It has meant a refusal to make enemies, and a habit of yielding to outside parties who opposed his attempts at reform. Love for all men turned out to make for an ineffectual management style. Public education has powerful symbolic value in the country. In the last decade, though, test scores have declined, and more and more Uruguayan families have begun choosing private schools.
Mujica pledged to fix that. He never got very far past the writing. As a leader reared on the fundamental right to earn a basic living, the proposal was incredibly important for Mujica. But enacting it required passing laws through the notoriously fractious Uruguayan Congress, which is filled with heroes of the labor movement.
And that, two education specialists told me, was more than Mujica and his schools minister—a distrusted, low-profile former Tupamaro— could manage. Ultimately, Mujica did establish a single new technical college. A similar lack of political will and strategic savvy doomed another educational reform effort to give more autonomy to the principals of troubled schools to design their own curricula.
More than professors weighed in on the plan, but union opposition squashed it, too. The story was the same on other policy fronts. He tried to pass a new tax on the big landowners to help the poor, but failed to ensure that the legislation would be constitutional. The Uruguayan Supreme Court struck it down. One morning over coffee, I spoke to a former Mujica staffer named Conrado Ramos.
A budget wonk who looks like a sad Hugh Grant, he had been in charge of an effort to reform the Uruguayan public sector. After several fruitless years, Ramos quit in frustration, embarrassing the administration. Mujica did win some acclaim for the passage of laws legalizing abortion and regulating the sale of marijuana. But when I convened a dinner of artists and activists to talk about his presidency, they refused to give him credit even for those advances.
Both bills had been in the works for years, they claimed; he had simply let them happen. The election was a landslide; the hopes invested in him near messianic. Then we lash out at them when they inevitably fall short.
But it has been amplified, partly as a result of the increasingly complex nature of global society and power itself. That he came nowhere near that is partly his fault, but also owes to constraints that Batlle never faced when imposing his early- twentieth-century makeover of Uruguay. There are obstructionist legislatures. There are moneyed interest groups. We are aware—sometimes directly, sometimes only vaguely—of the constraints leaders now face. Yet our response is to want more out of them, not less.
We want someone simply different enough to plot a new direction for a world that often feels full of deadly momentum toward existential decay and harder to steer than the hurtling Titanic. His lack of experience was exactly his appeal—as it was for Obama and de Blasio, as it is for Elizabeth Warren.
But the instant the election is over, these same leaders are judged according to different standards. Mujica ran for and won the Uruguayan presidency essentially as a persuasive bar philosopher. In fact, there is a politician in Uruguay who accomplished some of the kinds of goals people hoped Mujica could tackle.
An oncologist, he preceded Mujica as president and will succeed him again come March. With a ruff of silver hair, Basset Hound eyes, and a smile just on the wrong side of lascivious, Vazquez exudes the unsettling aura of a Mr. Rogers impersonator who performs in porn. He rarely consults others on political decisions and projects arrogance in his certitude. Milena Fajardo. Compare Uruguay to Argentina. Disrespect the mate circle. Mistake Uruguay for Paraguay. Bad mouth a Uruguayan in front of another Uruguayan.
Insult the national football team. Disrupt a comparsa. Ask for pizza without faina. Only visit Montevideo. Ask for Thai food in a parrillada. Be careless in the ocean. Smoke inside. Disrespect the wildlife. Give us feedback. At heart, he is still an anarchist — or, as he puts it, a leftwing libertarian. If ancient man could govern himself, then perhaps one day, in the future, men can govern themselves again. Cufflinks, shiny blazer buttons and a pastel green silk tie bolster an image of muted, patrician sophistication.
Sanguinetti is bemused and outraged. The hostages were released the following year, during his first presidency. By then Mujica had turned his potty into a tiny marigold garden. Rosencof recalls watching him step out of jail, proudly bearing his potty, and disappearing into a sea of flags waved by supporters.
Moderate Uruguayans did not want state companies privatised, at least not without proper guarantees, and said so at referendum; they are still in public hands. The Tupamaros, experimental as ever, saw no point in returning to violence, so they joined the Broad Front in and sniped at it from the left, warning against the evils of centrism. But many of them still believed that the rotten structure of neoliberal Latin America would collapse, and arms would be needed once more.
They elect the two chambers of parliament, a president and, often, vote on referenda at the same time. In , when the Broad Front came within a few points of winning an election, the Tupamaro-led faction was still a minor player, with only two deputies in the seat parliament. But one of those was Mujica. He rode to parliament on a battered Vespa, wore everyday clothes and peppered his speech with slang. Mujica the folk hero was born.
Vernazza, a high-powered Montevideo advertising executive, was a few minutes late, and found that an impatient Mujica had already wandered off. It was, Vernazza jokes, the meeting of a leftwing and a rightwing anarchist. Business acquaintances threatened to leave the country if Mujica won. But native political intelligence and a talent for improvisation saw him rapidly mutate from a rebel in ripped jerseys to a serious presidential candidate.
They tried to make doubters less afraid of a man known for his bruising vocabulary and tousle-haired television outings without his false teeth. Above all, Pepe sold himself. Mujica became president, and his faction, led by Topolansky, became the largest component of the Broad Front. Campaigners say he is not a natural social progressive. Sergio Miranda and Rodrigo Borda, the first gay couple to marry last year, do not give Mujica most of the credit.
If they are rich they are tolerated. Machismo hits hardest at the lowest levels. Poor girls are not well-treated by our society. There are women who end up abandoned with lots of children. For me that is one of the most important battles for fairness. We opted for regulating the sale of marijuana and that, naturally, has to be done by the state. You have to deal with that. Gangs of youths stand around in the dusk.
That number rises in these poor, fringe barrios — where the bocas , or drug markets, start trading after dark. Mujica wants to take marijuana profits away from traffickers, while freeing up police resources. In a country with such dramatic economic growth, popular concern is no longer about jobs, poverty or the economy, but about violence, insecurity and pasta base.
Then come on down. A garbage collectors' strike in left heaps of trash spilling out of containers in Montevideo. Trash piles up on almost every street corner of Montevideo at least during the winter; the place spiffs up considerably in the summer. Not to a majority of Uruguayans. Polls show about 60 percent oppose the law. Juan Vaz and Alicia Castilla , whose arrests for possession of cannabis plants are widely credited with sparking a new discussion on pot legalization, both have told me they hate the new law that passed earlier this month.
To buy weed here, you have to register with the government, which will track your pot purchases, capped at 40 grams a month. BBQ, Uruguayan style. The lack of good, inventive food in Montevideo, a city of more than a million people, is astonishing. It costs a pretty peso to live in Uruguay. In North America and Europe, many people think of South America as a collection of shambolic banana republics — amiable, if a little dangerous countries where the cold beer flows freely and the living is easy and cheap.
But nowhere on this continent is the happy concept of a cheap haven further from the truth than in Uruguay.
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