Photo taken from: news
We thought it was going to be eternal. No one has had his greatness, his detachment, his honesty. All the glory is summed up in her freedom to grow flowers on her farm on the outskirts of Montevideo where she lives with her partner Lucía Topolanski, drinking mate, singing over and over again the tangos she learned in the defeats. her. “Only a man who has lost knows the beauty of tango” She once told the filmmaker Emir Kusturica. This Monday, April 29, the Popular Participation Movement, the MPP, to which it belongs, announced a press conference. The news was not the best. Pepe, at 88 years old, has esophageal cancer that is difficult to treat. We immediately felt like orphans throughout Latin America.
Few leaders on this battered continent have had his honesty. While he was president, Mujica donated 70% of his monthly salary to help build houses for those who had nothing.
When Tabaré Vásquez, his disciple and who was his minister of livestock, agriculture and fisheries and also the man who spoke in his ear, became president of Uruguay, 39% of its inhabitants lived in poverty. The figure was lowered, ten years later, to 9%. But Pepe was more concerned about the moral problems that the world had than the economic indicators. One of them, the greed of the rich. Have you ever been asked what would he do if he had the 85 billion dollars that Carlos Slim has? And he responded, bitingly, “I would do what he does, find out who is robbing me.” After the obligatory laughter of the answer, with greater seriousness, he stated that he would worry about saving the world, bringing salt water to the middle of the Sahara, creating rivers in dry Mongolia taking advantage of the thaw in Africa, making the wild landscape of Patagonia.
No matter the ideology, Pepe is respected even by the fiercest politicians on the right. This respect is such that even Milei, always given to reaction, remained silent when Mujica expressed, after his incongruous and dangerous speech in Davos, that he was a “fanatical ideologue.” Pepe was a guerrilla. He belonged to the Tupamaros guerrilla movement since 1965 and says, with his usual self-confidence, that he participated in military actions such as robbing banks. “The only way to be respected in a bank is to walk in with a nine millimeter in your hand,” he says with his usual dark humor. He never killed anyone, but in a confrontation with law enforcement he was shot six times. Fifty years ago, half of his lungs were removed due to those shots. The other shots were in the legs, in the arms. They caught him and put him in jail. To say jail is an understatement. The civil-military dictatorship of Uruguay had the audacity to call hostages the political prisoners that it placed in that torture center that was Punta Carretas, today converted into an elegant shopping center.
He was imprisoned for 13 years, from 1972 to 1985. There he was subjected to unspeakable torture. When he was released he didn’t hate anyone. He was a senator, a minister and later an exemplary president, famous for driving his own car, a light blue beetle that became a symbol. When he was president of his country, he would go out to drink wine at any bar and there he would meet opponents with whom he would argue passionately, as if he were just another neighbor. “You cannot rule as if you were a king, democracy in these countries looks like a monarchy, everything is done with red carpets, with elegance. “You have to live like a normal person and set an example.”
Far from any type of resentment, revenge, Mujica governed for everyone and left when he had to leave, when his five-year term of government was completed, in 2015. One of the few things he regrets was not having had children. For this reason, his farm on the outskirts of Montevideo will be left to an association of farmers who became accustomed to working his land. He was always the same, self-confident, unique, far from the excesses, the megalomania of so many left-wing presidents.
With his usual naturalness, as if he were talking about growing flowers, he announced the following: Last Friday I went to Casmu (Assistance Center of the Medical Union of Uruguay) to have a check-up, as a result of which it was discovered that I have a tumor in the esophagus” and realistically did not give his followers much hope: “It is obviously something very committed. It is doubly complex in my case because I have suffered from an immunological disease for more than 20 years that affected, among other things, my kidneys.”
The sadness that his partner, Lucia Topolanski, must have is the same as that of the millions of followers that he leaves scattered around the world. Pepe goes off. Life must go on.