Mujica’s duties would entail taking the oath of office from other senators, including former comrades from the National Liberation Movement Tupamaros, better known simply as the Tupamaros. The most surreal part of the occasion, however, would come when Mujica performed a ceremonial review of the 1st Infantry Battalion, also called the “Florida” Battalion. In the 1970s, that same unit had been in charge of a detention center where Mujica and several of his comrades were tortured.

“All this has the sign of a García Márquez novel, of something that nobody could have foreseen,” Mujica said that day in a radio interview.

Mujica’s life journey took many unexpected turns—he escaped prison twice and came perilously close to death on at least one occasion—but he eventually became one of South America’s more respected national leaders. In 2013, Foreign Policy included Mujica in its list of leading global thinkers for “redefining the Latin American left” and for engineering “an experiment in social liberalism without precedent” in the region.

“Life can set us a lot of snares, a lot of bumps, we can fail a thousand times, in life, in love, in the social struggle,” he said in a speech at the 2014 Guadalajara International Book Fair. “But, if we search for it, we’ll have the strength to get up again and start over … There is always a dawn after the night has passed. Don’t forget it, kids. The only losers are the ones who stop fighting.”

Mujica’s death at age 89 was announced on May 13. “It is with profound sorrow that we announce the passing of our comrade Pepe Mujica,” Uruguayan President Yamandú Orsi wrote in a post on X. “President, activist, leader, and guide. We will miss you dearly, dear old man. Thank you for everything you gave us and for your profound love for your people.”

Following a brief stint in the youth wing of one Uruguay’s traditional parties, where he worked for a left-leaning politician, and the electoral failure of left-wing groups in 1962, Mujica decided to abandon the path of electoral politics. Like others of his generation inspired by the Cuban revolution, he took up the gun.

The 1960s and the early 1970s witnessed “unusual political violence” in Uruguay, said historian José Rilla, pitting an increasingly repressive government against leftist activists and burgeoning numbers of guerrillas. As a member of the Tupamaros, Mujica participated in several guerrilla operations, and in 1970 he was shot six times while resisting arrest at a Montevideo bar.

That was one of several times security forces arrested Mujica for his illegal activities. He managed to escape from prison twice: Once when he and more than 100 other prisoners dug their way out of Punta Carretas prison, constructing a 40-meter tunnel that led into the living room of a nearby home. Another time, Tupamaros outside the same prison (which is a shopping mall today) dug a tunnel under the wall to rescue their comrades.

The third time Mujica was arrested, in 1972, would mark the beginning of many years of torment. The guerrillas were largely defeated by then, and those who had been captured were held in a high-security prison. But in 1973, the armed forces, in agreement with President Juan María Bordaberry, staged a coup. The new government apparently wanted to stamp out any chance of another prison escape and moved Mujica and eight other Tupamaro leaders out of the regular prison system and into different military bases. There, they were kept in small cells, sometimes even in wells or horse-watering troughs, with little access to food and no basic hygiene.

Commonly known as the “dictatorship’s hostages,” the Tupamaro leaders endured many hardships for a dozen years, including long and intense periods of isolation. Years later, one of the former “hostages” would recall that their captors were on a mission to drive them insane. And they almost succeeded.

In his seclusion, Mujica experienced auditory hallucinations. He would later recall listening to the cries of ants that walked through his dungeon.

Former National Liberation Movement guerrilla organization members Mujica (left) and Mauricio Rosencof (right) sit with Adolfo Wassen Jr. on the day of their liberation as political prisoners in Montevideo on March 14, 1985. AGENCIA CAMARATRES/AFP via Getty Images

The Tupamaros declined to renounce their violent past, but they decided to move in a democratic direction, creating the Movement of Popular Participation (Movimiento de Participación Popular, or MPP), which in turn was part of a left-wing coalition called the Broad Front (Frente Amplio). In 1994, Mujica was the first former guerrilla from the MPP to be elected as a deputy in the lower chamber of the legislature. 

When the Broad Front won the general elections a decade later with an absolute majority, Mujica was the senator who received the most votes. Weeks after taking his seat in parliament, he became minister of livestock, agriculture, and fisheries in the administration of socialist President Tabaré Vázquez.

Mujica, as senate president, presides over the Uruguayan Parliament in Montevideo on Feb. 15, 2005. MIGUEL ROJO/AFP via Getty Images

They didn’t all get along, however, or pursue the same foreign policies. This was perhaps particularly true when it came to dealings with the United States: While Vázquez received U.S. President George W. Bush in Montevideo in 2007, for instance, Chávez led a mass event in Buenos Aires to repudiate Bush’s presence in the region.

At times, Mujica seemed divided against himself. He participated in official activities during Bush’s visit to Uruguay, yet he also assured the Argentine newspaper Clarín that he would have preferred to be in the streets of the capital with anti-U.S. demonstrators. He later said that negotiating with the United States “is not selling one’s soul or changing one’s ideas.”

The seeming contradiction in such statements was a trademark of Mujica’s political discourse, to the point that his critics assigned to him the phrase, “As I tell you one thing, I tell you the other.”

Nevertheless, his apparent attempt to appeal to different sides at once seemed to work. Mujica led the Broad Front to another triumph in the next elections, with another absolute majority in parliament, and he became president of Uruguay on March 1, 2010, at the age of 74.

Left: Mujica signs an autograph before the closing rally of his campaign in Montevideo on June 20, 2009. Right: Newly sworn in as president, Mujica waves to the crowd in the streets of Montevideo on the day of his inauguration on March 1, 2010. MIGUEL ROJO/AFP via Getty Images and PABLO PORCIUNCULA/AFP via Getty Images

The push for cannabis legalization in 2012 came as a surprise to many in his government. It emerged after a rise in crime—and some particularly violent homicides—sparked demands for more security. The government drew up a package of measures designed to fight crime and improve social cohesion that included apparently contradictory elements: It both legalized the sale of marijuana and enabled the compulsory hospitalization of drug addicts, mainly, but not only, crack cocaine users.

Certain that the “war on drugs” launched by U.S. President Richard Nixon in the early 1970s had failed, Mujica aimed to take a different approach. His goal was not to expand Uruguayan freedoms—he wasn’t promoting pot smoking—but to deny drug traffickers a market. “Free smoke, my ass!” said Mujica in an interview for a book I co-authored. “It has nothing to do with freedom. To me, it is a security problem, it is against drug trafficking.”

Most of Mujica’s aides were against the idea of compulsory hospitalization for drug addicts and tried to remove that from the package. But the president resisted: “If we human beings were as weak … as we paint ourselves, we would not have gotten here,” he’d later tell me to justify the measure. A new law was proposed in parliament by the executive branch, but it was never approved.

Mujica opens his garage door on May 21, 2010, in Montevideo. Ricardo Ceppi/Getty Images

Left: Mujica works on his farm dedicated to floriculture on the outskirts of Montevideo on Oct. 31, 2004. Right: Mujica gets ready to work at his farm after voting in the general elections in Montevideo on Oct. 25, 2009. MARCOS MIRAS/AFP via Getty Images and JOSE MONESTIER/AFP via Getty Images

The former guerrilla had decided not to use the presidential residence during his term. Instead, he continued living in the modest farmhouse he shared with his wife, the former guerrilla and then-senator Lucía Topolansky (they got married in 2005), and their three-legged dog Manuela. They didn’t have children, something both regretted. “I dedicated myself to changing the world and time ran out,” he said in an interview.

Austerity and the rejection of consumerism were values that Mujica embodied in word and deed. While president, he still drove his Volkswagen Beetle and grew flowers and vegetables on his farm. In the early mornings, he could be spotted on top of his tractor in the fields. He still collected his presidential salary but donated 90 percent of it to a state project to construct housing for people with limited resources.

Journalists from around the world made pilgrimages to Mujica’s farm to see how “the poorest president in the world” lived. In turn, Mujica stressed that he was not poor but had decided to pursue an austere lifestyle to gain personal freedom. In his speeches, he warned about where globalization was heading. As things stood, “Instead of us controlling globalization, it controls us,” Mujica said at the United Nation General Assembly in 2013.

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He warned then about relentlessly pushing for economic growth without pursuing the most important goal: human happiness. “The average man of our time wanders between financial institutions and the tedious routine of air-conditioned offices. He always dreams of vacations and freedom. He always dreams of being able to pay the bills, until one day, his heart stops and goodbye,” he said.

A day before that U.N. speech, Mujica met with billionaire philanthropists George Soros and David Rockefeller and participated in a dinner organized by U.S. President Barack Obama with various heads of state.

The Economist designated Uruguay the 2013 “country of the year.” The magazine praised the new cannabis law and Uruguay’s legalization of gay marriage, and commended Mujica’s “self-effacing” nature and “unusual frankness for a politician.”

Daniel Vidart, an anthropologist and friend of Mujica’s, defined him while president as a “[Don] Quixote dressed as a Sancho Panza.” “I don’t dare to say that as a ruler, he is a great statesman,” Vidart added, “but he is a great thinker about the future.”

Mujica speaks with U.S. President Barack Obama at the White House in Washington on May 12, 2014. Jonathan Ernst/Reuters

Later that year, Uruguay received six former prisoners from Guantánamo Bay detention camp. Mujica was doing Washington a favor, but he was also offering hospitality to people like himself who had been through tortuous confinement—“human beings who have suffered a terrible kidnapping in Guantanamo Bay,” he said.

Even though he was clearly a leftist, Mujica tried to be a neutral party in Latin America during and after his government. He hoped Uruguay would ride the wave of Brazil’s economic growth, yet he also praised Chávez’s radical efforts to unite the region.

Mujica’s government voted in favor of making Venezuela a member of Mercosur, the South American trade bloc, even when the legality of that measure was disputed. In his own defense, Mujica said “the political took precedence over the legal” in that case. When Chávez died, Mujica praised some of his policies and ideas, including wealth redistribution, even though he didn’t pursue them in Uruguay.

Mujica and his Venezuelan counterpart Hugo Chavez embrace during Mujica’s first official visit to Venezuela on April 7, 2010. JUAN BARRETO/AFP via Getty Images

His administration inherited a conflict with Argentina over the unauthorized construction of a pulp mill on the Uruguayan side of a binational river. He managed to improve the relationship, but tensions never entirely dissipated. At a press conference, Mujica was caught by an open mic calling Fernández de Kirchner, at the time president of Argentina, an “old hag” and saying that she was “worse” than “the cross-eyed man,” referring to her late husband and former president, Néstor Kirchner, who had a lazy eye.

Mujica had a good relationship with Sebastián Piñera, the right-wing president of Chile. And his status as a reformed ex-guerrilla made Mujica a natural and vital collaborator in peace negotiations between the Colombian government led by Juan Manuel Santos and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC).

Because Mujica had suffered torture yet did not seek revenge on his captors, Lula dubbed him a sort of South American Nelson Mandela.

Mujica leaves the site where human remains were found by a team of anthropologists in Toledo, Canelones, on March 16, 2012. The remains were thought to be of a political prisoner who disappeared during the Uruguayan dictatorship. MIGUEL ROJO/AFP via Getty Images

In 2013, Mujica’s economy minister, Fernando Lorenzo, and the president of the main state-owned bank, Fernando Calloia, had to resign over a scandal involving the 2012 liquidation of Pluna, the state-run airline. They were convicted years later, not for stealing money but for making illegal decisions detrimental to the administration.

When Mujica’s term was coming to an end, former President Julio María Sanguinetti accused him of “destroying” the fundamental values of Uruguayan society with his attitudes and policies. The way Sanguinetti saw things, Mujica despised the “institutional framework,” the law, and even basic decorum.

“The worst thing is the frivolity of contemporary society—this is even more true abroad— which has confused abandonment and carelessness with humility, pose with substance, impudence with sincerity, carelessness with republicanism,” Sanguinetti wrote in 2014.

Even though they remained in opposite political trenches, Mujica and Sanguinetti decided to leave the Senate on the same day in October 2020. The coronavirus pandemic was gaining traction in the country, and both leaders, over 80 years old, said they could not carry out their duties. The former presidents coordinated their departure as a message that Uruguayan unity was more important than political differences.

Mujica retires from his seat in the Senate on Oct. 20, 2020, in Montevideo. Ernesto Ryan/Getty Images

In his final speech to parliament, after listening to many colleagues and political rivals praise him, Mujica stressed that there was no place for hatred in his life because he knew what such feelings could generate. And he closed with a message for young people: “Succeeding in life is not winning. To succeed in life is to get up and start over every time you fall.”

After Mujica left office, critics assailed his ambivalent position on the dictatorship of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, criticisms that came both from detractors at home and from Maduro himself, who wanted his unequivocal support. When repression in Venezuela spiked in 2016, Mujica said Venezuelan leaders across the political spectrum were to blame, but added that Maduro was “crazy as a goat.”

Mujica’s agenda continued to be full of international activities. These included meetings with Santos and former FARC fighters to address the aftermath of Colombia’s peace agreement, a weekend with Noam Chomsky to film a documentary, online chats with author Yuval Noah Harari and musician Roger Waters, book presentations in Turkey and Japan, and the premiere in Cannes of a eulogistic film about Mujica shot by Emir Kusturica. In almost every regional election, leftist politicians sought his public support, though on many occasions, that support did not translate into victory.

Mujica stands at the entrance of his house during the filming of a documentary in Montevideo on Dec. 12, 2016. PABLO PORCIUNCULA/AFP via Getty Images

Mujica seemed largely unfazed by the attention. He would greet all visitors to his humble farm, including important politicians, in the same manner: dressed in garb soiled by the day’s work, his gray hair a mess, and protected by a small security detail of a couple police officers. If the visitors were lucky enough to get there after a harvest, they could get tomatoes handpicked by the former president.

Even though he was going through cancer treatment, the former guerrilla fighter still had the energy to perform one more act. In 2024, Orsi, one of Mujica’s political heirs, was elected president after a clear win in the national election. Mujica participated in political events and played a role in his party’s triumph.

Mujica announced in the first week of 2025 that he had decided to stop seeking further treatment for his cancer, noting that it had metastasized. He made the announcement in an interview with the Uruguayan weekly Búsqueda. “Honestly, I am dying,” he said candidly, with tears in his eyes. Mujica offered words of farewell to his compatriots as well as some self-criticism: “There is nothing like democracy. When I was young, I didn’t think like that, it’s true. I made a mistake. But today I fight for it. It is not the perfect society, [but] it is the best possible one.”