Uruguay’s former president José Mujica, an icon of Latin America’s left who was nicknamed the “world’s poorest president”, has died aged 89.
Mujica, a former guerrilla widely known as Pepe, led a centre-left government in Uruguay from 2010 to 2015. He was diagnosed with oesophageal cancer in 2024.
“We are going to miss you very much dear old man,” Uruguay’s current centre-left President Yamandú Orsi, a longtime protégé of Mujica, said as he announced his death on X on Tuesday. “Thank you for all you gave us and for your deep love for your people.”
Mujica became famous far beyond Uruguay, a tiny country of 3.5mn, after forgoing Montevideo’s presidential palace to live in a small farmhouse where he drove an old Volkswagen Beetle and gave away most of his salary. His unusual choices distinguished him in a region where many leftwing leaders have been dogged by corruption accusations.
He also implemented world-leading progressive reforms, including making Uruguay the first country to legalise marijuana in 2013.
“We deeply regret the death of our beloved Pepe Mujica, whose wisdom, thought and simplicity were an example for Latin America and the entire world,” Mexico’s leftist President Claudia Sheinbaum said on X.
Brian Winter, executive vice-president of the Americas Society and Council of the Americas, a Washington-based think-tank, said “people across the political spectrum appreciated his democratic spirit — the one-time guerrilla who ultimately embraced his former rivals at home, and his emphatic rejection of the Venezuelan dictatorship”.
“In his lifetime Uruguay became a model democracy in Latin America and the world, thanks in part to Mujica’s leadership,” he added.
Mujica took up arms in the 1960s as part of the Tupamaro guerrilla group that fought against Uruguay’s democratically elected but repressive government, which eventually gave way to a military dictatorship.
He spent more than a decade in prison, where he was tortured and spent long stretches in solitary confinement.
After Uruguay’s return to democracy in 1985, Mujica entered politics as part of the leftwing Frente Amplio and was elected to Congress in 1994. He was elected president in 2009, at 74 years old.
His administration oversaw a flurry of social reforms, including the decriminalisation of elective abortion in 2012 and the legalisation of same-sex marriage in 2013.
But it did not pursue radical economic reforms as some leftwing leaders in the region did. Mujica said in a 2014 interview with the Guardian that he “[needed] capitalism to work” to generate taxes to pay for poverty-reduction schemes.
Uruguay is one of the wealthiest and most politically stable countries in Latin America, with much lower borrowing costs than its neighbours Argentina and Brazil.
Mujica told the newspaper El País that he would “die happy” in an interview in late 2024.
“Not happy to be dying, but because I set the bar high above me,” he said. “I didn’t spend my life just consuming things. I spent it dreaming, fighting, struggling.”
