José “Pepe” Mujica has not used much for the presidential residence of three floors of Uruguay, with his chandeliers, his furniture of chandeliers, elevator, marble and Louis XV.
“It’s shit,” he said last year. “They should make it a high school.”
Thus, when he became president of his little South American nation in 2010, Mr. Mujica decided that he was going from his home: a hut crowded with three rooms the size of a studio, filled with a wood stove, over-hired libraries and pots of stripping vegetables.
Before His death TuesdayMr. Mujica has lived there for decades with His longtime partnerLucía Topolansky – herself an old vice -president – and their three -legged dog, Manuela. They cultivated chrysanthemums for sale in local markets and led their 1987 Blue Volkswagen Beetle in their favorite tango bars.
It was a political master stroke. Its presidency failed to achieve all its economic objectives. But his austere lifestyle made him venerated by many Uruguayans to live like them, while giving him a platform in the international press to warn that the eroded greed. He insisted that it was really the way he wanted to live, but he also recognized that it was used to illustrate that politicians had long been too good.
“We have done everything possible to make the presidency less revered,” Mujica told my predecessor of the New York Times in South America, Simon Romero,, In 2013Sharing with him a gourd of companion, the plant drink has spent back and forth in this part of the world.
I visited Mr. Mujica in his same house last year. It was grouped in a winter coat and a woolen hat in front of a wood stove, fragile and barely capable of eating as a result of radiotherapy treatment for a tumor in its esophagus. But faced with a journalist who could spread his ideas to the world for perhaps one of the last times, he held the court for almost two hours, explaining how to find a goal and a beauty in life and how, he told me without problem: “Humanity, as and when, is condemned.”
He also explained why he believed that the external signs of the elected office – the palaces, the servants, luxury jets – were the opposite of what democracy was supposed to be.
“The cultural remains of feudalism remain-inside the Republic. The red carpet, the fugles when the feudal lord came out of the castle on the bridge. Everything remains,” he said. “The president likes to be congratulated.”
He recalled a visit to Germany when he was president. “They put me in a Mercedes-Benz. The door weighed around 3,000 kilos. They put 40 motorcycles in front and 40 others in the back,” he said. “I was ashamed.”
The international press nicknamed him the “poorest president” in the world, noting that his net value was $ 1,800 when he took office. Mr. Mujica hated the nickname and often quoted the philosopher of the Roman court Seneca: “It is not the man who has too little, but the man who wants more, it is poor.”
It would be difficult to find a more striking contrast with President Trump, who brought a golden life to life at the heart of his identity. In our interview, three months before the elections, Mr. Mujica spoke several times Mr. Trump. “It looks like a lie-a country like the United States with a candidate like Trump,” he said. “Democracy at the top of a doormat.”
Mr. Mujica entered politics in the 1960s as left guerrillas as the crow flies. His group, the Tupamaros, gained notoriety for their violence. Mujica said they tried to avoid harming civilians, but added that the left struggle sometimes needed a force.
After escaping prison twice, he was imprisoned for 14 years under the military dictatorship of Uruguay, a large part of his sentence dedicated to isolation. Trapped in a hole in the ground, he said, he became friends A little frog To survive psychologically.
He was released while Uruguay restored democracy and was finally elected to Congress, attracting attention to be presented to work on a Vespa. In 2009, Voters did it president of the nation of 3.3 million.
Under M. Mujica, Uruguay has decriminalized abortion, legalized in homosexual marriage, pushed in renewable energy and has become the first nation to fully legalize marijuana. However, many of its objectives, as considerably reducing inequalities and improving education, have been victims of the realities of politics.
But while the news of his death spread on Tuesday, people around the world did not remember him for his policies. It was his humility which was his inheritance.
Earlier this year, his political protégé, a former history teacher named Yamandú Orsi, took office as a new president of Uruguay. He commissioned to work from his family home, and the presidential manor of Uruguay remained above all empty.