The great José ‘PEPE MUJICA’ is gone. Yes, that’s right, in capital letters. I write this column with deep sorrow for the departure of a revolutionary, of a politician who knew how to honour the exercise of power.
Germán Ayala Osorio*
From a man who lived almost like a Carthusian monk, ‘light on his feet’, without the ambitions of those who assumed politics and power as a way to accumulate wealth in the midst of their undeniable ethical and moral precariousness.
Those who seek to ‘make two Houses and two Senates’ and then flee to enjoy wealth on a paradisiacal beach.
He said that he laughed when people called him a Marxist. And he would reply: ‘I am not a Marxist, I am stoic, light on my feet, nothing too much’. Because of the affection he professed for Colombia, it is inevitable to involve in this heartfelt tribute and farewell to the Great Pepe, the local politicians who have become the antipodes of the life led by the former Uruguayan president.
Mujica dressed up as a guerrilla to take up arms against the Uruguayan state and ended up becoming an ethical reference for his compatriots and the peoples of Latin America who today mourn his inevitable departure. Guided by the Aymaras, he accepted the rules of democracy and from the Suárez Residence tried to deepen democracy in his small but dignified Republic.
In Colombia there are politicians who boast of leading exemplary lives because they ‘never took up arms against the state’. Countless times so far in this government we have heard this phrase from those in the executive and legislative branches who have ‘declared war’ on the poor, the vulnerable, the Afro-Colombian, indigenous and peasant peoples, and on nature with their neoliberal policies.
That phrase reflects the moral and classist journey of those who never understood what it means to build and live in a Republic. Greed turned them into victimizers and gravediggers of the everlasting desire of millions of Colombians to one day build a true democracy in Colombia.
He advised and criticised Chávez and Lula Da Silva himself. In a memorable interview he said: “Rescuing 40 million from poverty, as happened to Lula, will not be touching the sky with your hands, much less building socialism, but those forty who eat every day, those forty million, is something very left-wing. But those forty who eat every day, those forty million, is a very left-wing thing to do. Why? Because to be left is to be in solidarity… Then there is another stage. I believe in socialism, but I don’t believe in statism. And I believe that the construction of socialism means a much more educated, much more intelligent and much richer society. I believe that countries like Sweden have come much closer to what socialism can be, or Norway, than the failed attempts we have had… I am an enemy of bureaucracy… I distrust when the state becomes too big, when it can replace the initiative of the people… When Chávez passes, there will be a lot of millions of Venezuelans who lived in misery who will be living a little better, who will have a better house and a health service, but they will not have built any socialism, but humanity will have improved”.
Unattached to the vagaries of power and incapable of falling into and being a protagonist of the ‘bonfire of vanities’ of which a significant number of Latin American presidents took part, Mujica is the mirror in which Colombian heads of state such as Juan Manuel Santos, Iván Duque Márquez, César Gaviria, Julio César Turbay Ayala and much less the most pernicious – almost evil – of all Colombian presidents, Álvaro Uribe Vélez, could never look at themselves.
And it is not that they suffer from Capgras syndrome. No. It is enough for them to reflect on the perfidies they incurred and the cynical ways in which they exercised power, because as Mujica said, power ignites all your demons.
The Great Pepe is gone, but the demons of fascism, genocide, ethnic supremacy as a socio-cultural and political practice in racist and classist countries like Colombia remain in this hemisphere and in the rest of the world.
Perhaps if in Colombia we had at least 5 Pepes in the Constitutional Court, in the Council of State, in the Supreme Court of Justice, in Congress, in the rectorships of private and public universities, we could overcome the civilising defects of that elite that will always look down on stoics like Pepe Mujica. Farewell, Pepe.
Addendum: before Pepe Mujica’s death, the newspaper El Espectador published the following note on the X network: ‘On Sunday, Uruguayan President Yamandú Orsi, Mujica’s dauphin, asked for respect for the ex-guerrilla’s privacy’. Although the tweet was deleted, the Bogota-based newspaper took up the journey of moral superiority that accompanies those who still boast of ‘never having taken up arms against the state’ and who are responsible for generating poverty, the murder of 6402 young people (false positives) and the consolidation of a murderous state.
*German Ayala: Political Scientist, Specialist in Contemporary Humanities and Social Communicator-Journalist. Author of the blog La otra tribuna.
(Photos: Pixabay)
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