Pepe Mujica, the Former Uruguayan President, Removed the Pomp from Politics

José “Pepe” Mujica did not have much use for the three -story presidential residence of Uruguay, with his candlesticks, elevator, marble staircase and furniture of Louis XV.

“It’s shit,” he told me last year. “They should make it a high school.”

Then, when he became president of his small South American nation in 2010, Mr. Mujica decided that he would travel from his home: a hut of three bedrooms the size of a study, full of a legury, overload shelves and vegetable collection bottles.

Before his death on Tuesday, Mujica lived there for decades with his lifelong partner, Lucía Topolansky-Hestelf, former vice president and his three-legged dog, Manuela. They cultivated chrysanthemums to sell in the local markets and carried their Volkswagen Beetle from Sky Blue 1987 to their favorite tango bars.

It was a political master blow. His presidency failed to achieve all his economic objectives. But his austere lifestyle made him revered by many Uruguayans for living like them, while giving him a platform in the international press to warn that greed was eroding society. He insisted that it really was how he wanted to live, but also acknowledged that he served to illustrate that politicians had him 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 2013, sharing with him a pumpkin or partner, the Herbal drink passed from one side to another about the conversation in this part of the world.

I visited Mr. Mujica in the same house last year. It was included in a winter coat and a wool hat in front of a wooden stove, fragile and barely capable of eating as results of radiation treatment for a tumor in its esophagus. But facing a journalist who could spread his ideas to the world for perhaps one of recent times, Hey celebrated the Court for almost two hours, exposing about how to find a purpose and beauty in life and how, he told me that he was not foreseen. “

He also explained why he believed that the traps of the position chosen, the palaces, the servants, the luxury planes, were the opposite of what was supposed to be democracy.

“The cultural remains of feudism remain within the Republic. The red carpet, the bugles when the feudal man left the castle to the bridge. Everything that remains,” he said. “The president likes to be praised.”

He remembered a visit to Germany while he was president. “They put me in a Mercedes-Benz. He with a weight of about 3,000 kilos. They put 40 motorcycles in front and another 40 on the back,” he said. “I was ashamed.”

The international press was nicknamed the “poorest president” in the world, noting that his net assets were $ 1,800 when Toks. Mr. Mujica detest the nickname often cited the philosopher of the Roman Court Seneca: “He is not the man who has very little, but the man who longs for him, that is for.”

It would be difficult to find a more surprising contrast with President Trump, who has made living a life of grace in the center of his identity. In our interview, three months before the elections, Mujica repeatedly mentioned Trump. “It looks like a lie, a country like the United States that has a candidate like Trump,” he said. “Democracy in the apogee of A”.

Mr. Mujica entered politics in the 1960s as a leftist guerrillas that extends by a bank. His group, Tupamaros, gained notoriety for his violence. Mr. Mujica said they tried to avoid damaging civilians, but added that the leftist struggle sometimes required strength.

After escaping from the prison twice, he was imprisoned for 14 years under the military dictatorship of UUGUAY, much of his sentence spent on solitary confinement. Trapped in a hole in the ground, he said, he nicknamed the rats and a small frog to survive psychological.

He was released as Uruguay reidentified democracy and was possible chosen for Congress, calling attention to present to work in a Vespa. In 2009, voters made him president of the Nation of 3.3 million.

Under Mr. Mujica, Uruguay decriminalized abortion, legalized same -sex marriage, pushed renewable energy and became the first nation to completely legalize marijuana. However, many of its objectives, such as the significant reduction of inequality and the improvement of education, were victims of the realities of politics.

But as the news of his death spread on Tuesday, people from all over the world remembered him not for his policies. It was his humility that was his legacy.

Earlier this year, his protected politician, a former history teacher, Namandú Orsi, assumed the position of New President of Uruguay. He has traveled to work from his family home, and the presidential mansion of Uruguay has remained empty.