Brazilian president, Lula da Silva and Mujica driving his battered VW Beetle. Credit: Palacio do Planalto.
José “Pepe” Mujica, former guerrilla, ex-president of Uruguay, and icon of Latin America’s left, has died aged 89 after a long battle with cancer. Widely admired for his humility and deep reflections on life, Mujica became a symbol of principled politics and resistance to material excess.
Born in 1935 in a working-class suburb of Montevideo, Mujica’s early years were marked by hardship. He lost his father at six and was raised by his mother, a market gardener. By his teens, he was demanding workers’ rights in the streets. In the 1960s, he joined the Tupamaros, a Marxist urban guerrilla group. Captured multiple times, Mujica survived six gunshot wounds, two prison escapes, and over a decade of solitary confinement in military detention during Uruguay’s dictatorship.
During those dark years, confined in a space barely large enough to move, he kept his sanity by recalling poetry, philosophy and the stories he had once read. “I learned to walk inside my mind,” he said. That internal world became a sanctuary that shaped the quiet wisdom he would later share with the world.
Freed in 1985, Mujica returned to public life, rising through the ranks of the Frente Amplio, Uruguay’s leftist coalition. Elected president in 2010, he governed with quiet authority, still living on his small farm with his three-legged dog Manuela and driving his battered VW Beetle. He donated most of his presidential salary and often welcomed foreign dignitaries in his muddy yard. “They say I’m a poor president,” he once said. “Poor are those who need too much.”
As president, he advanced a bold progressive agenda: legalising abortion, same-sex marriage and cannabis. These measures put Uruguay on the global map as a beacon of liberal reform in the region. Yet Mujica remained disarmingly modest. “We don’t make history, we make little stories,” he mused in one of his last interviews. “We are far too arrogant in the face of the universe.”
He spoke plainly about suffering
Mujica lost a kidney due to prison conditions, but refused to dramatise his ordeal. “I don’t like playing the torture card,” he told a biographer, rejecting any victimhood narrative. Though criticised for not pushing harder to prosecute military officials from the dictatorship, he insisted on reconciliation over vengeance. “Some wounds never heal. You just learn to live with them.”
Mujica shared a life of struggle and love with Lucía Topolansky, fellow guerrilla turned senator and vice-president. Their bond began clandestinely and endured prison, poverty, power and illness. “When you’re old,” he said, “love becomes a sweet habit. If I’m still alive, it’s because she’s still here.”
He left the Senate in 2018, citing exhaustion. “I’m tired from this long journey,” he wrote in a resignation letter to Topolansky, who was then presiding over the chamber. Yet he remained a moral compass for many, warning younger generations about consumerism, inequality and ecological collapse. “Freedom is living lightly,” he insisted. “Success isn’t about buying things—it’s about having time to live.”
As cancer progressed, Mujica retreated from public life, requesting no more interviews. “The warrior has a right to rest,” he told a local paper. He chose to spend his final days at home, beneath the giant sequoia where he had once buried Manuela.
And then, simply, he said: “That’s it.”
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