José Mujica, the fetish of progressivism

By: Hugo Marcelo Balderrama - 19/05/2025

Guest columnist.
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José, Pepe, and Mujica died. His most devoted fans, and many other confused aficionados, emphasized his "humility" and "sincere nature," as he never stopped driving his old Beetle and his private life was always austere. I'm sorry, but this is nothing more than a marketing campaign very similar to the one they mounted for Evo Morales, Hugo Chávez, or Fidel Castro. All champions of "modesty"; yet they subjected their nations to the cruelest misery.

José Mujica was born on May 20, 1935, in Montevideo, Uruguay. From a young age, he was active in the radical left, and in the 1960s, he joined the Tupamaros armed group, an urban guerrilla movement inspired by the Cuban Revolution. Like all criminals who received Cuban training, the Tupamaros were far from a peaceful organization. They were responsible for kidnappings, murders, bombings, bank robberies, and extortion. Their goal was to impose a socialist revolution in Uruguay. In December 1971, specifically, they committed one of their most famous massacres, the assassination of Pascasio Báez.

Pascasio Báez Mena (1925-1971) was a rural laborer from the Pan de Azúcar area, living in the city's Escuela Industrial neighborhood. He was married with two children. Like a significant portion of the country's rural population, he sympathized with the National Party, although he was not actively involved in politics. He worked in construction and fence-making.

On the day of his disappearance, according to family accounts, he had gone out to look for a neighbor's lost horse, which had entered the Espartacus ranch. Pascasio was unaware that he was entering the area of ​​the El Caraguatá tattoo parlor, a network of underground hideouts belonging to the Tupamaros' 21st Column. When the subversives hiding in the area discovered him, he was arrested and taken to the complex's second underground shelter. He was then tortured, beaten, and buried alive. At that time, the "sensitive" Mujica was an active member of the armed group.

Mujica also participated directly in armed robberies and confrontations with the police. In fact, on January 10, 1971, when he had only recently joined the Tupamaros, Pepe murdered the humble police corporal José Leonardo Villalba to steal his service weapon and the wallet containing his newly collected paycheck. According to the forensic report, Villalba's body was shot seven times, all in the back. Mujica never answered for this brutal murder. For acts like this, he was arrested in 1972 and spent 13 years in prison, many of them incommunicado, which his followers use to justify his image as a "victim of the system."

In 1985, after regaining his freedom, Mujica distanced himself from the armed struggle and entered politics. In 2005, he became Minister of Agriculture, and in 2010, he became President of Uruguay.

His government, completely aligned with the Sao Paulo Forum, was unable to establish a dictatorship for one simple reason: his parliamentary majority in the Chamber of Deputies was narrow, with only a single vote. Otherwise, Uruguay's history would have been different, perhaps very similar to that of Bolivia, Nicaragua, Cuba, or Venezuela.

As a kind of compensation, Mujica legalized marijuana, abortion, and same-sex marriage. These measures earned him applause from the international left, but deeply divided society within Uruguay.

Once out of power, Mujica dedicated himself to defending his comrades from 21st-Century Socialism. For example, in May 2019, in the midst of the repression in Venezuela, Uruguayan journalist Leonardo Sarro of Radio Monte Carlo asked him: "What do you think about tanks running over people?" The veteran guerrilla's response was: "You shouldn't stand in front of tanks," a very cynical and bloodthirsty attitude for someone who tried to present himself to the world as a good-natured and harmless old man.

In conclusion, José Mujica was not the peaceful and honest leader that progressives idolize; he was simply a terrorist who later played at democracy and was unable to establish a dictatorship in his country because Uruguayan institutions were able to safeguard the republican framework.

«The opinions published herein are the sole responsibility of its author».