrong way around. It’s crazy.”
The gates to Eduardo Galeano’s house in Montevideo where he lived from 1985 until his death in 2015. (Photo: Matt Kennard/DCUK)
The poet historian
The day before I first went to Mujica’s farm I had made a pilgrimage to Eduardo Galeano’s old house in the sleepy Malvin barrio of Montevideo.
Galeano was a political writer and novelist whose work influenced a whole generation of Latin Americans. His Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent, published in 1971, became the Bible of the anti-imperialist and left movements in the region in that period. In 2009, Hugo Chávez, then president of Venezuela, gave the book as a gift to President Obama, sending it back on to the bestseller list.
The book told the history of the exploitation of Latin America after the Spanish and Portuguese arrived, but with a poetry and lyricism that was completely unique. The book was banned under the right-wing military governments of Brazil, Chile, Argentina and Uruguay.
“Galeano gave personality to the history of Latin America.”
Galeano’s house, named “Casa de los Pájaros” (House of Birds), is where he lived from 1985 to his death in 2015. It looks no different from the other houses on the street, apart from the mountains of plants that clutter the front garden. The bungalow is barely visible.
Afterwards, I went along to Galeano’s favourite coffee shop, Café Brasilero, in the heart of the old town of Montevideo. Galeano was an infamous devotee of cafes, and this is where he would spend days whiling away the day reading the paper and writing.
In one of his poems he wrote: “I go to the Café Brasilero, which miraculously lives on. This is the last of the ancient meeting places where I learned the art of storytelling by listening to liars who, by lying, told the truth.”
His picture is on the white-washed walls and I’m pointed to the window seat he used to sit at.
I ask Mujica about his significance.
“Galeano gave personality to the history of Latin America,” he says. “He presented it to the world, in short, but he didn’t just present data, he presented it with art. Because there is always that discussion, whether form or content. The content is explosive, but the form is beautiful. He is a great writer, apart from a thinker. And I was surprised by the impact his work had on the world.”
Eduardo Galeano’s chosen window seat at Café Brasilero in Montevideo’s old town, his favourite hangout. (Photo: Matt Kennard/DCUK)
Philosophy for life
Listening to Mujica speak it is almost impossible to imagine that he served five years as president. His analysis of capitalism and power, his honesty about our problems as a species, is almost never heard from people at the apex of the system.
What is his philosophy for life?, I ask.
“The most important thing is to live happily,” he replies.
How do you do that?
“By living according to what we hold inside,” he says.
That’s very difficult, I reply, there are many obstacles.
“It’s difficult because they dominate us from the outside,” Mujica says. “There is a consumerist culture that imposes desperation on us—and that results in us losing our freedom. The more soberly you can live, the more free time you have left, to spend on what you decide.
“But if you allow yourself to be cornered by the law of necessity, which in man can be infinite, you are not free. Being subject to covering the costs of increasing needs. And in this stage of capitalism what is sought is for us to be compulsive buyers. It needs it, because it is a civilization that justifies accumulation, it needs us to be consumers.”
“There is a consumerist culture that imposes desperation on us.”
Has he found happiness, then?
“We are two old people who live happily,” he says, looking at his wife across the table.
How did you come to this realisation, when he was a young man, was it prison?
“I belong to a generation that dreamed of changing the world,” he says. “We believed that we were going to be able to modify the parameters of the capitalist system, and for a long time we thought that by changing the relations of production and distribution we would have a better humanity.”
He continues: “Human science that understands human behaviour was not so developed, so we suffered from an ideological hole. Man is much more complicated, he is an emotional animal that learned to think, and perhaps we did not give culture the importance that it has. It is more difficult to change a culture than the material reality of a society.”
He pauses. “In the long run, culture is decisive. Capitalism has appropriated the subliminal culture of the people. By keeping us hooked on permanent atrocious consumerism, it dominates us. So we don’t have time to question it. Because it absorbs our entire life to cover the expenses we have ahead. There is nothing more important than the material concern that society has.”
“Work for what is required to live, do not live to work.”
Does he have a message for the young?
“Work for what is required to live, do not live to work. If you adjust to your needs, you have to work less. And I have time left to exercise my freedom. If I let my needs multiply, goodbye. People don’t have time, they can’t waste time. And free time is the foundation of civilization, even of theology. What was the most important civilizational work in the history of humanity? Athens. The fourth century and the fifth century. With citizens who did not work, because they had slaves.
“But they spent time arguing. And there began theatre, comedy, philosophy, academia, everything. These are 200 years of inexplicable history, there were no more than 100,000 citizens. They invented democracy. Another peak, the city of renaissance. People’s free time is what generates culture.”
How old are you now?
“89, almost. In a month,” he says.
Are you afraid of death?
“Ah, yes, death is going to come at any moment,” he says.
But aren’t you afraid of that?, I press.
“No, it’s like the sun coming out tomorrow. It is inevitable. But I believe that life is an adventure of molecules. There is no room for the question of where we come from or where we are going. This life. It’s a wonder. And it is wonderful to have had the opportunity to be born. There was a 40 million chance that someone else would be born, and it happened to you. That’s the miracle.”
A week after I visit the farm, articles appear in the media. Mujica had a routine appointment with the doctor the Friday after we met. He is diagnosed with esophageal cancer. “I want to convey to all the young people that life is beautiful, but it wears out and you fall,” he told journalists. “The point is to start over every time you fall, and if there is anger, transform it into hope.”
Pepe Mujica
José Alberto "Pepe" Mujica Cordano is a Uruguayan politician, former revolutionary and farmer who served as the 40th president of Uruguay from 2010 to 2015.
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