He dreams of being able to pay his bills, until one day, his heart stops." “We are poor people,” Almirón told me with a note of defiance, “but we are people at the end of the day.”, One of the weightiest responsibilities a president holds is the ability to characterize, by speech and example, his society and the meaning of the lives that are in his charge. Growing up in the poor and remote section of his native country, he had a difficult start in life. She had started saving for those beds. We are aware—sometimes directly, sometimes only vaguely—of the constraints leaders now face. Mujica, now in his twenties and rapidly rising in Uruguay’s left-wing political world, joined their crusade. Almirón had never considered this. In the end, though, the Tupamaros helped bring about a right-wing order far more hellish than the one they had protested. Progressives, in particular, long for leaders actually living their values. His heart thrilled in his chest; it felt like a physical enchantment. The nation's founders declared schooling a tool for "unity," and few parents historically sent their kids to private schools other than for religious reasons. Or they have been blurry. "His idea," Gerardo Caetano, Uruguay's foremost historian of the Batlle era, explained to me, was that "you can't have liberty without equality." The guerrillas bombed a Bayer plant in 1965 and held and tortured hostages in a makeshift jail euphemistically christened the "People's Prison." "We are poor people," Almirón told me with a note of defiance, "but we are people at the end of the day." She works at a slaughterhouse and has barely enough to get by. Over the phone, Naím and I spoke about a recent trip I took to Israel, where I’d been struck by how much conservatives’ complaints about Benjamin Netanyahu—that he’d been unable to turn his country from a polity riven by fissures and self doubt into a united community confident of its moral purpose—echoed the Uruguayan progressives’ language critiquing Mujica. Purportedly to preserve order, President Juan María Bordaberry in 1973 instituted a military dictatorship and locked up the rebels for good. The current President of Uruguay, José Mujica, is known as a champion of the poor and sets an example for citizens of Uruguay by living modestly. And that, two education specialists told me, was more than Mujica and his schools minister—a distrusted, low-profile former Tupamaro— could manage. Inequality and poverty climbed in Uruguay in the early 2000s, and the proudly anti-materialistic country is developing a taste for high-end brands. Mujica did win some acclaim for the passage of laws legalizing abortion and regulating the sale of marijuana. The president of Uruguay used to rob banks. “He believes everyone has the right to a home with dignity,” Almirón said. Seeing a man who looked like them and lived like them—who even invited them to barbecues at his commune—occupying the land’s highest office had made them feel human again. On YouTube, the U.N. speech raced past a million views. Prior to Pepe's rise, Uruguayans' enduring suspicion of the group might have made such an idea unthinkable. Instead, I followed a gravel path off the main road as it turned to dirt, then mud. “But Mujica isn’t too worried about the legal aspects of things.”. It's so rare that politicians say anything that feels real. Within a few years, Batlle had built perhaps the most perfectly rendered socialist society the world has ever seen. It led past some of the most derelict houses I’d ever seen, one made of old “for sale” signs. For post-dictatorship Uruguay, his language was healing, a triumphant return to the country's traditional values of humility and shared responsibility. So is the lesson of Mujica that we should suppress our attraction to charmers and truth-tellers and more rationally choose as our captains tough managers and bloodless wonks? Clad typically in a flannel shirt and Mujica-esque stubble, Rabuffetti commutes an hour a day to Montevideo from his home in a rural village that he shares with his wife and two young children. "I wouldn't say anybody here has been inspired by Mujica to live a simpler life," Daniel Weiss, an architect, told me—happily for him, since his business is to design luxury condo complexes. “Neck is unacceptable,” Mujica told a reporter. Bye Bye Pepe Mujica. Others saw them as heroes, much as Mujica had judged the anarchists growing up. Three? "Even the times he is in silence, some profound expressions cross his face," Garcé remembered. Thanks to his time in prison, he told an Economist interviewer last summer, “I do not hate. His biographer called him “distant and silent.” Two people who’ve worked with Vazquez used the same word when I asked them about him: “Asshole.” He gets things done, but he does not stir the soul. As a young man, Mujica had fought with an anti-capitalist guerrilla movement, then spent more than a decade in prison under the repressive military dictatorship that ruled Uruguay in the 1970s and early ’80s. He taxed big landowners to boost worker's pensions and championed unions. "Like in school, every morning, our leaders in government must be forced to write, 'I will busy myself improving education,' a hundred times," he said. New Audi dealerships are popping up, and mechanics crash online courses to bone up on the expensive imports. Enjoy the best Jose Mujica Quotes at BrainyQuote. From time to time, Pepe would wheel unannounced into Ramos's office and "get excited," unfurling beautiful language about the big changes needed. The poor (and four teachers I spoke with who work with them directly) believe the opposite. Even as she complained about Mujica’s sloppy management and policy failures, she added that Uruguayan society did somehow feel different under Mujica’s tenure. Downhill toward the Rio de la Plata, at the Santa Catalina, a grubby beer hall selling cheap shots and greasy pizzas, you can sometimes find Mujica himself, his gray hair mussed and his gnarled feet clad in beat-up leather sandals, tucking into a humble lunch. He ascended the podium in the United Nations General Assembly hall clutching a sheaf of papers. It's in the mind. "Mujica's legacy, if it exists," Caetano, the historian, told me, "is simply empathy." Swashbuckling local left-wing politicos became his new father figures. You can agree or disagree with former Uruguayan president José Mujica. One in every 500 Uruguayans spent extended time in prison, and one in every 50 endured police interrogation, often accompanied by torture. Mujica parted with 90% of his salary, which earned him the moniker ‘the world’s poorest President’. Mujica wanted Uruguay's public railway utility to operate under private-sector rules to boost efficiency; nothing happened. José Mujica was a Tupamaro, a member of a … There's something wrong with the way we respond to figures like Mujica. Gawker published a piece under the headline “Uruguay Has the President of Your Dreams.” Normally cynical friends of mine, investigative journalists and lawyers, posted articles about Mujica on Facebook with the fawning epithet: “My hero!” On YouTube, the U.N. speech raced past a million views. José Alberto "Pepe" Mujica was born 20 May 1935 in Montevideo Uruguay. But the instant the election is over, these same leaders are judged according to different standards. A 2007 poll showed that he'd become far and away the country's most-liked government official, and he decided to run for president. Mujica is the ultimate such figure. We place our faith in them—fall in love with them—for what they say and the incorporeal impact they have on our national consciousness. In 2005, he inaugurated the first left-wing government since the country’s dictatorship and took great strides toward restoring the Uruguayan social safety net, rebooting Batlle’s national health care system, expanding welfare, and making Uruguay the first nation in the world to fully implement the One Laptop Per Child program. He rarely consults others on political decisions and projects arrogance in his certitude. Three? Other Uruguayans I spoke with said the same thing. But he has done nothing!” Rabuffetti was about to publish a book-length version of his grievance titled José Mujica, La Revolución Tranquila. "If he had taken the opportunity to consult more specialists in law, he wouldn't have failed," said Garcé, the political scientist. He’d asked her a question that had stuck with her ever since, affecting how she thought of herself and her five boys and girls: “Does every child of yours have a mattress of his own?” Almirón had never considered this. The Tupamaros' reputation among the Uruguayan populace was similarly split. He donates 90 percent of his income as president to charities working on housing for the poor and lives on a small farm … Last January, Bill de Blasio took over as mayor of New York City. In this age of rapidly increasing inequality and technological ubiquity, the Armani-clad lizard-beings who run things offer assurances about a state of affairs that is inherently disturbing. He managed these successes thanks to a political persona as authoritarian and charmless as Mujica’s was gaily anarchic and alluring. When his father was crushed by heavy debt, which eventually led to his death, Jose was forced to help his family survive. A former Tupamaros freedom fighter in the 60s and the 70s, he was detained, like a hostage by the dictatorship between 1973 and 1985. Because actual experience tends to reveal the limits of candidates’ power, we’re also drawn to heroes with less and less experience, blank slates onto which we can project our fantasies for change. But this is a countdown against nature, against future humankind,” Mujica thundered. “I agree with absolutely everything Mujica has to say about materialism,” he told me. Over the phone, Naím and I spoke about a recent trip I took to Israel, where I'd been struck by how much conservatives' complaints about Benjamin Netanyahu—that he'd been unable to turn his country from a polity riven by fissures and self doubt into a united community confident of its moral purpose—echoed the Uruguayan progressives' language critiquing Mujica. Uruguay’s public school system has also been effective: The country’s literacy rates far outpaced Argentina’s and Brazil’s throughout the twentieth century. An ambitious leader had free rein to reinvent the country nearly from scratch. His U.N. speech, though, started a global Mujica cult. He does not have much, since, he declares, he does not need much. Here was a president who was not only a living antidote to the culture of materialism—“You don’t stop being a common man just because you are president,” he told the Guardian—but also an extraordinarily eloquent advocate for those same principles, a philosopher king without modern parallel. Several years ago, Rabuffetti did a stint working for Agence France-Presse in Washington. More than a century ago, Uruguay was ruled by another president determined to change the country’s course. Much as American character is still subconsciously shaped by Abraham Lincoln, who imprinted on our national psyche the notion that sacrifice leads inevitably to glory, so is Uruguayan character shaped by Batlle. José Mujica, nicknamed Pepe Mujica, was President of Uruguay from 2010 to 2015. But José Batlle y Ordóñez—popularly known as Batlle, pronounced “BAH-zhay”—fared better. It's a paradox: Under Mujica our society has become much more consumerist than it was before. The relatively rich and the relatively poor live side-by-side, and the signifiers indicating which are which are often blurry. Historically, Uruguay has had the lowest inequality and the most cohesive society in Latin America. “I’m in tears,” one commenter wrote. One of the activists I invited to dinner in Montevideo was a 60-year-old lesbian community organizer. A former revolutionary who still professes anarchist ideals has run Uruguay’s government and its booming economy ever since. He’d retained his childhood egalitarian passions, but prison had made him more philosophical and deepened his rough-hewn physical allure. But they could also be violent. "They have to," a salesman informed me. Across the way, beside an electronics store selling $9,000 HDTVs, the little bookseller was sepulchral, its cashier reclined in his chair, reading a newspaper with that air of a shopkeeper resigned to no business. The Economist recently interviewed José Mujica, Uruguay’s president, at his farmhouse outside Montevideo (see article).Here is an edited transcript of the conversation. He gets things done, but he does not stir the soul. The Uruguayan president worked to reduce inequality without sacrificing economic growth or free speech, and these José Mujica quotes show why he's still revered as a catalyst of change in Latin America and beyond. A billboard exhorting you not to be caught without Ray Ban sunglasses welcomes you to Punta del Este, a resort town teeming with condo developments boasting on-site spas. When he was elected president in 1903, Uruguay still had an underdeveloped central state. Other Uruguayans I spoke with said the same thing. It’s a paradox: Under Mujica our society has become much more consumerist than it was before. But he’s not a good president,” a member of Mujica’s own left-wing political coalition confided to me. A similar lack of political will and strategic savvy doomed another educational reform effort to give more autonomy to the principals of troubled schools to design their own curricula. José Mujica is the president of Uruguay. "Poverty is not in the pocket. From the start he eschewed the normal rites of power. Former Uruguayan leader José Mujica, who was dubbed "the world's poorest president" for … By noticing them, by speaking to them rather than about them, Mujica had reincarnated them. The policymakers and opinion-setters I’d spoken to had been so spittingly certain that Mujica’s presidency had failed Uruguay’s poor. The Uruguayans I spoke to admired Vazquez's efficacy—hence the second term they just extended him. With a ruff of silver hair, Basset Hound eyes, and a smile just on the wrong side of lascivious, Vazquez exudes the unsettling aura of a Mr. Rogers impersonator who performs in porn. Jose Mujica Was Every Liberal's Dream President. With his lanky physique and expressive black eyebrows, Mujica came to represent Tupamaros' romantic side. It offers three degrees, two in “milk production.”. “I want a hero,” Lord Byron begins “Don Juan,” written in 1819. I showed the group a Guardian article calling Mujica "the world's most radical president." He has been called "the world's 'poorest' president" because he donates around 90 percent of his $12,000 monthly salary to charities to help poor people and small … Mujica, now in his twenties and rapidly rising in Uruguay's left-wing political world, joined their crusade. [1] Integró el Movimiento de Liberación Nacional-Tupamaros, del cual fue elegido diputado y senador, para posteriormente ocupar el cargo de ministro de Ganadería, Agricultura y Pesca entre 2005 y 2008. "We have a civilization arrayed against free time that doesn't pay," he cried. He Was Too Good to Be True. When I met a prominent Uruguayan economist, Gabriel Oddone, in his downtown Montevideo office, he apologized before we took our seats in leather-backed chairs for the furnishings being too nice: that's Batlle's influence, the reluctance to show off any possessions that might elevate you above your brethren. “But he doesn’t know how to plan.” Mujica appointed as Ramos’s boss the disinterested son of a former Tupamaro and appeared to forget the issue. Downhill toward the Rio de la Plata, at the Santa Catalina, a grubby beer hall selling cheap shots and greasy pizzas, you can sometimes find Mujica himself, his gray hair mussed and his gnarled feet clad in beat-up leather sandals, tucking into a humble lunch. He told Obama that Americans should smoke less and learn more languages. Much as American character is still subconsciously shaped by Abraham Lincoln, who imprinted on our national psyche the notion that sacrifice leads inevitably to glory, so is Uruguayan character shaped by Batlle. Gawker published a piece under the headline "Uruguay Has the President of Your Dreams." (The fighting eradicated nearly the entire indigenous population, so that modern Uruguayans are overwhelmingly white, descended from Spaniards or Italians.) But if his attire didn't make it clear that his allegiances lay elsewhere, what he was about to say would. It has meant a refusal to make enemies, and a habit of yielding to outside parties who opposed his attempts at reform. Mujica’s biggest fight as agriculture minister was to ensure poor Uruguayans’ access to asado, the traditional dish of beef rib grilled over an open fire. “An uncommon want / When every year and month sends forth a new one, / Till, after cloying the gazettes with cant, / The age discovers he is not the true one ...” So the cycle by which we erect and dismantle saviors isn’t new. "He's always saying he's a fighter, he's a fighter," lamented Rabuffetti. Four? Mujica was wowed. February 6, 2015. He spoke truth to power, and legalized marijuana and abortion. The unilateral move prompted a flurry of outrage about personal liberties, and the Uruguayan legislature could have subsequently overturned it. President Mujica has rejected the use of the presidential palace and chosen to stay living in his house, a small farm on the outskirts of Montevideo. We’re searching for the one figure who can break the binds. His father, a washout in business, died bankrupt when Mujica was eight. Rabuffetti and I left the shopping center and headed toward our next stop, a slum on the city's northwest side. Here was a president who was not only a living antidote to the culture of materialism—"You don't stop being a common man just because you are president," he told the Guardian—but also an extraordinarily eloquent advocate for those same principles, a philosopher king without modern parallel. When some butchers began selling more affordable asado, people lovingly nicknamed it the "asado del Pepe." He Was Too Good to Be True.. “Mujica’s legacy, if it exists,” Caetano, the historian, told me, “is simply empathy.”. Mujica's biggest fight as agriculture minister was to ensure poor Uruguayans' access to asado, the traditional dish of beef rib grilled over an open fire. It’s in the mind. contact@pulitzercenter.org, Jeff Barrus During their twelve-year imprisonment, the Tupamaros’ leaders, a group called The Nine, worried that the experience was leaving Mujica permanently damaged. Rabuffetti was about to publish a book-length version of his grievance titled José Mujica, La Revolución Tranquila. In the months that followed, reporters from The New York Times and Al Jazeera and even a TV crew from South Korea jetted to Uruguay to learn more about this unusual prophet, who received them in the dumpy kitchen he cleans himself. His eyes squinted; his hair looked like it was slicked back with kitchen grease. But the national self- conception always emphasized honoring the working class and valuing the nonmaterial. But when I convened a dinner of artists and activists to talk about his presidency, they refused to give him credit even for those advances. The 45-minute cri de coeur that he delivered before the General Assembly had the astonishing quality of seeming so word-for-word true yet simultaneously so unsayable—so against the ordinary logic and boring jargon of contemporary speeches about world problems—that it was as if somebody had taken a knife and slashed through the flimsy set-painting that serves as the backdrop to our politics, revealing the real, crumbling world behind it. Then we lash out at them when they inevitably fall short. Worse, he said, Mujica also had done little to alleviate inequality in concrete ways. As the candidate of the Broad Front, he won the 2009 presidential electionand took office a… With the Second World War and the Korean War over, the global demand for Uruguay’s agricultural exports crashed. Rheumy-eyed cats padded listlessly through runnels of sewage. As the group readjusted to freedom, most of its members wanted to avoid returning to guerrilla warfare, though what course to pursue instead was unclear—right-wingers still maintained control over much of the government. At the end of a hopscotch course of puddles sat a little shack owned by a woman named Pilar Almirón. And with his tenure ending in March—Uruguay prohibits consecutive presidential terms, and a successor is set to take over—he also presents an ideal test case for how such leadership bears out in practice. They called themselves the Tupamaros, after a Peruvian indigenous rebel named Tupac Amaru II. Most U.N. speeches are pure boilerplate. It’s so rare that politicians say anything that feels real. This austere lifestyle - and the fact that Mujica donates about 90% of his monthly salary, equivalent to $12,000 (£7,500), to charity - has led him to be labelled the poorest president in the world. That it mattered when Obama said the seven little words “Trayvon Martin … could have been my son,” just as it mattered that he then failed to speak as powerfully post-Ferguson. He took this sense of toughness with him when he joined an armed revolutionary group. When Vazquez decided to ban smoking in public buildings—“something that was really important for him as an oncologist,” Rabuffetti, the journalist, said—he didn’t involve Congress at first. Shot six times by the police in a bar, he was thrown into prison and broke out twice—once by convincing a schizophrenic inmate kept near a potential tunnel site that he was an alien god come to burrow to the underworld. "I agree with absolutely everything Mujica has to say about materialism," he told me. Within a few years, Batlle had built perhaps the most perfectly rendered socialist society the world has ever seen. “He’s always saying he’s a fighter, he’s a fighter,” lamented Rabuffetti. They invite us to see ourselves differently, to open ourselves to a new way of being. Today, there's the global financial system, which demands that presidents attract corporate investment—driving materialism—so their countries remain economically stable. His knuckles blanched around the car's steering wheel. It was the barrio I drove around in with Rabuffetti, and this time, I didn't just pass through. Unable to afford the meat, the lower classes often ate less expensive cuts off the neck. Mujica became famous – and beloved in some circles – for the modest lifestyle he maintained while president. Love, in his own telling, is Mujica’s default setting. An oncologist, he preceded Mujica as president and will succeed him again come March. He made health care a universal right and university education free; the country's literacy rate soared to 95 percent. "But Mujica isn't too worried about the legal aspects of things." Prison warders did subtly sadistic things like screen the first 89 minutes of a soccer game and then cut off the feed before the final whistle. Swashbuckling local left-wing politicos became his new father figures. As president, that has meant giving every member of his team a hearing and making them feel good about their ideas, to hurt nobody with his words. By noticing them, by speaking to them rather than about them, Mujica had reincarnated them. Across the way, beside an electronics store selling $9,000 HDTVs, the little bookseller was sepulchral, its cashier reclined in his chair, reading a newspaper with that air of a shopkeeper resigned to no business. "He's a wonderful person. An old, modest man, and a dreamer. The guerrillas came first. Some anarcho-syndicalists working in a butchery near Mujica's house were so bold that they held up their employer's delivery trucks, seized the meat, and distributed it to the poor. It offers three degrees, two in "milk production." "An uncommon want / When every year and month sends forth a new one, / Till, after cloying the gazettes with cant, / The age discovers he is not the true one ..." So the cycle by which we erect and dismantle saviors isn't new. A stout, feathery-mustached idealist and the scion of a political family, Batlle spent time as a young man working as a journalist in left-wing Paris. Others saw them as heroes, much as Mujica had judged the anarchists growing up. The poor (and four teachers I spoke with who work with them directly) believe the opposite. … It wasn’t supposed to be like this.”. But this is a countdown against nature, against future humankind," Mujica thundered. "So his failure here is something that's very hard to understand—and hard to forgive." Historically, Uruguay has had the lowest inequality and the most cohesive society in Latin America. I spent a couple of days touring lower-income schools and neighborhoods, and the view of Mujica I encountered was as different as the view of a city from street level versus looking down from atop a skyscraper: Everyone, without exception, believed Mujica had improved their lives. He howled at noises that weren't there and obsessed over procuring a tiny portable toilet for his cell. Batlle’s Uruguayans made money, thanks to the world’s demand for their exports of meat and wool. He tried to pass a new tax on the big landowners to help the poor, but failed to ensure that the legislation would be constitutional. “When New York City Democrats head to the polls ... they will have a once-in-a-generation opportunity to rewrite the narrative of their city ... Mayor de Blasio might have a real chance to begin stitching the city’s tattered social contract back together,” the Nation effused in its August 2013 endorsement. He never got very far past the writing. Eduardo Galeano, the world- famous writer, loves the shabby-chic Café Brasilero on Montevideo's Ituzaingó Street. The clues to both Mujica's wild appeal and the disappointments of his actual leadership lie in his biography. But when I asked Graciela Bianchi, a school-reform activist and former Mujica supporter turned critic and opposition parliamentarian, what had led her to turn against him, she sniffed, "He's a bar philosopher." We're searching for the one figure who can break the binds. We acknowledge this when we feel that it mattered that George W. Bush failed to visit New Orleans for two weeks after Hurricane Katrina. It didn’t take long for the backlash to start: protests in the streets over Eric Garner, the police union snubbing and work slowdown. Some anarcho-syndicalists working in a butchery near Mujica’s house were so bold that they held up their employer’s delivery trucks, seized the meat, and distributed it to the poor. Seven years after Batlle passed away in 1929, Pepe—Mujica's lifelong nickname—was born to a poor second-generation family descended from Basque and Ligurian immigrants. "Now let's count how many cell phone stores we can see, standing right here. But it only took a day or two before the Mujica myth began to come apart. She gave Mujica credit for both interventions: Living in elective poverty himself, he appreciates the importance of something seemingly as simple as a clean place to keep one’s clothes. You can be poor in the pocket but still have your honor.” Mujica’s mission, in such remarks, was to protect the self-worth that even Uruguay’s least well-off have treasured for a century in Uruguay, so easily assaulted by the infiltrating billboards and their message that only those who can afford that new phone or that new car have value at all.
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