A President like no other

By Julia Carreon Lagoc
Georgia-USA
February 6, 2016



Savannah, Georgia, USA, Jan. 2016—First week of the New Year, two daughters’ families joined a walking tour of Savannah, Georgia. It was a treat before school opens. Call it the holidays’ sweet dessert, and the Californians’ adieu to twinkling days before Rose’s group fly home to their home state. For this grandma—ensconced here in Randy’s abode in South Carolina—the tour was a respite from the domestic front.

          Our tour guide Chris Rauers asked us participants as to what country we came from. When a couple answered Uruguay, Chris remarked that their country had the best president. Immediately, I muttered that the Philippines had the worst. José Mujica of Uruguay and Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines will go down in history as the best and the worst president a country could ever have.

          Chris’ remarks squared with an email I got from David, Randy’s American better-half. Wrote David: “Uruguay Pres. Jose Mujica -- What an admirable left-wing leader! This man would have my vote for President of the USA.  Wow.” Enough to set me googling about the man. Astonishing tidbits hereunder:

          Born 20 May 1935, Mujica was the 40th President of Uruguay from 2010 to 2015. He was a former urban guerrilla fighter with the Tupamaros, an armed political movement. In March 1970, Mujica was gunned down, and was imprisoned for 13 years during the military dictatorship in the 1970s and 1980s. In 1985, when constitutional democracy was restored, Mujica was freed under an amnesty law that covered political and related military crimes committed since 1962.

Jose Mujica became a member of the Broad Front [Frente Amplio], a coalition of left-wing parties. He held office as Minister of Livestock, Agriculture, and Fisheries from 2005 to 2008, becoming 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. The Guardian magazine had this banner: Uruguay's president José Mujica: no palace, no motorcade, no frills.

          Like Mujica, his wife Lucía Topolansky was a former Tupamaros member. She owns the farm where their tiny one-story house is situated. During his term, Mujica waived the luxury of the presidential palace, and it is believed that Tabare Vazquez, his successor, will also elect to live in his own home and forego the presidential palace as well. With his austere lifestyle, Pres. Mujica was able to donate about 90 percent of his $12,000 monthly salary to charities that benefit poor people and small entrepreneurs.

          The Mujica couple use a beat-up Volkswagen Beetle, slated a likely item for a museum. The Uruguayan newspaper Búsqueda reported that Mujica has been offered 1 million dollars for the car. He said that if he did get 1 million dollars for the car, the money would be donated to house the homeless through a program that he supports. Proud of its social traditions, Mujica’s Uruguay sets prices for essential commodities, and provides free computers and education for every child. [A dream for our dear Philippines.]
At the close of Mujica’s term, BBC’s Rio de Janeiro correspondent Wyre Davies headlined his article thus: Uruguay bids farewell to Jose Mujica, its pauper president. A title most appropriate, Mujica’s life being bereft of the trappings of wealth and luxuries. Davies quoted the pauper president: "I was imprisoned in solitary [confinement] so the day they put me on a sofa I felt comfortable. I've no doubt that had I not lived through that I would not be who I am today. Prison, solitary confinement had a huge influence on me. I had to find an inner strength. I couldn't even read a book for seven, eight years - imagine that!" His bookcase is thick with biographies of his allies and political adversaries.
"All I do is live like the majority of my people, not the minority. I'm living a normal life and Italian, Spanish leaders should also live as their people do. They shouldn't be aspiring to or copying a rich minority." By majority, Mujica could be referring to the huge base of the Philippines’ own social pyramid. Certainly, not the minority rich at the apex — the billionaires who buy the electorates like the 1% in America’s Wall Street who fund the presidential candidates. Money talks! Unconscionable, condemnable in a democratic society.
Do the Philippines five presidential aspirants—Binay, Defensor-Santiago, Duterte, Poe, Roxas (alphabetical order)—bear a shade of Jose Mujica? Methinks it is going to be the same —as it had been in the past, so it is in the present. The same old, same old ever and ever again?

---

About the author:
Julia Carreon-Lagoc retired as newsletter editor of SEAFDEC (Southeast Asian Fisheries Development Center). She continues to write "to keep Alzheimer's at bay."