José Mujica

Demetrio was a descendant of a Spanish Basque family, originating from Muxika in the province of Biscay; his family arrived in Uruguay in 1842.

José Alberto "Pepe" Mujica Cordano (born 20 May 1935) is a Uruguayan politician, former revolutionary and farmer who served as the 40th president of Uruguay from 2010 to 2015.

Mujica was born on 20 May 1935 in the neighbourhood of Paso de la Arena in the capital city of Montevideo to Demetrio Mujica and Lucy Cordano.

Demetrio was a farmer who went bankrupt shortly before his death in 1940 when José was five years old.

Lucy was born in Carmelo to poor Italian immigrants from Liguria, with origins from Favale di Malvaro and Val Fontanabuona in the province of Genoa.

Upon her birth, her parents had bought 2 ha in Colonia Estrella to cultivate vineyards.

Upon completing his primary and secondary studies, Mujica enrolled at the Alfredo Vásquez Acevedo Institute for his undergraduate studies, but did not finish.

Between the ages of 13 and 17, Mujica cycled for several clubs in different categories.

He was also active in the National Party, where he became close to Enrique Erro.

In the mid-1960s, Mujica joined the newly formed MLN-Tupamaros movement, an armed political group inspired by the Cuban Revolution.

He participated in the brief 1969 takeover of Pando, a town close to Montevideo, leading one of six squads assaulting strategic points in the city.

Mujica's team was charged with taking over the telephone exchange and was the only one to complete the operation without any mishaps.

A former guerrilla with the Tupamaros, he was tortured and imprisoned for 14 years during the military dictatorship in the 1970s and 1980s.

In March 1970 Mujica was gunned down while resisting arrest at a Montevideo bar; he injured two policemen and was in turn shot six times.

The surgeon on call at the hospital saved his life.

Tupamaros claimed that the surgeon was secretly Tupamaro and this is why his life was saved.

In reality the doctor was simply following ordinary medical ethics.

At the time, the president of Uruguay was the controversial Jorge Pacheco Areco, who had suspended certain constitutional guarantees in response to MLN and Communist unrest.

Mujica was captured by the authorities on four occasions.

During the 1970s and 1980s, this included being confined to the bottom of an old, emptied horse-watering trough for more than two years.

During his time in prison, Mujica had a number of health problems, particularly mental issues.

Although his two closest cellmates, Eleuterio Fernández Huidobro and Mauricio Rosencof, often managed to communicate with each other, they rarely managed to bring Mujica into the conversation.

According to Mujica himself, at the time he was experiencing auditory hallucinations and related forms of paranoia.

He was among the more than 100 Tupamaros who escaped Punta Carretas Prison in September 1971 by digging a tunnel from inside the prison that led to the living room of a nearby home.

Mujica was re-captured less than a month after escaping, but escaped Punta Carretas once more in April 1972.

On that occasion he and about a dozen other escapees fled riding improvised wheeled planks down the tunnel dug by Tupamaros from outside the prison.

He was re-apprehended for the last time in 1972, unable to resist arrest.

In the months that followed, the country underwent the military coup in 1973.

In the meantime, Mujica and eight other Tupamaros were especially chosen to remain under military custody and in squalid conditions.

In all, he spent 13 years in captivity.

In 1985, when constitutional democracy was restored, Mujica was freed under an amnesty law that covered political and related military crimes committed since 1962.

Several years after the restoration of democracy, Mujica and many Tupamaros joined other left-wing organizations to create the Movement of Popular Participation, a political party that was accepted within the Broad Front coalition.

In the 1994 general elections, Mujica was elected deputy and in the elections of 1999 he was elected senator.

Due in part to Mujica's charisma, the MPP continued to grow in popularity and votes, and by 2004, it had become the largest faction within the Broad Front.

In the elections of that year, Mujica was re-elected to the Senate, and the MPP obtained over 300,000 votes, thus consolidating its position as the top political force within the coalition and a major force behind the victory of presidential candidate Tabaré Vázquez.

A member of the Broad Front coalition of left-wing parties, Mujica was Minister of Livestock, Agriculture, and Fisheries from 2005 to 2008 and a Senator afterwards.

As the candidate of the Broad Front, he won the 2009 presidential election and took office as president on 1 March 2010.

An outspoken critic of capitalism's focus on stockpiling material possessions which do not contribute to human happiness, he has been praised by the media and journalists for his philosophical ideologies; the Times Higher Education referred to him as the "philosopher president" in 2015, a play on words of Plato's conception of the philosopher king.

He was the Second Gentleman of Uruguay from 13 September 2017 to 1 March 2020, when his wife Lucia Topolansky was vice president under his immediate predecessor and successor, Tabaré Vázquez.

Mujica has been described as "the world's humblest head of state" due to his austere lifestyle and his donation of around 90 percent of his $12,000 monthly salary to charities that benefit poor people and small entrepreneurs.