Pepe Mujica’s Long Revolution

Mujica was given a diagnosis of esophageal cancer in the spring of 2024, and the final few months of his life were an extended farewell, as old friends, reporters, and heads of state came to see him for a last time. Mujica received his guests alongside his wife of many years—Lucía Topolansky, an ex-guerrilla who later served as Vice-President—in their dilapidated farmhouse, a tin-roofed, single-story structure off a dirt road outside Montevideo. The Brazilian President, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, was among the visitors. “He was aware that he didn’t have much time left,” Lula told me recently. “But it wasn’t a problem. He had already made history.”
I first met Mujica in Havana, in the mid-nineties, at the home of an old revolutionary in the Miramar neighborhood. I was conducting research for a biography of Che Guevara, and Mujica had known him—they were fellow-partisans in the revolutionary ferment of the sixties. As a young man, Mujica had joined a Marxist urban guerrilla group known as the Tupamaros, whose campaigns were met with vicious repression by Uruguay’s military dictatorship.
Mujica spoke to me about the time he attended a nocturnal meeting between Guevara and the Tupamaro leader Raúl Sendic, in a safe house outside Montevideo. Guevara was travelling in disguise, en route from Cuba to Bolivia. As Mujica told it, he was there to ask for help from Sendic’s guerrillas. In addition to a fake Uruguayan passport and other logistical support, Guevara wanted the Tupamaros to commit to a continental guerrilla struggle that he proposed to ignite—the only way, he suggested, to overcome their class enemies. “He wasn’t mistaken,” Mujica said. “We were very aware, because of the dimensions of Uruguay and the context of that time, that we had to be part of something bigger.”
A year later, Guevara died leading a guerrilla uprising in Bolivia. Though he did not succeed in forging Latin American unity, Mujica held on to the goal. “You know, the notion of ‘continentality’ goes much deeper than just sparking off guerrilla wars throughout Latin America,” he told me. “We Latin Americans came late to the advent of modern capitalism and continue to be distant from it. If we don’t find some way to integrate ourselves, as the poor countries of the region, then we are condemned to be dependent” on the rich industrialized countries of the North.
The fight for political change was fierce, at least at the beginning. As a member of the Tupamaros, Mujica participated in battles and sustained wounds. He was captured several times, and once took part in a dramatic prison escape. In the end, though, he and a handful of others were recaptured and held hostage by Uruguay’s military, in a bid to break the back of the insurgency. Mujica was imprisoned for thirteen years, much of it in a solitary underground cell—an experience that nearly drove him mad.
The Tupamaros formally disarmed after the end of the dictatorship, in 1985. Mujica emerged from prison and, in 1994, embarked on a political career in Uruguay’s restored democracy. He served as a parliamentary deputy, as a senator, as a cabinet minister, and finally, from 2010 to 2015, as President. Even then, he refused to move from his farmhouse into the Presidential residence, and donated a large majority of his salary to charity. He drove to work in his sky-blue 1987 Volkswagen Beetle.
Mujica never budged from his left-wing views, and he expressed solidarity with the region’s other leftist Presidents—veterans including Fidel Castro, Hugo Chávez, and Lula, and later such newcomers as Chile’s Gabriel Boric and Mexico’s Claudia Sheinbaum. But he was also a pragmatist, able to engage with domestic political adversaries and with foreign leaders to his right. He was sometimes likened to Nelson Mandela, that other legendary political prisoner of the Cold War, who similarly spent his postwar life working to reconcile his countrymen and extolling the virtues of nonviolence. In our first meeting, I asked Mujica how he had managed to come out of prison without wanting to seek revenge. “I had comrades who used their power to settle scores,” he said. “But I fought myself not to do that, because I realized it would just create more obstacles. I had to decide what the priority was—the future or the past. It’s not about forgetting the past, but, if you concentrate on it to the extent that it kills your future, then you’ve failed.”
I visited Mujica’s farmhouse in 2017, and met him at the guardhouse outside, a ramshackle structure where El Turco, his loyal bodyguard, was stationed—and where Mujica came to sneak cigarettes out of sight of Lucía, who had forbidden him from smoking. As we chatted, he rolled his own cigarettes, one after the other.
Castro had died a year earlier, and Mujica reminisced about their last meeting, saying that even at the end Castro had remained “able to say things that needed to be said.” Still, Mujica lamented the ebbing of a revolutionary consciousness in Cuba, where the socialist society that Castro had tried to build was disintegrating. “The number of consumers has increased, but not their social conscience,” he said. “In our time, we thought society could be automatically changed if we transformed the relationship between production and distribution—but, by emphasizing that, we relegated the importance of art and culture.” That, he said, had been a profound mistake.
The left had failed, its energy replaced by that of global capitalism. This was a reality that had to be acknowledged, because it posed huge problems for humanity, Mujica said. “The changing nature of society, the growth of globalized transnational corporate power, and international finance have brought insecurity to the middle classes,” he said. “The changes in places like Detroit, because of new technologies, meant that those people were very vulnerable to protectionist and racist messages—‘It’s the fault of the Blacks, the Mexicans’—which generate the worst kinds of egocentrism.” As a result, he said, “you see the rise of reactionary politics, the hypernationalism: Germany for Germans, or whatever.”
He felt as strongly as ever that capitalism could not entirely feed the soul. “Humanity has been overwhelmed by a type of civilization that has as its epicenter the market,” he said. “Everything now depends on the success of the market, from the means of production to the risks to the ecological balance.” Contemporary society was adrift, he went on. “It needs a political administration which it cannot have, because the market, and not a social conscience, is its driving force.”
This past September, I went to see Mujica for the last time, in the cluttered, book-lined front room of his farmhouse. He sat in an easy chair and wore an oversized black cardigan against the winter chill. The room was warmed by an old wood-fired heater. He and Lucía and I spoke about everything from the “narcissism” of selfie-obsessed modern society to the phenomenon of immigration and, as ever, the apparent collapse of the political left and the rise of the extreme right.
Mujica rarely criticized his fellow-leftists in public, but he was privately critical of those, such as Daniel Ortega and Nicolás Maduro, who had become increasingly dictatorial in recent years, and he expressed concern about autocratic polices and human-rights abuses in Cuba and other countries. “Often, those who lead governments fall in love with power,” he said. “They don’t want to leave it, and they don’t prepare for a succession. They turn the love of power into a raison d’état, which is insane.”
He pointed out that he was nearly ninety, and not far from death. “Biology is not something you can appeal. You can’t go against nature,” he told me. “I am very aware that a political succession must be created and cultivated intellectually, and not be left as a trauma for future generations.” He had taken care to cultivate younger leaders in his own party in Uruguay, and was happy that it had found an enduring place in a politically diverse coalition. “Now, what happens after I am gone, who knows?” he said. “But at least they are prepared to go on.” One of Mujica’s last public appearances was on March 1st, at the inauguration of the country’s new President, Yamandú Orsi, whose candidacy he had supported.
Latin American leaders I spoke with told me that Mujica left an enduring legacy. “His life will continue to linger in the air,” Lula said. “And I hope that many young people find in Pepe Mujica the inspiration to do politics.” One of his most successful protégés is Boric, Chile’s young President. “Pepe was a guiding light,” he wrote to me, flying back from a state visit to Japan. “Through his own example, he showed that one achieves nothing through superficial voluntarism, empty arrogance, and hatred for those who think differently. He demonstrated that forward paths can be found by forging unity between progressive forces, and that permanent changes in society can also be achieved through moderate steps. I felt him to be a brother and a comrade. He also repeated to me that happiness is only real when it is shared. That is not something one forgets.”
It is a philosophy that sustained Mujica to the end. On my final visit with him, he told me, “As humans, we love ourselves too much, and at times that dominates us. I believe that we need to look hard at everything we have done and where we are today, and we must have the intellectual courage to acknowledge the contradictions posed by the world around us. But we cannot give up and decide that what we once sought is no longer possible. No! I think humanity can build a better world than it has done and do so deliberately, even though achieving the impossible always requires a little more effort. Because, if we lose our ability to have faith, what is the point of life?” ♦