Caracas Chronicles

José “Pepe” Mujica became a sort of political myth in Latin America. The austere former president, who lived at a small farm in the Uruguayan countryside, and who used to talk about life, death and happiness as a peasant elder, was admired around the world. But for Venezuelans—especially those who migrated to Uruguay fleeing a country overwhelmed by authoritarianism, economic crisis and repression—Mujica was something else.

Because Mujica, as many other leftist leaders in the region, showed open solidarity for chavismo for years, before assuming a rather ambiguous stance. During the oil bonanza in Venezuela, when Hugo Chávez used PDVSA’s checkbook to weave ideological and economic alliances across the continent, Mujica’s administration (2010-2015) was among the ones that benefited from the petrodollars rain. Venezuelan money funded improvements in Hospital de Clínicas de Montevideo, where people saw medical equipment and services that never became true for Venezuelans. During Mujica’s presidency, this “cooperation” reached its climax with exports that ended up being ruinous for Uruguay’s industry, as the book La Petrodiplomacia of journalist Martín Natalevich explains. The five major dairy companies of Uruguay—where dairy is an essential economic sector—faced a dramatic crisis when payments for their exports to Venezuela were delayed.

For Venezuelans who lived the progressive ruin of their country under chavismo, these alliances are hard to swallow. Mujica not only took his time to acknowledge in public Maduro’s autocratic path. For years, the Uruguayan leader relativized the claims of human rights violations, repression and institutional collapse that pushed Venezuela to an unprecedented humanitarian emergency.

Mujica waited until 2019 to admit, when his party was campaigning for the Uruguayan elections and chavismo was facing international backlash, that Venezuela had become a dictatorship. This change in his stance was important, of course, but too late for many Venezuelans that died, were imprisoned or ran to exile while some politicians kept considering the Maduro regime as a “popular and democratic” project.

Until 2019, Mujica remained silent about growing authoritarianism in Venezuela, save for the few moments when he said he needed to understand the chavista regime.

Nothing that Mujica would say at that point would erase from Venezuelans’ minds the images of the armored vehicles ramming students, the hunger strikes, the prisons full of political prisoners, the thousands of claims by international institutions. Hundreds of atrocities were by then being documented in reports signed by people like former Chilean president Michelle Bachelet, as leftwing as Mujica.

Until 2019, Mujica remained silent about growing authoritarianism in Venezuela, save for the few moments when he said he needed to understand the chavista regime. That contradiction left a deep emotional wound for Venezuelans in Uruguay, even if one is aware that Mujica corrected his course after some time.

Is not the same to see Pepe Mujica from abroad than in his own political context. In Uruguay, the former president was a very relevant man, respected by people in many places, even if Mujica has been criticized by the contradictions between the simple life he lived and the outcomes of certain measures taken by his administration.

Inside the Venezuelan community in Uruguay, there are some nuances as well. Some have opted to give their backs to local politics, after being traumatized by polarization in Venezuela. These people know almost nothing about Mujica and his government, because many of them arrived in the country after he left the presidency. However, they experienced the end of the boom of raw materials, some fiscal deficit and the arrival of new problems in security and education, which gave them a rather negative vision of Mujica’s time as head of state.

The rest, the informed majority that follows politics in Uruguay, constantly compares models and decisions to the ones they see in Venezuela. For these people, Mujica is a two-faced figure. On one hand, he was seen as a leader who believed in dialogue, coherent with a style and way of conducting himself, who left valuable lessons on life and politics. On the other, a man who was an accomplice, by action or inaction, of the movement that destroyed their country of origin. In fact, when pictures of Mujica with Chávez and Maduro resurfaced, an old wound started to hurt again.

We have learned that we can’t carry resentment forever, that Uruguay is not Venezuela, and that there’s some space to recognize the human and political complexity of public figures like Pepe Mujica.

However, we must remember that Mujica’s administration showed important gestures towards migrants. During his government, permanent residency became available for citizens from Mercosur countries (where Venezuela acted as an associated state, later suspended because of Maduro’s abuses), which allowed for many Venezuelans in Uruguay to regularize their status for free and rebuild their lives. That measure by Mujica took place when many other countries in the region closed their doors.

This is something to appreciate, as well as the fact that Mujica, as time passed, acknowledged that Venezuela is ruled by a dictator. This capacity to rectify, even if delayed, is not without significance. Maybe this is the reason why many Venezuelans hold a silent respect for the former president of Uruguay at the time of his death, instead of the adoration that many other people show for him. We have learned that we can’t carry resentment forever, that Uruguay is not Venezuela, and that there’s some space to recognize the human and political complexity of public figures like Pepe Mujica.

He wasn’t perfect. He wasn’t wise or rightful all the time. But he was a different politician, who lived in austerity, who didn’t get rich, who talked to people as one of them and who said, in his last years, what he resisted to say for a long time.

This, to some at least, might be a form of redemption.