José Mujica became the antithesis of a caudillo

A frugal authenticity was one factor that turned Mr Mujica into a global icon

It is not a flashy country and José Mujica, who died on May 13th aged 89, became its epitome. As Uruguay’s president from 2010 to 2015 he continued to drive a battered sky-blue Volkswagen Beetle and to lunch in workaday bars on the main street of Montevideo, the capital. Foreign dignitaries or journalists who sought an audience usually had to trek out to his scrabbly farm with its three-roomed house of grey concrete where he lived for the last 40 years of his life. He often dressed in a fleece and tracksuit. He gave away much of his presidential salary. If it was partly a theatrical act, almost a caricature, it was one he lived to the full. He had a deep and genuine hatred of pomp and flummery, which he saw as inimical to the egalitarian principles of a democratic republic.

As Uruguay’s president from 2010 to 2015, Jose Mujica continued to drive a battered sky-blue Volkswagen Beetle and to lunch in workaday bars on the main street of Montevideo, the capital. (X/Cultura Inquieta)(Cultura Inquieta)

This frugal authenticity was one factor that turned Mr Mujica into a global icon, especially for those uncomfortable with a voracious and environmentally predatory consumer society. Another was his extraordinary life story, for the journey to the presidency had been long, tortuous and hard. The son of a florist and of a smallholder farmer who died when he was six, at 29 he joined the Tupamaros, an urban guerrilla group inspired by Che Guevara and the Cuban revolution. They were fond of Robin Hood stunts such as robbing supermarkets to distribute food to the poor. Mr Mujica was hit by six bullets when he and three comrades exchanged fire with police who had found them in a bar. He was imprisoned for a total of 14 years (he twice escaped), ten of them in solitary confinement, two at the bottom of a well with only ants and mice for company.

Far from fighting for democracy as leftist myth holds, Mr Mujica and the Tupamaros fought to extinguish it in what had long been a peaceful country. In that they succeeded: in response to guerrilla violence, the armed forces staged a coup in 1973 and ruled for 12 years. At least incarceration gave Mr Mujica time to think, which he said he did a lot (as well as “listening to the ants”, he added).

He emerged a changed man. Though he never made an explicit self-criticism of his guerrilla past, his actions offered one. He became a parliamentarian and a minister (of agriculture), accepting the market economy, foreign investment and liberal democracy—“and I have to make it work as well as I can,” he told The Economist. The “enormous advantages” of democracy, he concluded, were that “it doesn’t believe itself to be finished or perfect” and its tolerance of disagreement. Because of that and because of the suffering he underwent, Uruguayans pardoned his past.

A third factor in his fame he owed to Uruguay. It is a secular, progressive country, one of the first to establish a welfare state. Younger members of Mr Mujica’s coalition drew on that tradition to propose new rights. As president he legalised cannabis, abortion and gay marriage.

Unlike other Latin American leftist leaders, such as Rafael Correa in Ecuador or, more recently, Gustavo Petro in Colombia, he did not try to “refound” his country. Nor did he try to rewrite the rules, in contrast to Claudia Sheinbaum in Mexico with her espousal of elected judges. When Uruguay’s courts knocked down six of his government’s laws, he accepted it without criticism.

He was not particularly good at governing. He tried and failed to reform a deteriorating education system dominated by an over-mighty trade union. He was good at talking. With a twinkle in his small, penetrating eyes, he enjoyed the cut and thrust of argument. Above all, he was not vindictive, not even against his jailers. “I don’t hate,” he said. “Can you imagine the luxury it is not to hate?” He disappointed his own supporters by rejecting attempts to put the dictators on trial. “Justice has the stink of vengeance,” he insisted. In that he was in tune with majority opinion in his country.

He retained a vestigial, if misplaced, loyalty to the Cuban regime (he acted as a discreet messenger between Barack Obama and Raúl Castro when the two negotiated a diplomatic thaw between their countries). But in practice he had evolved into a social democrat, one who mistrusted extreme positions. He came to believe that the key to a lasting change in material conditions was to change cultural attitudes and that was harder and took longer. Ironically, perhaps, for a former Marxist, he became a tribune for anti-materialism, at least up to a point. He invited young people to live modestly because “the more you have the less happy you are”.

In a region not known for it, he was self-deprecating. “I dedicated myself to changing the world and I didn’t change anything, but it was amusing and gave sense to my life,” he said in one of his final interviews last year. His lasting legacy to the Latin American left was that he became the antithesis of a caudillo.