Pepe Mujica: “There is nothing greater than the opportunity to live”

“I laugh when they call me a Marxist,” he tells me. Pepe Mujica. “I’m not a Marxist, I’m a Stoic.” And what does it mean? “It’s living without baggage, trying to cultivate a happy sobriety, applying that old principle: ‘nothing too much’…”

I only have to look around me to see that he applies the principle quite rigorously. We are in the countryside, half an hour from Montevideo, talking in the kitchen of the small farm where the former guerrilla fighter, former prisoner, former president of Uruguay (from 2010 to 2015) and, at 88 years old, the world’s favorite grandfather went , lives. .

The kitchen is your living room and dining room. The only concession to luxury, or the only exception to sobriety, would be the collection of bottles of whiskey, gin, rum, vodka, tequila and mezcal that adorn the shelves behind the wooden chair in which he sits.

Keep up the stoicism and packing light, I say. “And, ultimately, it is a question of freedom, because If I am subject to necessity, I am not free. The goal is to have time to dedicate to the things we like.”

And what do you like? “Walking in the field. “I like the countryside because there I talk to myself.” With himself? “Yes, I spent seven years alone in prison. No books. I had nothing to do. Nothing. And I had to learn to talk to that inside me. And do you know what he told me? He greeted me a lot, he told me that when he was very young he had been very crazy. But the great thing is that I had read a lot and that’s when I started mulling over my books.

“I learned to enjoy my interiority, to understand that the only miraculous thing there is for every person is to be born, to live this adventure of life. There is nothing greater than the opportunity to live. Do you realize?”

And use your time well, I advise you.

“Of course!”

Mujica, with his old teddy bear appearance, is lively and smiling. He likes to talk. As clear-headed as when the moral vigor of his presidency placed Uruguay on the world map as never before, He does not speak with resentment of the years of military dictatorship what happened in prison. Rather, it seems that the experience has strengthened him. Attentive to every word the pampas oracle releases, grateful to be able to share time with him in his lair, I propose to change the subject from philosophy to politics.

“To move on!” he answers me.

Unlike the contraction that characterizes political discourse in almost all other Western countries, including noisy neighbors Argentina and Brazil, everything is respect, serenity, consensus and peace. And the facts prove it. In rankings from the UN and other international organizations, Uruguay is second in the Americas, behind only Canada, for democracy, transparency and security. How did they manage to distance themselves from the madding crowd like this?

“I believe,” says Mujica, “that it is first and foremost about our history. Already in 1910 Uruguay had a project that, using contemporary language, we would call social democracy. Came in like a cruise ship, stayed and anchored. There was a generation of people led by President José Batlle y Ordoñez who shaped some things – like public aid, like women’s rights – that colored Uruguay’s history. To the point that the Swedes came to study it and transplanted things from here.”

Are you telling me that the famous Nordic model of democracy was inspired by Uruguay?

“They took things from here, for sure.”

Things that never went away from here?

“With the exception of the period of the military dictatorship, from 1973 to 1985, n. I wait, consent was imposed in this way that those of us who are on the left can’t be that left because history mediates us. And not even those on the right. A right-wing government arrives and cannot abandon social policies. That barbarity that occurs today in Argentina: no, no. “It doesn’t even cross his mind.”

Will you refer to President Javier Milei’s social reduction policies?

“Yes, It’s horrible what happens there. But that’s what happens when people get fed up. Milei is an extremist and voting for him is a symptom of desperation.”

Because of that permanently underdeveloped economy?

“And because of the gigantic corruption at all levels.”

But how could you avoid catching the Argentine virus, having them so close? And not only with respect to economic chaos and corruption but also to the ferocious polarization, to the famous fracture…

Peronism, “a religion”

“The thing is Argentina is determined by the phenomenon of Peronism, which is not an ideology, it is a religion. A mystic. Peronism is the consequence of a historical circumstance: Argentina was a very rich country, but with enormous social injustice. And then Perón arrives in his forties and starts distributing and distributing. He remained as God, of course. And this is not forgotten. He has remained engraved in the culture of a large part of the Argentine people. Then they made a bit of a mess. Then everything happened, but that memory remained and Peronism remains there. It’s still there…”

Let’s talk about religion, I tell him. Something many of his compatriots have told me is that another reason Uruguay is an oasis of civilization is the atheism that defines it. What do you think?

“And yes, together with that of social democracy, the idea of ​​the separation of Church from State was born here more than a hundred years ago. Today only 1% of the population is a practitioner, by far the lowest percentage in Latin America. Look at President Batlle y Ordoñez, there in the 1920s. He was a journalist as well as president and in his articles he always wrote the word ‘god’ in lower case, never capital ‘God’”.

Are you against religion?

“WELL, I think monotheistic religions have done harm to humanity of the fucking mother. “They have generated deep bigotry and intolerance that extends into the political world.”

But do many depend on the comfort that religion offers them, especially in poorer countries?

“OK. I totally understand. There are about 4,200 religions in the world and more than 60% of the world’s population believes in something. No, that’s not a factor to throw it away. No, no, no. And also, although religions were used by the power to crush, they also helped to live with a little hope for what they didn’t know they would eat the next day. I recognize that the topic is complicated. “Religions can encourage fanaticism, but they can also be a brake.”

In an hour and a half we went from philosophy, to politics, to religion and its paradoxes. I turn off the recorder, I get up, Mujica gets up and we say goodbye. I’m about to turn and walk down a muddy path towards the car that will take me back to Montevideo when Mujica exclaims: “But, brother! I didn’t buy you a drink! Sit. I chose something from what I have here.

I examine the offerings, as plentiful as those in a New York cocktail bar, and point to an unopened bottle of mezcal.

“Sounds good,” I tell him.

«You can be sure of it. “The Mexican ambassador brought it to me.”

Open the bottle and fill the glasses. After a while he fills them again. We enjoy, with the recorder always off, what he calls happy sobriety. We are in Uruguay, where Mujica reminds me that the first World Cup took place, and for a good part of the hour and a half that I spend in his kitchen we talk – obviously – about football, the only field in which his compatriots lose their calm and they behave with as much abandon, or more, than the rest of humanity.