Uruguay's José Mujica: the 'humble' leader with grand ideas
Uruguay's José Mujica: the 'humble' leader with grand ideas
Interview with the former Marxist guerrilla turned president, who shares his views on same-sex marriage, drugs and abortion
Nicolas Bourcier and Christine Legrand
Guardian Weekly, Tuesday 27 May 2014 08.11 EDT
For many years he would go to bed early listening to what ants whispered in his ear. Sometimes he would chat with a frog or two, maybe share a hunk of bread with some rats. José Mujica, aka Pépé, is a survivor from a world he himself wiped off the map. A former leader of the Marxist Tupamaros, the country's main guerrilla group, he spent 13 years in prison under the military dictatorship in Uruguay, which held power from 1973 to 1985. Then he turned over a new leaf and devoted his efforts to restoring democracy.
In November 2009 he was elected president, polling 53% of the vote. "Locked up, I almost went mad," he says. "Now I'm a prisoner of my own freedom to think and decide as I wish. I cultivate that freedom and fight for it. I may make mistakes, some huge, but one of my few virtues is I say what I think."
To see him today, now aged 78, sitting on his wooden chair, surrounded by books and silence, a pair of sandals on his feet and a bust of Che Guevara opposite him, you might take Mujica for some Latino Diogenes, a benevolent patriarch, the last man on Earth and obviously indignant. He is also one of the few people to have experienced nothingness, spending two years' captivity at the bottom of a well.
He describes himself as a "humble peasant", meeting us at his small farm out in the countryside, about half an hour's drive from Montevideo. He speaks of himself and his native Uruguay in the first person plural: "We are a republican voice for the world." By which, one supposes, he means a possible future, a path, however modest, to take for the common good with politics as its ethical base and honesty as its guiding light. "I re-read Plato in search of keys to understand what is going on, for nothing is completely new," he explains. A very personal way of recalling the warning he issued to the United Nations general assembly in September 2013: "Politics, which should rule human relations, has succumbed to economics and become a mere administrator of what the financial system does not control."
The international media have described him as "the most incredible politician" or indeed "the best leader in the world". Some have suggested he should win the next Nobel peace prize. He is also thought to be the world's poorest president, because he gives almost 90% of his income to low-income housing organisations. He is not very keen on such labels. "My definition of poverty is the one we owe to Seneca: It is not the man who has too little, but the man who craves more, who is poor."
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http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/may/27/jose-mujica-uruguay-maverick-president