REST IN POWER

From jailed guerrilla fighter to President of Uruguay

 

Mike Phipps reflects on the extraordinary life of José ‘Pepe’ Mujica.

MAY 30,2025

Pepe Mujica, who died earlier this month, a week before his 90th birthday, was a remarkable man. A former guerrilla with the Tupamaros, he was tortured and imprisoned for 14 years during the military dictatorship in the 1970s and 1980s, before joining the Broad Front coalition of left-wing parties. In government he served as Minister of Livestock, Agriculture and Fisheries from  2005 to 2008 and a Senator before winning the 2009 presidential election and serving a five year term as President.

Urban guerrilla

Her was born in 1935. His father died when he was six years old and he was raised by his mother, a hardworking farmer. As a young man, he travelled to Havana a year after the Cuban Revolution, where he was inspired by Che Guevara. Later that decade, he joined the Tupamaros National Liberation Movement, an armed urban guerrilla group, soon rising to its leadership. Mujica later described the group as “not a classic guerrilla organisation, but a political movement with weapons.”

Perhaps one of its most audacious actions was in October1969. To mark the second anniversary of Che Guevara’s execution in Bolivia, the group decided to take over the town of Pando, a city of 15,000 inhabitants, 30 kilometers from Montevideo. They occupied the police station, the fire station, the telephone exchange and several banks, seizing weapons and money.

Some months later, Mujica was in a bar in downtown Montevideo when several police officers entered and asked for their papers. “These are my papers,” he responded, drawing his pistol and firing. He was shot six times but survived, thanks to a sympathetic surgeon.

Mujica was jailed, badly wounded. When he recovered, he and his companions dug a tunnel 40 meters long and 10 meters deep, allowing 106 inmates to escape. The effort made the record books as the joint-largest prison breakout in history. Mujica was soon recaptured, escaped and was recaptured again.

Hostage of the military

In 1973, the Uruguayan military seized power in a coup, dissolving Congress, banning parties and trade unions. The Tupamaros leaders in prison were kept in military custody and told that if further attacks occurred outside, they would be shot, while ‘trying to escape’. For the next twelve years, José Mujica was imprisoned in solitary confinement – for two years in darkness at the bottom of a disused horse-watering trough –  without books, medicine, a bed or a latrine, with little water or food. He lost all his teeth and his mental health suffered.

In 1985, Uruguay’s military leaders were forced to accept the return of democracy. Under a general amnesty for political prisoners, Mujica was freed, his health wrecked. He was surprised by the crowd waiting for him, who recognised his courage and saw him, as Argentine writer Martín Caparrós puts it in an unsurpassed appreciation, as the “quintessential victim of the dictatorship’s barbarity.”

The former Tupamaros prisoners and many thousands more formed a party – the Movement of Popular Participation – that went on to become the largest component of the Broad Front, a center-left alliance that had been formed a generation earlier to challenge Uruguay’s two-party duopoly. Mujica was one of its leaders and lived with his partner Lucía Topolansky on an old farm outside Montevideo, where they cultivated chrysanthemums for sale.

Lucía herself was formerly a member of the Tupamaros, who had helped organise a daring prison escape for her comrades and was eventually captured and tortured under the coup regime. She went on to serve as Vice President of Uruguay from 2017 to 2020.

Elected to office

In 1994, she, Mujica and several other comrades were elected to Congress. Mujica turned up in his old Vespa, dressed in his customary work clothes. Throughout his ministerial office and stint as a Senator, he continued to live simply and his philosophy for doing so resonated widely.

“I belong to a generation that thought socialism was just around the corner, “ he said. “My youth belongs to the world of illusion. The passage of history has shown us that it was much more difficult. And we learned that, to achieve a better humanity, the cultural question is as important, if not more important, than the material question. You can change the material, but if the culture doesn’t change, there is no change. True change is inside the mind. Many who were socialist in their convictions migrated to capitalism… But the solution is not capitalism; we must find something else, other paths. We belong to that search.”

In March 2010, he was sworn in as President. He liberalised abortion and enacted same-sex marriage. But his best-known measure was the legalization of marijuana, in an attempt to separate drugs from the criminal gangs who controlled the trade. It was a trail-blazing measure at the time and greeted with jubilation.

Mujica’s government also managed to lower unemployment, increase real wages and massively expand housing for the poor. Poverty halved under his rule. Uruguay also became at this time the most advanced country in the Americas in terms of respect for basic trade union rights. But he showed little interest in holding the dictatorship accountable for its crimes. “Justice has a stench of vengeance from the mother who gave birth to it,” he said.

Constitutionally unable to run for a second consecutive term as President, “Mujica left office with a relatively healthy economy and with social stability [Uruguay’s] bigger neighbours could only dream of,” opined one BBC correspondent. After leaving the presidency, he criticised the regimes of Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua and Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela for authoritarianism, while opposing foreign intervention there.

The key to his popularity

“Nothing worked out so well for him as the construction of himself,” writes Caparrós. “Articles appeared all over the planet about ‘the poorest president in the world,’ who donated 90 percent of his salary to social projects and, instead of moving to his official residence, stayed on his farm with his partner, Lucía, and Manuela, his three-legged dog, and his old light blue 1987 Volkswagen. In other words, someone who lived like most of his countrymen.”

And spoke them like them. His plain, colloquial speaking style has been widely credited for his huge popularity, in an era when the left, not just in Uruguay, has not always succeeded in communicating effectively with the very voters from whom it expects support. Mujica encouraged people. “Only he who stops fighting can be beaten,” he would say.

Most obituarists have focused on the evolution of Mujica’s politics from revolutionary idealist to pragmatic gradualist and the quirkiness of being ‘the world’s humblest president’. “But this simplistic narrative obscures a profound truth: beneath his austere lifestyle burned the unyielding spirit of a revolutionary who never abandoned his revolutionary principles,” argues international solidarity activist Ali Abutalebi. “Unlike many former guerrillas who entered mainstream politics and diluted their principles, Mujica transformed his methods while keeping his essence intact.”

The simple fact was that in Uruguay, as in many countries in Latin America, democratic participation was virtually impossible in the 1970s. As in Nicaragua and elsewhere, when democracy was re-established, it was because of the grassroots struggle against authoritarian and military dictatorships – and the guerrilla movement was a central part of that. Mujica certainly changed his tactics in the new conditions of the late 1980s, but he never apologised for his guerrilla past. It was a necessary response to state oppression and injustice for which many of his comrades paid the ultimate price.

“Mujica’s trajectory stands as a powerful counterexample to the narrative that entering state institutions necessarily corrupts revolutionary ideals,” says  Abutalebi. “He demonstrated that one could wield political power without betraying the struggle that made such power possible.” Moreover, his simple lifestyle was an expression of those ideals: “a living embodiment of resistance against capitalist excess and a testament to the enduring relevance of revolutionary values in contemporary politics.”

This had a  resounding impact. Uruguayan historian Gerardo Caetano comments: “By living in alignment with what he said and what he did, he revitalized the legitimacy of politics, not only in Uruguay but also internationally.”

Over 100,000 people attended  Pepe Mujica’s funeral. “In times when the left is timid or dogmatic, authoritarian or fruitless, his words challenged us, made us think, gave us hope,” Caparrós concludes. “That’s why, whether he likes it or not, the former guerrilla, former prisoner, former President, former wise old man, Pepe Mujica, will continue to speak for a long time.”

Mike Phipps’ book Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow: The Labour Party after Jeremy Corbyn (OR Books, 2022) can be ordered here.

Image: President Mujica in 2010. Author: Andrea Mazza,  licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.