Who Was Pepe Mujica?

José Alberto Mujica Cordano, called “Pepe” from a young age, was born in 1934 on a small farm west of Montevideo. In the 1940s, rural poverty in Uruguay was extreme. Before the future president reached age six, his father died, and his family lost its farm. Mujica grew up on the geographic and political margins of a country that would see its booming wartime economy quickly crumble as a rebuilding Europe focused inward and no longer demanded the agricultural products of the Southern Cone.

In the north of Uruguay, the cañeros — sugarcane plantation workers — endured cruel working conditions and, during the economic downturn, were reduced to famine. The frustrated unionization drive of these workers, combined with the victory of the Cuban Revolution in 1959, radicalized a young Mujica. He soon broke from his early activism in the youth wing of the traditionalist Partido Nacional, one of Uruguay’s two dominant ruling parties, and joined the Tupamaros, a Leninist urban guerrilla movement made up of political activists, trade unionists, students, and former cañeros.

The group gained notoriety for bold operations throughout the 1960s, including sabotage, bank robberies, kidnapping, and weapons raids targeting police, local elites, and foreign actors. But by 1972, the Tupamaros had collapsed under relentless military and police repression. Beginning in 1973, a brutally oppressive military dictatorship took control of the country, and it would ultimately rule Uruguay for twelve years. Throughout the late 1960s and early 1970s, Pepe was wanted by police. He was shot six times in one confrontation and arrested four times, twice escaping in mass prison breaks.

In 1972, he was captured for the last time. For the next twelve years, Mujica and other political prisoners were shuttled between secret locations and held in solitary confinement. Pepe spent two years in a damp well and seven years without anything to read. He endured months with his hands bound behind his back with wire and survived long stretches in total darkness, cut off from human contact, hallucinating, with only spiders for company.

The dictatorship finally began to lose its grip in the early 1980s, weakened by economic crisis, mass civil resistance, and mounting international pressure. Popular mobilizations — including huge strikes, student protests, and a growing human rights movement — forced the regime to begin negotiations with the opposition. In 1985, after a democratic agreement was reached, civilian rule was restored. That same year, Mujica, then fifty years old, was released under a general amnesty for political prisoners. Pepe emerged from more than a decade of captivity into a country transformed: a still-fragile democracy but once again open to social and political contestation.

The shift to electoral politics sparked intense internal debate among activists in the late 1980s. Mujica never apologized for his participation in armed struggle; he saw it as a necessary response to state oppression and systemic injustice. But he also argued that it was no promised land — that it had ultimately proven just as ineffective at transforming society as electoral politics had during that period.

“Armed struggle cannot be a life goal,” he argued. “In certain circumstances, it might have seemed like a way forward — but it can’t last forever. Because societies can’t be built on that basis. It doesn’t make sense.”

Over the next two decades, Mujica’s party, the MPP, became the most influential political faction in Uruguayan politics, distinguished by its sophisticated grassroots base, highly effective electoral machinery, and clearly defined progressive ideology. In 1989, it joined a coalition known as the Frente Amplio, and in 2004, they achieved a landmark victory. Campaigning in the aftermath of a 2002 financial crisis, which had devastated Uruguay’s economy and sharply eroded public trust in the political establishment, Tabaré Vázquez — a former oncologist and mayor of Montevideo — was elected president in a landslide popular vote. It marked the first time in Uruguay’s history that the presidency was won by someone outside the country’s two traditional parties.

The successes of the first Frente Amplio administration led to continued victories, and in 2009 Uruguay elected an even more progressive president in Pepe Mujica. Although Uruguayan presidents cannot serve consecutive terms, the coalition won three straight presidential elections, securing Mujica’s term spanning the period between 2010 and 2014, as well as Tabaré Vázquez’s return for a second term from 2015 to 2019. The two presidents became key members in Latin America’s broader Pink Tide, a wave of left-leaning governments that swept across the region in the 2000s and early 2010s, challenging neoliberal orthodoxy and prioritizing social justice.

Between 2005 and 2019, Uruguay experienced a period of robust and inclusive growth, and was hailed as a regional success story. Social spending rose dramatically, making possible an expanded cash transfer program that reached over 30 percent of households and sweeping health care reforms that ensured universal, equitable access. These policies contributed to a dramatic drop in poverty, which fell from nearly 40 percent in 2005 to under 9 percent by 2019. This positioned Uruguay as the South American country with the lowest poverty and inequality levels.

By 2019, Pepe’s health had begun to worsen, and he chose not to run for a second term as president. Shortly after, he retired from national politics altogether, yet he continued his activism through his last years. In February 2024, he helped organize a transnational gathering of progressive activists, labor leaders, and elected politicians in Foz do Iguaçu, Brazil, that made a call for greater internationalism as a strategy for expanding the field of possibility in Latin America.

The Substance of Authenticity

There are many lessons that can be drawn from Pepe’s story. But for activists outside of Latin America, three ideas are particularly relevant.

A first lesson is that authenticity cannot be bought from a public relations consultant. There is a truism often repeated in electoral politics and policy advocacy that you must speak authentically to the people you want to represent — that they must feel that you are one of them. And yet, no amount of messaging and polling is enough to make Kamala Harris feel genuine. Hakeem Jeffries has put on hoodies, Nancy Pelosi has knelt in a Kente cloth, Andrew Cuomo took off his tie and filmed himself in a park in Manhattan, but their efforts never seem to achieve what they are seeking to achieve.

What is it that makes someone like Pepe Mujica different? What makes them feel authentic?

Pepe showed that the real substance of authenticity lies in the politics themselves — in the work, the commitments, the choices. Miss that, and you end up with a generation of Barack Obama knockoffs, a parade of shallow imitations. Mujica demonstrated that authenticity is more than messaging or representation; it is a function of political commitment. His viral global image as “the poorest president in the world” was no stunt. He lived his austere lifestyle with his partner Lucía Topolansky — a political force in her own right — for his forty years of post-dictatorship life. It was less a choice than a reflection of what he saw as his obligations to the people of Uruguay and the world.

Before he won the presidency, Pepe was seen as an unrealistic contender by much of the mainstream Uruguayan media. He was too rough around the edges. He was charismatic, sure, but he consistently made gaffes and broke the established protocols of elected officials. Political commentators saw his unwillingness to adopt the trappings and privileges of higher office as evidence of his lack of seriousness.

But Mujica spoke of his minimalist way of living with pride, declaring, “I’m not poor. My definition of poor are those who need too much. Because those who need too much are never satisfied.”

This was the expression of a unique worldview, shaped by lived experience and informed by the insights of Marxist political economy. In a moving interview, he explained his philosophy: “Either you manage to be happy with very little — light of luggage because happiness is inside of you — or you won’t achieve anything,” he argued. “But since we invented a consumerist society, and the economy must grow — because if it doesn’t, it’s a tragedy — we have created a mountain of superfluous needs. And you have to throw things away and live by buying and throwing away, while what we are really wasting is our time to live.”

A journalist who covered multiple Uruguayan presidents told me how Mujica stood apart — even from fellow Frente Amplio president Tabaré Vázquez. While most presidents kept the press at arm’s length, Mujica treated reporters as equals. On foreign trips, he would ditch his security detail and wander down from his hotel room in decidedly unpresidential pajamas to share a drink with the press at the hotel bar.

But he did not use his friendships with journalists to pump up his own image. When tossed a softball about his administration’s record on poverty, Mujica refused the self-congratulatory script. “We lifted quite a few people out of extreme poverty,” he admitted, “but we didn’t make them citizens — we made them better consumers, and that is our failing.”

And yet, the numbers speak for themselves. Under Mujica, poverty plunged from 21 percent to 9.7 percent, real wages climbed nearly 4 percent a year, and GDP per capita grew at an average 4.4 percent annually. Social spending rose from 21 percent to 23 percent of GDP, expanding the safety net and strengthening the services that sustain working- and middle-class families.

Inequality narrowed too: the real minimum wage rose 37 percent, while the wealthiest tenth saw their share of national income drop by more than 10 percent. By any conventional measure, Mujica delivered on the core promises of the Left, even if he refused to take credit for it.

Pepe’s lifestyle was a reflection of who he was and his political commitments to society. The lesson is that our leaders should not represent us; they should be one with us. What matters is how they remain in a reciprocal relationship with us — how they show deference, how they honor the debt they owe to the community.

All too often, we see the opposite play out in politics, especially in liberal circles. Politicians who once belonged to our communities imply that we owe them deference for their personal success. But in reality, what they have achieved is an exit — a detachment — from the very communities they claim to represent. As they embrace the trappings of elected office, the protocols, the privileges, they tie themselves to that position of power and create a material commitment to elite class status. Eventually they begin to believe that reelection is what matters most.

A material commitment to the majority can help mitigate the tendencies that come with holding state power. Of course, you do not become president without a degree of hunger for power, and some on the Left still privately describe Mujica as a caudillo, a strongman of sorts. But his mode of life kept him close to regular people and gave him critical perspective when receiving the advice of professional pundits and the economic elite.

Accountability Is a Structure, Not a Vibe

The second lesson to learn from Pepe is about how to ensure that personal commitments become political outcomes. It is difficult to maintain genuine accountability to the working class and social movements in modern democratic systems. Time and time again, activists have placed allies in office only to see them caving to corporate and neoliberal pressures. Or conversely, they witness leaders trying to establish control over a political system who end up turning toward authoritarianism. There are too few institutional mechanisms that allow elected officials to avoid these paths and assert a consistent progressive mandate, especially when facing sustained resistance from the media, corporate interests, and the political establishment.

Exceptional political talent is not enough. Without structural support, the likelihood of disappointment is high. Without a durable, independent structure behind electoral efforts, accountability cannot be guaranteed.

No doubt Pepe Mujica was an exceptional political talent, but it was the unique structural accountability of the Frente Amplio that allowed him to stay steady and responsive to his base. It stands as a key institutionalized example of a true mass party in Latin America. Through its creation of mechanisms to keep it beholden to the interests and concerns of its grassroots supporters, the Frente is a uniquely valuable instance of participatory politics.

The Frente Amplio is not a single party. It is a coalition of political movements, including the MPP, in combination with a network of local comités de base, or base committees. These grassroots hubs — which are independent of internal factions — organize members in their neighborhoods, spark debate, mobilize supporters, and connect communities directly to party leadership. The committees are the source of volunteer labor for electoral campaigns. But they also meet regularly to discuss policy proposals and elect delegates that take part in important national decision-making processes. Half of the delegates in the Frente Amplio’s National Plenary, the party’s top decision-making body, as well as significant numbers in other positions of responsibility, come from these grassroots committees.

While the committees are not as active as they once were, they continue to shape the internal dynamics of the Frente Amplio, and they inspire an uncommon degree of political participation. Internal decision-making power in the coalition is not based solely on vote shares won in the general election: the system rewards factions that can build strong, active local networks. In practice, it does not work perfectly. The committees are sometimes ignored, or they become overly partisan. But it does achieve a degree of accountability to grassroots voices that is seldom seen in modern electoral politics.

This structure was crucial in Mujica’s rise. Moderate factions within the Frente Amplio — representing wealthier middle-class professionals and government employees — often opposed him, voicing many of the same criticisms that centrist Democrats in the United States level against progressives. These groups have held significant influence, producing leaders including Tabaré Vázquez, key ministers of finance, and many of the coalition’s policy experts and administrators. Yet despite their mainstream appeal and resources, they were balanced by the coalition’s established internal structure, which amplified the voices of organized activists.

Not only did this structure help Mujica rise, it also helped keep him accountable once in office. It was organizational grounding — not just individual virtue — that enabled Mujica to stay aligned with the communities that brought him to power.

Electoral structures in the United States make this hard to replicate, but activists can take steps in this direction by codifying the internal democracy of organizations that make up the wider ecology of progressive electoral efforts. We can ask: In what ways are these groups — beyond electoral efforts — formalizing their accountability to social movements? There is much in the world of nonprofit community organizing, policy research, and advocacy that claims to reflect the interests of everyday people but, in fact, is driven by the choices of nonprofit boards, philanthropic funders, and political consultants. When these organizations do seek to engage their base, it is usually in a limited advisory capacity — for example, by placing a token community representative on a board where the representative is then expected to assimilate and sign off.

Instead, following the example of the Frente Amplio, groups should prioritize building structures where elected allies are not only supported but also held accountable to the people who mobilized them. Without that kind of durable infrastructure, progressive leaders will always be fighting alone against systems designed to absorb, co-opt, or isolate them.

Keep the Heat On — Even With Friends in Office

This focus on internal structures of accountability overlaps with a third lesson we can draw from Mujica’s career: the importance of active and independent social movements outside the elected administration or political party.

Mujica’s personal commitments and the Frente Amplio’s organizational structure both shaped his approach as a leader. Nevertheless, the critical force behind many of Uruguay’s progressive reforms during his presidency came from a broader set of forces operating beyond the halls of power. The external pressure applied by social movements — the “outside game” — proved essential in driving meaningful change.

Recently I spoke with a close adviser to Pepe, a lifelong leftist who is a committed Leninist and a former elected official. He was embarrassed to admit that there really is not a formal cadre or strict structure of cogovernance in Uruguay that goes beyond the electoral coalition. Although the Frente Amplio has a strong grassroots base, its relations with civil society and wider social movements have been scattershot, sometimes informal, sometimes even antagonistic. Even with its most progressive administration in office, key executive decisions were ultimately made by Mujica and his trusted inner circle.

Yet many of the victories that came to define Mujica’s presidency were not his chosen battles. The legalization of marijuana, legal abortion, and same-sex marriage became iconic reforms of Pepe’s administration, but they were not originally on his agenda. Rather, they were the result of pressure from well-organized social movements.

Mujica was both politically savvy enough and connected enough to his grassroots base to be receptive to these external demands. He recognized the momentum behind these ideas, remained flexible, and avoided rigid attachment to a predetermined plan. But even though these reforms would become some of his signature accomplishments of his time in office, he had to be pushed to champion them.

The legalization of marijuana, for example, was driven by a coalition of activists combating both entrenched international drug policy norms and local conservatism. Groups including the Asociación de Estudios de Cannabis del Uruguay and Proderechos organized marches, lobbied lawmakers, and kept the issue in the media spotlight, making changes politically feasible. Their efforts coincided with mounting pressure to find creative strategies to combat drug trafficking in the wake of the failed “war on drugs” promoted by the United States.

When cannabis activists began mobilizing in the early 2000s, public opinion was initially against them — two-thirds of Uruguayans opposed legalization. Mujica himself expressed reservations. Interviewed on the topic, he said, “Do not think that I am defending marijuana. . . . Love is the only healthy addiction on the face of the Earth. All the other addictions are a plague, whose harms have varying degrees.” But the movement built momentum by tying the cause to a broader rights agenda championed by students, LGBTQ groups, unions, and other civil society forces.

By 2012, rising fears over urban insecurity cracked the debate wide open. Legalization was reframed as a security measure, a way to cut into narcotraffickers’ profits and separate cannabis from harder drugs. In 2013, Uruguay became the first country in the world to legalize recreational marijuana. In the end, Mujica’s backing and the Frente Amplio’s congressional majority pushed Law 19.172, the country’s legalization measure, over the finish line. But it was relentless social movement organizing that transformed the issue from an improbable and unpopular cause into a political winner.

This is a crucial lesson for social movements seeking progressive change: having allies in office, even a president with deep political commitments to regular people, is not enough. Social movements drive political possibility, expanding the Overton window and forcing elected officials to move beyond their comfort zones. Political power, even when wielded by well-intentioned leaders, is constrained by institutional inertia, competing interests, and the limits of political will.

Uruguay’s story underscores the importance of sustained pressure, strategic agitation, and public engagement — keeping issues alive beyond election cycles and inside the corridors of power. Allies in office may open doors, but movements must push through them. Mujica often described himself as reluctant, even skeptical, but he was also unusually open to being pressed. Unlike leaders who wall themselves off once in office, Mujica kept the door ajar.

More to Carry On

Pepe Mujica’s legacy comes not only from the laws passed under his watch but also the way he embodied a different kind of politics: a grounded politics, a politics of accountability, and a politics of democratic participation. He insisted that leadership must emerge out of everyday life, and that democratic institutions only thrive when civil society is strong enough to hold power to account. In 2024, at Orsi’s postelection victory event, Mujica told those assembled that he was battling death. “I’m an old man who is very close to beginning the departure from which there is no return,” he said. “But I’m happy! . . . Because when my arms are gone, there will be thousands more to carry on the struggle. All my life I’ve said that the best leaders are the ones who leave behind a team that surpasses them by far — and today, you are here.”

Shortly thereafter, reflecting on his journey, he added: “I spent my years dreaming, fighting, struggling. They beat the hell out of me and everything else. It doesn’t matter, I have no debts to collect.”