By: Alberto Giovanelli

A few days ago José Alberto Mujica Cordano, more popularly known as “Pepe Mujica”, passed away. After a time when passions descend, we allow ourselves to critically retrace his trajectory, trying to provide the younger generations with an objective vision of his role and the reasons why they have paid tribute to his death, from the right to the institutional left, recognizing Mujica as a transcendent and famous figure in the recent history of Latin American “progressivism”.

Its origins

“El Pepe Mujica” was born on May 20, 1935 in the city of Montevideo. He began his militancy in the National Party (Blanco) and became general secretary of its Youth. The Blanco Party, representative of the typical Uruguayan oligarchy on the one hand, and the Colorado Party, exponent of the interests of those most linked to the financial and foreigner sectors, on the other, are the expression of Uruguayan bipartisanship, the pendulum on which Uruguayan politics swung until the emergence of the Frente Amplio (Broad Front).

During his period as a member of the Blancos, Mujica was part of Enrique Erro’s team, who in 1959 had been appointed Minister of Industry and Labor. When Erro withdrew from the National Party, he founded the Popular Union, of which Mujica would become a member.

Stage in MLN Tupamaros

However, in the 1960s, accompanying the processes initiated by the Cuban revolution and the development of Latin American guerrilla movements, to which the strong influence of the French May was added, the National Liberation Movement – Tupamaros MLN-T was born in Uruguay, of which Mujica would be founder and one of its main leaders, coinciding with a process in the country of widespread mobilizations among workers and students.

Tupamaros, which arose fundamentally in middle sectors which, due to their class origin and their political project, were an objective impediment to the independent organization of the workers. In spite of having gained certain prestige in its beginnings, it could not prevent extraordinary fighters from being prevented from organizing massively in unions, or from building a party in the working class, but rather they turned to organize armed actions isolated from the people as a whole. Worse still, the popular sectors were considered suppliers of fighters, thus taking out of the class (and sending to death) very valuable activists and fighters, thus weakening the organization of the working class. As has been demonstrated once again, this guerrilla experience ended in failure.

In this environment and as the confrontations with the “Colored” governments of Pacheco Areco and later of Bordaberry increased, by the mid 70’s, the Tupamaros had been strongly dismantled, with most of its members forced into exile or imprisoned, among them its main leader Raul Sendic and Mujica himself.

In 1973 the Armed Forces staged a coup d’état that would open a whole period of more than 12 years of civilian-military government. Like all dictatorships of the time and the region, it would deepen the violation of human rights, torture, kidnapping, assassinations and disappearances. In Uruguay’s prisons there were more than five thousand political prisoners. In this context, José Mujica was one of the nine hostages of the MLN-T that the dictatorship kept in conditions of torture and isolation in several barracks.

With the fall of the dictatorship and the recovery of democratic freedoms, the great majority of the MLN leaders joined the Frente Amplio and were assimilated into institutional democracy. Once again, the ultra-left experiences mutated into reformism and were assimilated by the institutional regime in force.

The FA and Mujica, the left leg of the system

“Pepe” was elected to his first congressional seat in 1989, for the Movimiento de Participación Popular (MPP)- Frente Amplio (FA). He was later elected senator and served as Minister of Livestock, Agriculture and Fisheries from 2005 to 2008, under the government of Tabaré Vázquez. In 2010 he was elected President of the Republic in a second round with more than 54% of the votes. He then returned to the Senate where he resigned his seat in 2020.

During Mujica’s term in office, three laws can be recalled that were varnished and disseminated as having progressive overtones: the legalization of abortion (which the government of Tabaré Vázquez had opposed), equal marriage and the decriminalization of cannabis consumption.

However, since his inauguration, Mujica has been gradually turning to the right, justified behind a supposed “realism” that began when, in response to the demands for wages of state workers, the government responded by issuing a decree prohibiting occupations of public places and authorizing the use of police force to evict them.

Also when in 2013 a major conflict developed in public education, Mujica addressed the teachers’ claims and told them to work more: “four hours 180 days a year. You have other hours left to do something else”. Referring to the teachers’ conflict he stated that “maybe they are very young people, and they have no idea of what repression or lack of freedom is, they have no idea, and that is why they take very little care of this coexistence that we have among Uruguayans”.

Mujica was the one who inaugurated the Montes del Plata pulp mill, owned by foreign capital and which owns 250,000 hectares. Responding to claims of environmental pollution and monoculture, Mujica said that “nature is the future, but I do not believe that ecology means condemning oneself to a photograph of a time” (…) “Man can destroy a lot but he can also rebuild”.

Mujica finally, and perhaps in the most distinctive gesture of his right wing and abandonment of elementary demands, supported his partner, Lucia Topolansky who had stated “We know who are those who lied within the left but we are not going to say it because we are not traitors or buttons”, referring to alleged witnesses who testified against the military violators of human rights. This earned him a harsh communiqué from Relatives of the Detained and Disappeared where they expressed their “maximum repudiation of this type of affirmations”.

Mujica also stated that “I do not want to have old people in prison. Old men of 75, 80 years old. But not only the military, no prisoner at that age”.

Back in 2011, when a vote was to be taken to repeal the Impunity Law, José Mujica campaigned against it with the approval of the Human Rights violators, who continued, for the most part, in impunity. Mujica was thus the necessary ally to develop a deliberate action for oblivion and forgiveness.

The FA did not govern to find truth and justice, but to take the people to the polls in the elections, to remain in power and create positions of trust and paid positions, which remain there to structure a related apparatus.

But Mujica’s career was not exempt from harsh criticism from many of his former Tupamaros comrades, including some of the 9 who shared prison with him. This is the case of the late leader Jorge Zabalza:

“Besides embracing Yankee anacondas, heconveys that it is valid to sell one’s soul to the devil for a quarter kilo of minced meat. It de-ideologizes. It discourages. It produces merchant heads. And then complains that youth is consumerist.”

The bullets that killed them still hurt in my guts, and their spirits support mine insurgently. The disappeared and murdered are, for some of us, a material force, an impulse, a message of altruistic values, a moral stimulus not to compromise with the ideas and values of the class enemy and to continue looking for ways to make the revolution.

It is clear that for Mujica, Huidobro and others, the disappeared and murdered are also a material force, but in the opposite direction. That of the brake. That of not thinking again about revolutions. That of the fear of struggle“, expressed Zabalza in 2020.

Also the founder of Tupamaros Julio Marenales, said about “Pepe”: “He has not talked to Mujica for years, he is an international showman, his problem. I have nothing to do with that way of thinking”. About the MLN he said: “We in the MLN emerged as an anti-system organization, now all the signals given by the Tupamaros are of total acceptance of the dependent capitalist system”.

When José Mujica announced his retirement in 2020, the homage paid to him by the bourgeoisie as a whole was unanimous and the inescapable record of the abandonment of his old revolutionary pretensions. Under the government of Luis Lacalle Pou, José Mujica placed himself at the service of the white government and even traveled with Lacalle to Brazil “to give him a hand” in relations with Lula. In the Social Security Plebiscite, Mujica opposed the YES, which sought to eliminate the AFAPs, keep the retirement age at 60 and increase minimum pensions.

Finally, we believe it is appropriate to point out that with this note we intend to contribute to the necessary debate about an emblematic figure who gradually declared himself an advocate of a “human capitalism”, abandoning the objective and the task of building a new society, which collapses each of the columns on which capitalism is based. For that task, Mujica became an obstacle trying to convince workers with the false illusion that Capitalism could be improved. That is a real utopia.