Former President of Uruguay José Mujica (2010-2015) said during the forum “The social challenge of Latin America”, that the challenge that America and the world must face is “the model of life he has assumed and the loss of elementary values ”.
The former Uruguayan president, recognized throughout the world for his austerity, warned that in recent decades “technology and science have advanced much more than the set of values that enlighten us on the path of life”.
“I am nothing but an old man who grumbleswith the awareness that I am leaving and I love life, and I belong to a time that goes naturally, but I am aware that when we are born we receive a torrent that falls upon us from what is called civilization, which is intergenerational solidarity “, he said.
Mujica he criticized the values of the current capitalist model assuring that “life has become buying new things, confusing being with having”.
“We believe that modernity offers us a horizon of happiness that is constantly renewed with the amount of taxes we have to pay”, he stressed during a forum organized by the Organization of Ibero-American States (OEI) and the Prisa group.
“What has brought us so much prosperity also condemns us”, continued the leader, who warned that “it is lack of vital commitment to put our existence at the service of a cause that becomes the north of life ”.
“If we fail to convince people to commit to seeking a better world than the one we were born into and are facing, we do not blame the world, but rather take responsibility for our passivity,” advised the 87-year-old politician and former guerrilla. in the 60s.
For Mujica “if there are so many poor people in Latin America, so much ignorance” it is because “those who have had the opportunity to dream, to think, to know, to have a slightly more refined vision of history (…) they didn’t make the necessary effort become a current towards the hope of those who have no hope ”.
“The social debt of the compatriots of our Latin America does not depend on the diagnoses we can make, because the diagnoses are clear to us, it depends on the attitude that we are able to build and on which is the construction of collective beings that can politically influence to change the means. reality. It will not change by spontaneous generation, It will change if there is a long line of people engaged in this “, He added.
In this sense, he said that the continent “goes two-speed” and inequalities divide society between “an overdeveloped world and an irrelevant world that doesn’t even need to be exploited”.
The former president also referred to the “ecological holocaust” on which, in his opinion, the ruling class does not intervene due to “political impotence”, a consequence of “lack of commitment”.
Mujica concluded that “you can live because you were born, like a lettuce or a cockroach (…) or we can give a course to our existence with the commitment to help overcome the difficulties of our society”.
Finally, Mujica, who retired from his last public position as a senator in 2020, invited attendees to this conference to “look inside” and that “have the courage not to be complicit in passivity with the subdued challenges of the time we have to live”.
Source: EFE
PB
Source: Clarin
