José Alberto Mujica Cordano – Tupamaros, President and El Pepe

Uruguay was once nicknamed the "Switzerland of Latin America" ​​as a prosperous, peaceful and stable country, which attracted many emigrants, mainly Spaniards and Italians.

Jose Muhika, born on May 20, 1935 in Montevideo, on his father's side he was a descendant of Basques who migrated to Uruguay in 1842 from the city of Mujica. His mother's family came from the valley of Fontanabuona in the province of Genoa, in the region of Liguria, near Rapallo. His mother was born in the Uruguayan town of Carmelo, where her parents, winegrowers, bought five hectares of land to grow grapes in the Colonia Estrelja area.

When José Mujica was six years old, his father, a poor rancher, went bankrupt and soon died in 1940.

During his youth, in the second half of the fifties of the last century, due to the decrease in demand on the European market, the Uruguayan agro-export economy was affected by a crisis.

photo: ap photo

Agriculture, which played a key role in Uruguayan exports, faltered, as did industrialization, which had served as a powerful economic stimulus in the 1930s.

Gold and foreign exchange reserves accumulated during World War II when Uruguay was militarily neutral and supplied Britain with raw materials were being depleted. Financial speculation reached large proportions, inflation grew and the national currency devalued. The IMF usually dictated a restrictive policy and cuts in public spending. Unemployment grew, and the purchasing power of the population, which previously had salaries like in Belgium or France, decreased.

PELUDOS REBELLION

In 1963, workers in the sugar industry revolted in the town of Bela Union, in the department of Artigas, 627 km from Montevideo, on Uruguay's border with Brazil and Argentina, where poverty, hunger, exploitation, illiteracy and cruelty reigned.

The state had no control over the relationship between workers and landowners, wages were meager and paid in coupons that could be spent in company canteens.

The working day lasted 10–12 hours, and vacations were not paid.

After the 1962 strike, the factory owner temporarily agreed to the workers' demands, but a month later fired all the strikers. Those strikes were organized by the Union of Sugar Plantation Workers (Unión de los Trabajadores Azucareros de Artigas), which was opposed by the police, the CIA and the official union subordinate to the North American company "American Factory", which was controlled by the latifundists. This new union represented the sugarcane cutters, who were called "peludos" ("hairy ones"), by analogy with the bristly mammal, the great hairy armadillo ("tatú peludo").

At the end of April 1962, the "peludos", together with their families, set off in trucks on a protest march to Montevideo, where they occupied the basement of the Transport Federation and set up camp in front of the Confederation of Trade Unions of Uruguay.

From 1962 to 1971, five marches were organized towards Montevideo, usually after the end of the sugar harvest seasons, which ignited social discontent in "well-fed Montevideo", where most of Uruguay's urban population lived. By the way, in 1964, out of 2.560.000 inhabitants of that country, 87,2 percent lived in cities.

However, the government and landowners continued to ignore demands to improve working conditions on the plantations and to nationalize 30.000 hectares of unused land. Clashes with the police, arrests and violence followed.

photo: reproduction

REVOLVER OR CONSTITUTION

Demonstrations broke out, solidarity strikes, fund-raising campaigns were launched to support the protesters, prayers were held with sermons in churches, and in left-wing parties, student organizations, among parliamentarians, intellectuals and priests, ways to get out of the crisis were increasingly discussed.

One of the organizers of the "peludos" union was Raul Sendik, who on March 22, 1963 left his studies at the Faculty of Law and headed north, in order to organize workers' meetings in the sugar cane thicket, lecture them on the law and encourage them to resist. In his article "Revolver or Constitution?", published in the newspaper of the Socialist Party of Uruguay "El Sol", one sentence read: "Today, a loaded revolver could give us many more guarantees than the Constitution of the Republic together with the laws designed to protect our rights".

The bourgeois National Party was in power in Uruguay. Traditional left parties (communist and socialist) fought for power within the existing system and considered the methods of armed struggle inappropriate in the given conditions.

The pro-Soviet Communist Party with about 40.000 members emphasized the fruitfulness of the partisan movement as a possible form of struggle in politically favorable conditions, but warned: "Putting an isolated vanguard under enemy fire and allowing the other side to exterminate the best cadres would mean a heroic sacrifice, but it would be irreparable folly."

However, the pro-Castro Revolutionary Movement of Uruguay rapidly increased its membership in the early 1960s, possibly by attracting members of the Communist Party. A small circle of left-wing activists from the Federation of Anarchists of Uruguay, the Eastern Revolutionary Movement, the Union of Young Communists, the left wing of the Socialist Party, as well as revolutionaries from Brazil and Argentina became radicalized.

In La Teja, a working-class neighborhood in Montevideo, where many union activists lived, political discussions were held about the Cuban Revolution (1959) and the so-called The Havana Declarations of 1960 and 1962 condemned: US interference in the internal affairs of Latin American countries; latifundism, exploitation, inequality, racial discrimination and indicated the possibility and necessity of overthrowing North American imperialism in Latin America.

A NIGHT WITH CHE GUEVARA

photo: alberto korda

When the "New Yorker" reporter first met Jose Mujica in Havana in the mid-nineties, he said that in the 1960s he attended a night meeting between Che Guevara and the Tupamaros leader Raul Sendik, in a safe house outside Montevideo. A disguised Che Guevara traveled from Cuba to Bolivia, where he would die on October 9, 1967. In addition to a fake Uruguayan passport and other logistical support, Che demanded that Uruguayan leftists commit themselves to the continental guerrilla struggle that he tried to initiate.

"We were very aware that, due to the dimensions of Uruguay and the context of that time, we had to be part of something bigger", Mujica will say.

The publication of Che Guevara's book probably also influenced ideas about the need to switch to armed struggle Guerrilla warfare.

According to the memoirs of Julio Marenales, Che's theory of the "guerrilla hearth", according to which the popular forces can defeat the regular army, and a small "engine" can start a "big engine", was one of the fundamental ideas of the National Liberation Movement - Tupamaros (Spanish: Tupamaros, Movimiento de Liberacion Nacional), founded in the small tourist town of Park del Plata, in the south of Uruguay.

Tupamaros, by the way, is an abbreviation of the name Tupak Amaru. That member of the Inca people was the leader of the uprising against the Spanish crown in the viceroyalty of Peru in 1781. Tupamaros were also called rebellious gauchos, brave and disobedient horsemen, led by José Gervasio Artigas (1764–1850), the father of Uruguay's independence.

In university circles, one group distributed a 10-page pamphlet called "Tupamaros", with a pentacle and the slogan "Arm and wait". The graffiti on the walls in Montreal also spoke about it.

In the late 1960s, the Uruguayan Anarchist Federation created its armed wing, the Popular Revolutionary Organization (Organización Popular Revolucionaria, OPR-33). The hero of our story, a member of the National Pariah from the 1950s, José Pepe Mujica, also belonged to the anarchists, who claimed that he had not killed anyone and that he considered it a greater crime to set up a bank than to rob it.

THREE BANKS ROBBERED FROM THE FUNERAL PROCESSION

The initial plan of the Tupamaros was to arm, finance and prepare for armed struggle, but not to wage it. They imposed a "revolutionary tax" on the rich layers of society, forced the ransom of captured officials, financiers and industrialists, robbed banks and weapons warehouses.

In the operation "Swiss Shooting Range" in 1963, they stole weapons and ammunition from the Tiro Suizo shooting range in the city of Nueva Helvesia, in the south of Uruguay, which was inhabited by Swiss immigrants, so it was previously called the Swiss Colony.

In December 1963, before Christmas, they seized trucks with food and candy and distributed them in a Robin Hood fashion to the people of the Montevideo slums.

At 13:8 p.m. on October 1969, 50, about 32 Tupamaros, disguised as a funeral procession, entered the town of Pando, XNUMX kilometers from Montreal, and posing as members of the Uruguayan Air Force, occupied the police and fire station and blocked the telephone switchboard.

They then broke into the branches of three banks - Banco Pan de Asucar, Banco La Caja Obrera and Banco de la Republika Oriental del Uruguay - and took what was then US$357.000, which would be more than three million dollars today.

After 20 minutes the Tupamaros began to retreat, once again simulating a funeral procession. The police opened fire. There were dead and wounded, twenty Tupamaros were arrested, among them Raul Sendik, who later escaped.

As a sign of protest against the economic blockade of Cuba, they carried out bomb attacks on the property of some North American companies and the homes of their executives. They then kidnapped the powerful bank executive Ulises Pereira Reverbel and the British ambassador to Uruguay, Geoffrey Jackson.

In 1970, the Tupamaros carried out a surprise raid on the Laval training center in Montevideo and took about 400 weapons and significant amounts of ammunition without firing a single shot…

They also robbed customs in Bella Union. From the Uruguayan police station, they released "peludos" arrested for trade union activities, etc.

THE MURDER OF DAN MITRION

A 1971 CIA file says: "From a public relations standpoint, the terrorists' most serious gaffe occurred as a result of their multiple kidnapping operations in July and August 1970. Within a week, the terrorists took three hostages and narrowly missed three more attempts. When the government offered to release all 'political prisoners' in exchange for US USAID adviser Dan Mitrione (Daniel Anthony "Dan" Mitrione, some say, a CIA agent, first. RED), he was killed. Subsequent reports cast some doubt on whether Mitrione's killing was the result of a high-level political decision or the panic created when massive police manhunts led to the arrest of several high-ranking National Liberation Movement figures. It was the only case among the ten kidnappings attributed to the organization in which the demands were backed up by a threat to execute the hostage, supporting the argument that his killing was a calculated political decision.

Mitrione's killing first sparked widespread public outcry against the terrorists and increased public support for the security forces. Because of the general feeling of revulsion caused by the murder, the population was more inclined to provide anonymous clues to the police…” (CIA 1971)

Despite this, the Tupamaros actively continued their "direct actions" against military and police officials. On April 1972, XNUMX, the right-wing deputy minister of the interior, Armando Acosta i Lara, and three policemen and intelligence officers were killed.

The influence of the Tupamaros spread in Uruguay, Venezuela and elsewhere in Latin America, and the actions of the Tupamaros as urban guerrillas were copied by European organizations of the radical left such as the Tupamaros of Munich, the Tupamaros of West Berlin, the Red Army Faction in Germany….

"In 1968, the police estimated that the terrorists included 50 activists and about 1.000 supporters or peripheral members. By the end of 1970, official police estimates had risen to 1.000 activists and 3.000 associates and supporters - a likely overestimate...", stated that 1971 CIA file, noting that the Tupamaros survived. arresting all its early leaders, as they were replaced by long ones.

The list of those arrested showed that most of the ordinary Tupamaros were disaffected youth. Some of the attackers of private residences were between 17 and 21 years old. Priests, politicians, doctors and lawyers were discovered in the guerrilla ranks, and there were suspicions that there were sympathizers in some of the ministries, and, probably, active Tupamaros as well.

"THE TUPAMAROS HAVE ESCAPE! THE TUPAMAROS HAVE ESCAPE! "

After the arrest of Raul Sendik and eight other activists, Jose Pepe Mujica was also arrested in 1970 when he was surrounded by the police in the La Via bar. Jose Mujica was hit by six bullets during the raid.

"At the Military Hospital, I was treated by a surgeon who was a friend, a tupamaros at heart. He gave me a bucket of blood and saved me. It makes you believe in God," Mujica remembers.

His escape from prison was spectacular. On Monday, September 6, 1971, at five in the morning, six women ran up to the outer wall of the Punta Carretas prison in Montevideo and shouted: "The Tupamaros have escaped! The Tupamaros have escaped! We have been kidnapped for more than ten hours..." The guards who were watching them sarcastically replied that they should not be disturbed with nonsense in the morning: "Go to sleep, you bastards!"

Among those women was Serrana Auliso, who was 42 years old at the time and lived with her mother in a house across the street from the prison. Today she is 96 years old and she vividly remembers that right under the chair from which she spoke to the reporter of "El Pais", through a small hole in the middle of her living room, 106 guerrillas of the National Liberation Movement - Tupamaros, including Jose Pepe Mujica, escaped.

She told how the son of her tenant, a divorced teacher, twenty-year-old Billy came one day with some people she didn't know and said that those guys were tupamaros and that they needed a house for some work, and that they took her, her mother and two other women to an apartment in the yard, where they stayed from seven in the evening until five in the morning. They were guarded by an armed man.

She finally realized what was happening when she was taken out of her custody to answer a phone call that she had to answer with a code. There she saw a hole in the floor, piled furniture, earth scattered on the white tiles, and people working quietly in the dark. Then she realized that it was a prison break. "They dug a tunnel all the way to the wall, but they didn't take into account that the house was higher. They got there and couldn't find a way out. One of the men who occupied my house, a neighbor of mine, brought a young man with a stethoscope. I thought he was going to check the health of his comrades, but it turned out that he was just listening to the noise in the floor, to decide where to dig and raise the tiles..."

Before the mid-1970s, police response to largely successful Tupamaros operations was often slow and investigations sloppy. Coordination between branches of government was sometimes quite poor; the intelligence was not adequate. The entire security system suffered from careless operation. Prisons, for example, were managed by the Ministry of Culture rather than the Ministry of the Interior or the security forces, a reflection of Uruguay's emphasis on rehabilitation rather than isolation. When the terrorists staged a "spectacular" prison break in March 1970 and freed 13 imprisoned female gang members, allegedly guarded by an unarmed guard and a group of nuns, the culture minister resigned.

After that, the responsibility for the prison system was transferred to the Ministry of the Interior in 1971, a special prison was established for important Tupamaros and police pursuits were intensified.

During the military dictatorship, from 1973, the number of victims of torture per capita in Uruguay was the highest of all Latin American countries. The ultra-right terrorist organization Nationalist Armed Defense (Defensa Armada Nacionalista, DAN) carried out attacks, kidnappings, tortures and murders of opponents of the regime in cooperation with the police and intelligence services.

photo: agency fotografia camaratres

A PRESIDENT WHO DOESN'T TAKE VENGEANCE

All the fugitives from Punta Carretas were recaptured. And Mujica was one of the "nine hostages" that the army kept alive in inhumane conditions as a guarantee that the Tupamaros would not carry out attacks.

In the book Jose Muhika: Peaceful revolution, Mauricio Rauffetti describes how Mujica was brutally and systematically tortured, physically and psychologically, in prison. He suffered from beatings and humiliation. He lived on half a ration of food and water. He had intestinal and kidney diseases. He lost his teeth. His body had reached its limits. His psyche, too. He spent most of his imprisonment in a solitary underground cell with no contact with other people...

"I was locked up for seven years in a room smaller than this one. Without a book, without anything to read. They took me out once a month, twice a month, to walk around the yard for half an hour. Seven years like that. Then I was there for another five years and they allowed me to read science, physics and chemistry books. I was on the verge of going crazy," said Mujica.

After the end of the dictatorship in 1985, the Tupamaros were formally disarmed, and José Mujica got involved in politics: in 1989, he was elected as a deputy and then as a senator of the Broad Front coalition (Frente Amplio).

The magazine "Forin Polisi" describes how former leftist guerrilla and prisoner Jose Mujica woke up on February 15, 2005, "ready to write history." As the senator who received more votes than anyone else, during the swearing-in ceremony he conducted a ceremonial review of the 1st Infantry Battalion, named "Florida". In the XNUMXs, the same unit was in charge of the detention center where Mujica and several of his comrades were tortured.

When he came to power after the end of the dictatorship, Mujica never tried to take revenge on his jailers, even at the cost of bitter disputes between him and human rights organizations that advocate for the victims of the military dictatorship.

"Why did you decide to turn the page?", the "Paisa" reporter asked him.

"I didn't turn the page. I just didn't waste time on revenge. You don't live on memories - there are things you can't change. They are what they are. There are wounds in life that have no cure and you have to learn to keep living. I know there are people who won't support me, but I chose a more intelligent and less sentimental attitude..."

"Are we talking about wound healing?"

"There are wounds that don't heal and you have to learn to live with them."

"Do you have many open wounds?"

"If I try to take revenge... God forbid!"

Jose Mujica, better known as Pepe, was elected president in 2009. At the inauguration, according to tradition, he received the presidential ribbon from the senator who received the most votes: Mrs. Topolanski.

"The photo of you arriving at the Legislative Palace on a motorcycle is very well known," noted the "Paisa" journalist.

"I remember on the first day I saw that there was a space under the eaves of the building and it occurred to me to park it there. It immediately became a motorcycle garage. And it still is today. It was the most positive thing I did in parliament," Mujica will say with a laugh.

A journalist made up a story that a soldier asked him if he would leave his bike there for a long time, and that he replied: "Five years, if they let me."

"It never happened, but denying it was useless. It became the truth everywhere because it was a brilliant lie," he will say.

When asked by "Paisa": "In 2009, you won the presidential election with 54,6 percent of the vote. What is it like to learn how to be president?"

He replied: "It's a real disaster, because you take over the office and discover things you had no idea about. It's terrible..."

At the end of his term, the "New York Times" stated: "Although his ambitions often exceeded his ability to fulfill political promises, the progressive legislation his administration adopted enjoyed global praise."

photo: reproduction

El Pepe Mujica never gave up his leftist views and expressed solidarity with other leftist presidents including Fidel Castro, Hugo Chávez and Lula de Silva, and later with Chile's Gabrielo Borria and Mexico's Claudia Scheinbaum. But he was also a pragmatist, able to engage with domestic political opponents and with foreign leaders to his right.

He was sometimes compared to Nelson Mandela, also a legendary political prisoner.

His legacy is above all the way he lived and what he was when he had power - not His Excellency José Alberto Mujica Cordano, but El Pepe.

photo: ap photo

From 2010 to 2015, he served as president, confusing the establishment with his brash charisma, lack of desire for revenge, and marked modesty.

Of his $12.500 presidential salary, he kept only $1.250 for himself and gave the rest to charity. The village school built with that money is only 210 meters from his country house in Rincón del Cerro, 16 kilometers from Montevideo. From there, he drove to the presidential residence in a sky blue 1987 Volkswagen Beetle.

TWO UTOPIAS OF JOSE AND LUCIJA

He and Lucia Topolanski found the house in March 1985, the day after he was released from prison, they went on their bicycles to look for a place outside the city to live.

Jose Mujica and Lucia Topolanski have been married for a long time — to the party, the "New York Times" will write, describing how the two met in the early 1970s. He led a group of armed rebels. She was an expert in forging documents. They robbed banks, organized prison breaks and were in love.

"It was the early 1970s, and Jose Mujica and Lucia Topolanski were members of the violent left-wing guerrilla group Tupamaros. For them, their crimes were justified: they were fighting against a repressive government," wrote the New York Times.

He was 37 and she was 27 when they met for the first time during a covert operation. "It was like a flash of lightning in the night," Mr. Mujica recalled many years later.

"In the middle of the war, they found love. But just a few weeks later, they were thrown into prison, where they were tortured and abused. During 13 years, they managed to exchange only one letter. The guards confiscated the rest," continues the "New York Times". Prison took away their chance to have children.

In 2005, they had been living together for 20 years, but were still not married. One evening, Jose Mujica told a national television show that he was going to get married. "I watched the show and that's how I found out," Mrs. Topolanski recalled, laughing.

They were married in a simple home ceremony. They were sometimes seen listening to tango in one of their favorite bars in Montevideo, but that night they went to a political rally.

"We have united two utopias," Mrs. Topolanski told a documentary filmmaker many years ago. "The utopia of love and the utopia of political struggle."

When he visited their country house in 2017, a New Yorker reporter met El Pepo outside at the guardhouse, a dilapidated structure where El Turco, his faithful bodyguard, was stationed. While they chatted, El Pepe, with that short, stocky figure of his with a mustache and disheveled hair, dressed in crumpled, worn clothes, eyes sparkling with ironic humor, rolled cigarettes, one after another - secretly, away from the eyes of Lucia, who forbade him to smoke. Several dogs were hanging around, including a one-legged mongrel named Manuela, who often accompanied Mr. Mujica when he was president.

To the right was a bench made of soda caps where the former King of Spain, Juan Carlos I, sat in 2015. "You have the misfortune of being a king: they put you in a flower vase," Mujica told the monarch at the time.

photo: ap

EXTENDED FORGIVENESS

In April 2024, Lucia and Pepe entered one of their most difficult periods. Jose Mujica was diagnosed with a tumor in his esophagus. Radiotherapy has weakened him. The small living room where Mujica spent part of the day, surrounded by books, small sculptures, paintings and photographs, was about two meters wide and four meters long. A narrow library separated it from the country-style kitchen, where there was a large table with four chairs.

There was a wood stove, a television and a pair of mismatched chairs. A white light bulb hung from the ceiling.

On the small table was a glass of water and a box of tissues. José Mujica sat in front of the wood stove. He lifted his light blue shirt and showed the New Yorker reporter the gauze that covered the hole on his body. That's how he received food.

"He's so weird ... He's been shot nine times in his life. When they put the barrel in, they found an old bullet hole and put it through," said his wife, Lucia Topolanski, helping him put on an extra layer of clothing as the sun set.

The last few months of his life were an extended farewell as old friends, journalists and heads of state came to see him one last time, wrote John Lee Anderson, a reporter for The New Yorker on May 16, 2025.

José Alberto Mujica Cordano, for the friends of El Pepe, died on May 13, 2025 at the age of 99.

"Mujica was many things," writes the New Yorker reporter, "but above all he was a kind-hearted man who spent his life fighting for a more just future for his country, first as an armed fighter and later as Uruguay's oldest statesman."

Emir Kusturica's documentary film about Jose Mujica, which had its world premiere at the 75th Mostri (2018), has an adequate title - El Pepe, a sublime life.