Jose Mujica, a former guerrilla and later the president of Uruguay, who was famous for his humble lifestyle and driving a well-worn VW Beetle, passed away at the age of 89. His leadership and progressive changes during his tenure extended his fame far beyond South America.

Mujica, often affectionately called “Pepe” by Uruguayans, served as the leader of the country’s left-leaning government from 2010 to 2015. He gained the public’s trust by assuring them that his militant days were behind him.

President Yamandu Orsi announced Mujica’s death on X, expressing profound sorrow and gratitude, saying, “Thank you for all that you contributed and for your immense love for the people.”

As president, Mujica adopted what was then a pioneering liberal stance on issues related to civil liberties. He signed a law allowing gay marriage and abortions in early pregnancy, and backed a proposal to legalize marijuana sales. The gay marriage and abortion measures were a big shift for Catholic Latin America, and the move on marijuana was at the time almost unprecedented worldwide.

Regional leaders, including leftist presidents in Brazil, Chile and Mexico, mourned Mujica’s passing and praised his example.

“He defended democracy like few others. And he never stopped advocating for social justice and the end of all inequalities,” said Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva. Mujica’s “greatness transcended the borders of Uruguay and his presidential term,” he added.

During his term in office, Mujica refused to move to the presidential residence, choosing to stay in his modest home where he kept a small flower farm in a suburb of Montevideo, the capital.

Shunning a formal suit and tie, it was common to see him driving around in his Beetle or eating at downtown restaurants where office workers had lunch.

In a May 2024 interview with Reuters in the tin-roofed house that Mujica shared with his wife, former Senator Lucia Topolansky, he said he had kept the old Beetle and that it was still in “phenomenal” condition.

But, he added, he preferred a turn on the tractor, saying it was “more entertaining” than a car and was a place where “you have time to think.”

Critics questioned Mujica’s tendency to break with protocol, while his blunt and occasionally uncouth statements sometimes forced him to explain himself, under pressure from opponents and political allies alike.

But it was his down-to-earth style and progressive musings that endeared him to many Uruguayans.

“The problem is that the world is run by old people, who forget what they were like when they were young,” Mujica said during the 2024 interview.

Mujica himself was 74 when he became president. He was elected with 52% of the vote, despite some voters’ concerns about his age and his past as one of the leaders of the Tupamaros rebel group in the 1960s and 1970s.

Lucia Topolansky was Mujica’s long-term partner, dating back to their days in the Tupamaros. The couple married in 2005, and she served as vice president from 2017-2020.

After leaving office, they remained politically active, regularly attending inaugurations of Latin American presidents and giving crucial backing to candidates in Uruguay, including Orsi, who took office in March 2025. They stopped growing flowers on their small holding but continued to cultivate vegetables, including tomatoes that Topolansky pickled each season.

BEHIND BARS

Jose Mujica’s birth certificate recorded him as born in 1935, although he claimed there was an error and that he was actually born a year earlier. He once described his upbringing as “dignified poverty.”

Mujica’s father died when he was 9 or 10 years old, and as a boy he helped his mother maintain the farm where they grew flowers and kept chickens and a few cows.

At the time Mujica became interested in politics, Uruguay’s left was weak and fractured and he began his political career in a progressive wing of the center-right National Party.

In the late 1960s, he joined the Marxist Tupamaros guerrilla movement, which sought to weaken Uruguay’s conservative government through robberies, political kidnappings and bombings.

Mujica later said that he had never killed anyone but was involved in several violent clashes with police and soldiers and was once shot six times.

Uruguay’s security forces gained the upper hand over the Tupamaros by the time the military swept to power in a 1973 coup, marking the start of a 12-year dictatorship in which about 200 people were kidnapped and killed. Thousands more were jailed and tortured.

Mujica spent almost 15 years behind bars, many in solitary confinement, lying at the bottom of an old horse trough with only ants for company. He managed to escape twice, once by tunneling into a nearby house. His biggest “vice” as he approached 90, he later said, was talking to himself, alluding to his time in isolation.

When democracy was restored to the farming country of roughly 3 million people in 1985, Mujica was released and returned to politics, gradually becoming a prominent figure on the left.

He served as agriculture minister in the center-left coalition of his predecessor, President Tabaré Vázquez, who would go on to succeed him from 2015 to 2020.

Mujica’s support base was on the left, but he maintained a fluid dialogue with opponents within the center-right, inviting them to traditional barbecues at his home.

“We can’t pretend to agree on everything. We have to agree with what there is, not with what we like,” he said.

He believed drugs should be decriminalized “under strict state control” and addiction addressed.

“I do not defend drug use. But I can’t defend (a ban) because now we have two problems: drug addiction, which is a disease, and narcotrafficking, which is worse,” he said. 

In retirement, he remained resolutely optimistic.

“I want to convey to all the young people that life is beautiful, but it wears out and you fall,” he said following a cancer diagnosis.

“The point is to start over every time you fall, and if there is anger, transform it into hope.”