The battle for political change was fierce, no less than firstly. As a member of the Tupamaros, Mujica participated in battles and sustained wounds. He was captured a number of occasions, and as soon as took half in a dramatic jail escape. In the long run, although, he and a handful of others have been recaptured and held hostage by Uruguay’s army, in a bid to interrupt the again of the insurgency. Mujica was imprisoned for 13 years, a lot of it in a solitary underground cell—an expertise that almost drove him mad.
The Tupamaros formally disarmed after the tip of the dictatorship, in 1985. Mujica emerged from jail and, in 1994, launched into a political profession in Uruguay’s restored democracy. He served as a parliamentary deputy, as a senator, as a cupboard minister, and at last, from 2010 to 2015, as President. Even then, he refused to maneuver from his farmhouse into the Presidential residence, and donated a big majority of his wage to charity. He drove to work in his sky-blue 1987 Volkswagen Beetle.
Mujica by no means budged from his left-wing views, and he expressed solidarity with the area’s different leftist Presidents—veterans together with Fidel Castro, Hugo Chávez, and Lula, and later such newcomers as Chile’s Gabriel Boric and Mexico’s Claudia Sheinbaum. However he was additionally a pragmatist, capable of interact with home political adversaries and with overseas leaders to his proper. He was typically likened to Nelson Mandela, that different legendary political prisoner of the Chilly Battle, who equally spent his postwar life working to reconcile his countrymen and extolling the virtues of nonviolence. In our first assembly, I requested Mujica how he had managed to come back out of jail with out wanting to hunt revenge. “I had comrades who used their energy to settle scores,” he stated. “However I fought myself not to do this, as a result of I noticed it could simply create extra obstacles. I needed to resolve what the precedence was—the long run or the previous. It’s not about forgetting the previous, however, in case you think about it to the extent that it kills your future, then you definately’ve failed.”
I visited Mujica’s farmhouse in 2017, and met him on the guardhouse exterior, a ramshackle construction the place El Turco, his loyal bodyguard, was stationed—and the place Mujica got here to sneak cigarettes out of sight of Lucía, who had forbidden him from smoking. As we chatted, he rolled his personal cigarettes, one after the opposite.
Castro had died a yr earlier, and Mujica reminisced about their final assembly, saying that even on the finish Castro had remained “capable of say issues that wanted to be stated.” Nonetheless, Mujica lamented the ebbing of a revolutionary consciousness in Cuba, the place the socialist society that Castro had tried to construct was disintegrating. “The variety of shoppers has elevated, however not their social conscience,” he stated. “In our time, we thought society might be mechanically modified if we remodeled the connection between manufacturing and distribution—however, by emphasizing that, we relegated the significance of artwork and tradition.” That, he stated, had been a profound mistake.
The left had failed, its power changed by that of worldwide capitalism. This was a actuality that needed to be acknowledged, as a result of it posed large issues for humanity, Mujica stated. “The altering nature of society, the expansion of globalized transnational company energy, and worldwide finance have introduced insecurity to the center lessons,” he stated. “The modifications in locations like Detroit, due to new applied sciences, meant that these individuals have been very susceptible to protectionist and racist messages—‘It’s the fault of the Blacks, the Mexicans’—which generate the worst sorts of egocentrism.” In consequence, he stated, “you see the rise of reactionary politics, the hypernationalism: Germany for Germans, or no matter.”
He felt as strongly as ever that capitalism couldn’t completely feed the soul. “Humanity has been overwhelmed by a sort of civilization that has as its epicenter the market,” he stated. “Every thing now depends upon the success of the market, from the technique of manufacturing to the dangers to the ecological stability.” Up to date society was adrift, he went on. “It wants a political administration which it can not have, as a result of the market, and never a social conscience, is its driving power.”
This previous September, I went to see Mujica for the final time, within the cluttered, book-lined entrance room of his farmhouse. He sat in a simple chair and wore an outsized black cardigan in opposition to the winter chill. The room was warmed by an outdated wood-fired heater. He and Lucía and I spoke about every thing from the “narcissism” of selfie-obsessed trendy society to the phenomenon of immigration and, as ever, the obvious collapse of the political left and the rise of the intense proper.
Mujica hardly ever criticized his fellow-leftists in public, however he was privately vital of these, corresponding to Daniel Ortega and Nicolás Maduro, who had turn into more and more dictatorial lately, and he expressed concern about autocratic polices and human-rights abuses in Cuba and different international locations. “Usually, those that lead governments fall in love with energy,” he stated. “They don’t need to depart it, they usually don’t put together for a succession. They flip the love of energy right into a raison d’état, which is insane.”
