Latin America's leftist leaders remember Uruguay's 'Pepe' Mujica as generous, charismatic leader

MONTEVIDEO, Uruguay — In the soaring palace of Uruguay’s parliament, leftist presidents from the region came to remember former President José Mujica on Thursday as a generous and charismatic leader whose legacy of humility remained an example for the world’s politicians.

“A person like Pepe Mujica doesn’t die,” Brazil’s President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva said as he paid his respects to his longtime friend, widely known as Pepe, at the Legislative Palace in Montevideo where his body lay in state, eulogizing the onetime Marxist guerrilla who spent over a decade in prison in the 1970s as a “superior human being.”

“His body is gone. But the ideas he put forward over the years demonstrate the generosity of a man who spent 14 years in prison and managed to emerge without hatred toward the people who imprisoned and tortured him,” Lula said.

Approaching the coffin, tears streamed down his face. Lula pulled Mujica’s lifelong partner and fellow politician, 80-year-old Lucía Topolansky, into a hug and planted a kiss on her forehead.

Mujica, a member of Uruguay's leftist Broad Front coalition elected in 2009, and Lula, the standard-bearer of Brazil's Workers’ Party who started his second term in 2007, belonged to a generation of leftist leaders elected to office across Latin America in the early years of this century.

The movement's power faded more recently as some leftist populist governments became embroiled in corruption scandals. But Mujica stood out for keeping his reputation for honesty and humility intact.

“It's the end of an era. I think Mujica represented one of the last figures of that ‘pink tide’ that rose in the region in the 2000s,” said Juan Cruz Díaz, a political analyst who runs the Cefeidas Group, a consultancy in Buenos Aires. “The global impact and iconic figure of President Mujica is probably irreplaceable.”

Lula often met Mujica in his three-room farmhouse on the outskirts of Montevideo, where, after retiring from the Senate, the former president tended to his chrysanthemums and dispensed wisdom to a range of visitors — from rock band Aerosmith to philosopher Noam Chomsky.

It's also where Mujica died at age 89 on Tuesday, after more than a year spent battling esophageal cancer.

Another leftist leader paying tribute to Mujica in Montevideo on Thursday was Chile's president, Gabriel Boric.

On learning of Mujica's death on Tuesday, both Boric and Lula jetted to Uruguay from Beijing, where they had been meeting Chinese officials.

They were received by Uruguay's moderate left-wing president, Yamandú Orsi, who was Mujica's preferred candidate in last fall's presidential elections.

“Life goes on, causes remain,” Boric wrote on social media. “Thank you, dear Pepe, we will carry you with us in every fight.”

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Associated Press writer Isabel DeBre in Buenos Aires, Argentina, contributed to this report.

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