Free Radicals

In 2013, President José “Pepe” Mujica of Uruguay gave a keynote speech on climate change to the United Nations. That most macro of problems, he argued to the assembled dignitaries, was intimately related to the more personal one of consumerism. Globalization, he said, had quickened humanity’s collective drive for accumulation, such that ours had become “a civilization against simplicity, against sobriety, against all natural cycles; worse yet, it is a civilization against freedom, which requires time to experience human relationships and the most important things: love, friendship, adventure, solidarity and family.”

Simplicity he knew well. Mujica spent the 1960s and 1970s as a militant in the Tupamaros, a Robin-Hoodish group of leftist guerrillas battling against a military dictatorship backed by the U.S. government. He was in jail for fourteen years, much of that time in solitary confinement. It was there, he told the New York Times in 2023, that he developed his tender connection with the living world: “I kept some frogs as pets in prison and bathed them with my drinking water,” he said. “The true revolution is a different culture: learning to live with less waste and more time to enjoy freedom.”

Liberated with the fall of the dictatorship in 1985, Mujica became involved with party politics, founding the Movement of Popular Participation (MPP) alongside other former Tupamaros. By 1995, he was a representative in Uruguay’s General Assembly; five years later he was a senator; and in 2010 he became president. His pensive and sober approach to public office made him a figure of global renown: he never stopped driving his teal 1987 Volkswagen Beetle, rode his sixty-year-old bike to work, and donated 90 percent of his salary to charity. Forgoing a move to the presidential palace, he instead opted to continue living with his wife, the then-senator and later vice president Lucía Topolansky, in a three-room house on their chrysanthemum farm on the outskirts of Montevideo.

Mujica passed away on May 13 from esophageal cancer. I only encountered him once, from afar, at the fiftieth anniversary commemorations of the Chilean coup in 2023. Mujica attended alongside other luminaries of the hemispheric left—he had long emphasized the importance of greater social and political integration among the peoples of Latin America. Already sick then, the teddy-bearish man shuffled slowly, small and round, and was met with waves of exuberant appreciation. I had hoped I’d find some excuse to visit with him: he spent his later years patiently receiving a steady stream of international journalists and documentarians eager to parse his wisdom. In one such interview with El Pais in 2024, he spoke of what was to come with equanimity: “I gave meaning to my life,” he said. “I’m going to die happy. Not happy to be dying, but because I set the bar high above me. Nothing more. I didn’t have a wasted life, because I didn’t spend my life just consuming things. I spent it dreaming, fighting, struggling. They beat me up and all that, but it doesn’t matter, I don’t have no debts to pay. Lucía and I spent our youth on this whole adventure of living.” And not just their youth.

Though Mujica did not publish much writing, his views on life and politics live on through the corpus of visitors’ interviews. Mujica spoke, in his old age, about his return to reading the Greeks, so as to think through questions of democracy; just as well, then, that his thought is encapsulated in such Socratic form. A well-timed new addition, out last month from Verso, takes the form of a lengthy series of conversations between Mujica and the leftist linguist Noam Chomsky, moderated by the Mexican documentarian Saúl Alvídrez. Surviving the 21st Century, compiling transcripts of conversations for a companion documentary, sees the two men holding forth on empire, the environment, love, and China.

The talks—interspersed with selections from a 2017 lecture of Chomsky’s at Montevideo City Hall—mostly took place that same year, with both men already in their eighties. They take stock of the global situation: humanity threatened with devastation from potential nuclear war and accelerating climate change, yet unable to act to address either, thanks to a rotted public sphere given over to market imperatives and narrow elite interests. The two old lions also reflect on their own political histories and philosophies. They share a left-libertarian horizon, in which people might author their own lives and destinies, freed from the strictures of capital and the domination of an overweening central state alike. Workers’ cooperatives, which could encourage democratized economic production, play a key role in Mujica’s vision.

In bringing his interlocutors together, Alvídrez’s instincts were sharp. The sensibilities of the two men chime nicely. Chomsky’s understanding of South American politics is clearly influenced by his marriage to the Brazilian Valéria Wasserman Chomsky, who, like Mujica’s wife Topolansky, pops into the conversations from time to time. Occasionally the viejitos complain about the uncertain fortitude of today’s youth, in whom they nonetheless find hope. The conversations are most touching when exploring questions of how to live, which Chomsky and Mujica tether to, though never fully reduce to, the political. To wit: Chomsky, hearing Mujica’s proposal that happiness depends on a pursuit of one’s commitments in time away from work, accepts and inverts the formulation: “And when there is that freedom, work can be the most satisfying part, or one of the most satisfying parts, of life. Being involved in creative work under your own control is an incomparable experience, and the fact that people are deprived of this is something that must be prioritized. This is something that anyone can do, whether it’s research in a physics lab or fixing your car in the garage on the weekend.” And onward they philosophize.

Elsewhere, their conversations focus more squarely on political economy—though even these are sprinkled with charming asides. In response to a question of Chomsky’s about the Union of South American Nations never addressing the “problem of concentrating on the export of primary goods and importing cheap manufactured goods, which destroyed national manufacturing industries,” Mujica offers a consideration of economic planning in the region before closing with a joke: “There is a popular saying in the Río de la Plata that says when God was making Argentina, he gave it so many things that St. Peter said: ‘No, wait, you are giving them too much.’ And God replied: ‘Don’t worry, I’m going to put the Argentines there.’”

We hear less in Alvídrez’s volume about Mujica’s time in office and about his youthful militancy. I often wonder what the younger, brasher Mujica might have thought of his time later administering the Uruguayan state. His change of strategy, if not of heart, took place within the evolution of the Tupamaros movement. As hundreds of imprisoned Tupamaros prepared for their release as part of the transition to democracy, their leader Raúl Sendic decided that the time had come to lay their weapons down and instead institutionalize their militancy. In a 1985 speech at a Montevideo athletic club, Mujica was charged with publicly explaining the former revolutionaries’ thinking, recalls journalist Mauricio Rabuffetti in 2014’s Pepe Mujica: The Calm Revolution. “One has to have wisdom not to ask of the people what the people can’t give,” he said. “Because if our impatience means asking more of men than what they can give, we’ll expose ourselves to failure and them to ruin.”

Late in life, he continued to believe that this transition had been the right one. Answering one of Alvídrez’s questions about revolutionary vanguardism, Mujica offers a clue: “I believe in the permanent existence of the left, but it will not be the left as it was,” he says. “What it was, is gone, has passed! The left will have to be different because time changes. The only permanent thing is change.” The shifting nature of his political action speaks to a strategic flexibility. The political actor learns empirically what does and does not work. In the context of the Cold War in Latin America, Mujica visited revolutionary Cuba and came to believe that advancing toward liberation involved taking up arms against the state. Like so many of the continent’s communists and socialists in those years, he was met with violence—he was shot six times by police during his 1970 arrest, and nearly died. (He credits a Tupamaro-friendly doctor with saving his life.) Three decades later, given parliamentary avenues for redress, he steered the state apparatus to advance his vision of freedom and ecological balance. He had aged, and Uruguay had changed. Key is the dialogue between the intellectual and the politician: to know how to act effectively depends on grasping the political moment.

How might Mujica act in our own political moment? “I sometimes ask myself: Why did I hurry to be born?” he muses in Surviving the 21st Century. “I would have liked to have been born later and be able to fight today’s battles with the younger generation.” Mujica’s late-in-life emphases can be boiled down to the importance of a sober anti-consumerism to guard against the acquisitive thirst that entraps capitalism’s subjects, the necessity of confronting market forces to achieve ecological harmony, and the protagonism of cooperatives in building a more democratic society. He was, in his way, a degrowther.

Supporters of degrowth have theorized theirs as a project for cultivating a more harmonious relationship between human society and its natural environment, so as to preclude cooking the planet. “Degrowth is a transition from quantity (growth) to quality (flourishing),” writes philosopher Kohei Saito in 2024’s Slow Down: The Degrowth Manifesto. “It’s a grand plan to transform the economy to a model that prioritizes the shrinking of the economic gap, the expansion of social security, and the maximization of free time, all while respecting planetary boundaries.” Reducing inequality is also essential to the program, for the persistence of scarcity for the working class continues to shackle them to long working hours: “If growth is stalling but the gap between the rich and poor is still widening, degrowth is not taking place,” Saito writes. “Even if production shrinks, the resulting rise in unemployment is a far cry from ‘maximizing free time.’”

Free time well spent: such was Mujica’s hope for humanity. Saito, aiming at the same, prescribes a “degrowth communism” predicated on reinstating various forms of commons in the systems by which we live. Land, energy, natural resources, and knowledge could all be de-privatized and instead stewarded and managed by collectives of local citizens. And to sideline the distorting power of capital over production, economic activity would be in the hands of workers’ cooperatives. The society that might then emerge, argues Saito, would be one of production for need rather than exchange value, one in which environmental costs are not displaced to faraway places, and one in which an absence of cultivated scarcity would allow for more free time for the average person. The upshot Saito terms “radical abundance”: the phrase captures Mujica’s ethic nicely.

Part of the power of Mujica’s life story is its tripartite arc, like a butterfly’s. The youthful revolutionary, encased for years in his solitary cocoon, emerges a sage and a statesman and friend of the frogs. Like Dilma Rousseff of Brazil and Gustavo Petro of Colombia, likewise imprisoned for their participation in leftist guerrilla movements before later leading their respective countries as president, he endeavored to maintain his earlier political principles through his later march through the institutions. Speaking with Spanish documentarian Guillermo García López in 2016, Mujica held forth on “the tragedy of civilization: those on the bottom, those that protest, many of them within twenty or twenty-five years may be the ones on top, and they’re going to act according to models of civilization like those on top today.” Thus are the critics of capitalist accumulation captured by the logic of the systems they bemoan. “Unless,” that is, “they have a long education of a collective nature, so they understand things like: I’m on top, but I’m still on the bottom.” A certain continuity of practice helps: Mujica’s father died when he was a young child, and he took as a boy to chrysanthemum cultivation to help support his family. He would return to growing and selling the flowers upon his release from jail.

Connected to the struggles of his people via both party organization and a profound cultural affinity, Mujica saw governing as a matter of a conductor aligning disparate forces. To be a president is to be powerful, Alvídrez prods Mujica in Surviving the 21st Century. “No!” Mujica replies. “It’s just being a figurehead, so that people can amuse themselves criticizing you. . . . Power is elusive. Power is distributed among those who manage the society. So, to be president is to try to negotiate among these contradictions.” In Mujica’s time in office, he negotiated the achievement of expanded personal freedoms in Uruguay: the legalization of abortion in 2012, of same-sex marriage in 2013, and of recreational cannabis the same year. His Frente Amplio (Broad Front) coalition won power in the 2004 elections, whereupon he became minister of agriculture. Their entrance into office coincided with a boom in global commodity prices that benefitted South American economic fortunes generally. Within a decade, poverty fell from 39.9 percent to 9.7 percent and extreme poverty from 4.7 to 0.3 percent, and the country was the most equal in the continent as measured by Gini coefficient. Mujica also helped to midwife the rapid buildout of Uruguay’s renewable energy sector, led by the state energy company—by 2023, Uruguay relied on 98 percent renewable power, among the highest such figures in the world. Still, the Frente Amplio’s time in office did not manage to meaningfully diversify the country’s underlying economic model. As Mujica departed from office, a global commodities downturn undermined the coalition’s momentum, and they were voted out in 2019.

Last year, the Frente Amplio returned to power under president Yamandú Orsi, a history teacher who spent his youth under military dictatorship before becoming infatuated with politics upon Uruguay’s return to democracy. Like Mujica, Orsi grew up the son of a farmer, and like his mentor he retains a hushed appreciation for the countryside, where he became a mayor in the interior town of Canelones. In the country’s elections last year, Mujica championed and campaigned alongside the younger Orsi. Here, then, is one final small gift of Mujica’s: the old showman, having played his role with brio, knew when it was time to shuffle offstage. But he made sure to bequeath both a more decent Uruguay than he was born into, and a left movement capable of continuing to fight on for the ability of common people to author and enjoy their lives. Nobody ever seemed so free.