“I haven’t cultivated hatred in my garden for decades, because I learned a hard lesson that life imposed on me: that hatred ends up making you stupid,” said Mujica.”
14ymedio, Federico Hernández Aguilar, San Salvador, 19 May 2025 [Delayed translation] — It is not easy to find balanced obituaries when certain public figures die. Some are praised or disparaged, sometimes without nuance, depending on the ideological radicalism of the person writing about them. Sometimes, these somewhat hasty words, cobbled together by journalists and columnists in the wake of a recent death, tell us more about their authors—their likes and dislikes—than about the figures being profiled. This has been no different with former Uruguayan President Pepe Mujica, who died of cancer on May 13.
I open the digital version of a newspaper that includes the word derecha— right—in its name and find the following headline: Pepe Mujica, the man who hid a past stained with blood and violence. The article criticizes the “wise peasant” and “pacifist grandfather” profile that the former Tupamaro leader has “sold,” reminding us that his guerrilla organization was responsible “for multiple acts of armed violence in the 1960s and 1970s.” Later, the article states that Pepe “did not show a single gesture of remorse for his crimes” nor did he apologize to the victims of his attacks. The final sentence is damning: “Mujica was not a hero: he was a terrorist recycled as a president.”
In another newspaper that includes the word izquierdo—left—in its name, the column I’m reading calls the former Uruguayan president a “repentant revolutionary” in its headline. Nor does this obituary—written from the opposite side of the street—offer its readers much room for maneuver either: Pepe was a “defender of the institutions of the capitalist system,” an “extreme expression” of a deradicalized Latin American left, and someone who “played a central role in reconciliation with the military responsible for crimes during the dictatorship.” The author describes Mujica’s speech as one that served as “a defeatist and disciplinary message (sic), which contrasts drastically with the revolutionary ideals of his youth.”
In another newspaper that includes the word “left” in its name, the column I read calls the former Uruguayan president a “repentant revolutionary” in its headline.
I recognize the interest aroused in me by the confrontation of these feverish obituaries, so completely separated by their respective ideologies and yet so unusually united in their contempt for the figure. I confess, I like the disgust that Pepe Mujica provokes at both ends of the Spanish-American ideological spectrum. The old man must have done something right, I imagine, for the reptilians on both sides to rush to criticize his legacy, portraying him as an unrepentant bloodthirsty man who should be given no credit, or as a shameful comrade who ended up sugarcoating the socialist ideal for which he had fired rifles and dropped bombs.
I suspect radicals have many reasons to feel uncomfortable with Mujica. They find it very difficult, for starters, to claim him as their own. No one who still believes in Marxist postulates about violence could explain why Pepe, toward the end of his life, spoke more about the great ethical battle of our time than about the Jurassic class struggle. “The old left,” he wrote, “lives too much on nostalgia… It has a hard time understanding why it failed and has great difficulty imagining new paths.”
On the other side, it also stings that Mujica was a living example of moral coherence. He challenged what he called the “culture of selfishness” with more than just catchphrases, embodying sobriety in countercultural, almost lacerating ways. Body and soul, he lived contradicting the atavistic desire for profit and luxury. “The poor are those who want more,” he said, “those who can’t afford anything. Those are the poor, because they’re in an endless race.” Someone so detached from all baggage, of course, hardly fits in anywhere.
But without a doubt, the worst burden Pepe shed was hatred. In his days as a guerrilla and criminal, hatred for those who thought differently was an indispensable condition for struggle. Che Guevara, in those chilling words addressed to the Tricontinental (1967), granted the revolutionary legitimacy that was the cloak of that youthful criminal fury: “Hatred as an element of the struggle; a relentless hatred of the enemy, impelling us over and beyond the natural limitations that man is heir to and transforming him into an effective, violent, selective and cold killing machine. Our soldiers must be thus; a people without hatred cannot vanquish a brutal enemy.”
That’s why he went so far as to say that Venezuela and Nicaragua were “indefensible,” accusing their leaders of “playing at democracy” while perpetrating electoral fraud.
Upon his release from prison in 1985, however, Mujica had also freed himself from the mental shackles that justify excess. And he never again yielded to them. That is why, last year, he once again distanced himself from the “dictatorship of the proletariat” entrenched in Cuba for more than 60 years with two words: “It’s useless.” That’s why he went so far as to say that Venezuela and Nicaragua were “indefensible,” accusing their leaders of “playing at democracy” while perpetrating electoral fraud.
That is why, upon leaving his seat in the senate in 2020, he recalled that, although he had many flaws, there was one he was proud of redeeming. “I’m passionate,” he said then, “but I haven’t cultivated hatred in my garden for decades, because I learned a hard lesson that life imposed on me: that hatred ultimately makes us stupid, because it makes us lose objectivity in the face of things. Hate is blind like love, but love is creative, and hatred destroys us.”
Due to ideological distortion and historical inertia, socialists have gardens littered with corpses because resentment has taken over their consciences. Pepe Mujica understood, with a stroke of clarity, that it is impossible to change the world this way. And his lesson is everlasting.
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