José Mujica, president of Uruguay
- José Mujica — El País photo
Former Tupamaro leader interviewd shortly after repeal of the Ley de Caducidad
[Translation of an article from El País of Madrid, Spain, for April 23. See original here and related article here.]
by Soledad Gallego-Díaz
The president of Uruguay, José “Pepe” Mujica, 76 years old, hosts El País at one of the most delicate points in his 13 months in office. The Senate, thanks to a vote by his coalition, the Frente Amplio, will repeal the Ley de Caducidad [“Expiry Law” or, to detractors, “Impunity Law”], on the books since 1986, which had allowed members of the military accused of committing atrocities during the dictatorship of 1973 to 1985 to avoid prosecution. It is known that Mujica, a former Tupamaro leader who was brutally tortured and who spent almost 15 years in prison, has not wanted to back the initiative personally and intends to keep his presidency outside the controversy.
He is not the only former guerrilla who did not want the amnesty law to be repealed. Another historical leader, Senator Eleuterio Fernández Huidobro, out of party discipline, voted with his group in favor of re-opening the trials, but resigned immediately afterward. When this interview ended, President Mujica went to visit his old friend to give him a warm embrace in public.
Early the next morning, on the small farm where the president and his wife have lived for more than 20 years, under really very modest conditions (about 45 square meters are constructed), explains his position: “Parties are important, for all their faults; there would be no advances without them. So we must defend them and vote with discipline. Although later, out of personal consistency, this old comrade would prefer to submit his resignation.” Beside him, his companion, Lucía Topolanski, 67 years old, a senator and also a former guerrilla, imprisoned and tortured as well, agrees and, at the kitchen table, laboriously sorts the laundry just taken down from the line.
El País: Uruguay has been sidestepping the problem of whether or not to try the military, in contrast with what Argentina decided.
Mujica: I don’t think that’s the way it is. In Uruguay, there were two plebiscites on the matter. In fact, I don’t think any other country has made such an effort to resolve this question. What happens is that in the two plebiscites the vote was against repeal of the Ley de Caducidad. Which is not the equivalent of the people approving what happened during the dictatorship. In the first plebiscite (1989), the wound was too fresh, there was fear and a lot of people preferred rationally to try to look forward. In the second plebiscite (2010), a lot of time had gone by and there were a lot of young people for whom this was not a central question. I insist that this does not mean that the decisions of the dictatorship were approved or anything like that. That would be unfair to the sensibility of my people But I believe that part of the citizenry had had enough of the discussion.
What has happened since then so that your party is now voting against what was decided in the two referendums?
There is a part of the people who have suffered more, and above all there are their families, who have found no consolation for some things that happened in Uruguay and who have not had a hearing from the judicial point of view. Uruguay is no different in this respect from any other country. I have learned that in Spain they are taking out cemeteries. There are old wounds that unfortunately remain in some people who make up our societies. It doesn’t happen to everyone, but there are people who make that claim.
There was also a decision in February by the Inter-American Court on Human Rights, in a lawsuit related to the case of Gelman, niece of the poet, disappeared in 1976 and recovered in 2000, which ruled that the Uruguayan state should modify this law.
In fact, we are condemned from the international point of view for keeping the law. It is not a simple problem. There are valid sides from both points of view. It is a dilemma between the decisions our people made and the parliament’s decision, that appears to be amending the results of the plebiscites. Why does it do that? To a part of the parliament it seems that it has to do so.
It seems that you, as president, want to stay outside this matter.
The executive avoided getting involved in this discussion, because we are president of the nation. Of those who voted for us and those who did not vote for us. We said from the first moment that we wanted to build national unity, to the extent that we could. We have had plenty of success and the opposition is participating as it had not done in years. In reality, it is doing us a favor because no one is going to keep us in line better than the opposition. In the end, this debate does no good for national unity, and for that reason we asked the party to leave the administration deliberately out of it.
But it is very difficult for you to stay outside it. As president, you have the right to veto laws.
Yes. It is true we were not able to keep the administration out of the matter. They ask us why we did not veto it. We were pressured to veto. But we had already declared, when we took office, that we were against exercising the presidential veto.
Your predecessor, Tabaré Vázquez, vetoed the law decriminalizing abortion.
Yes, but I made it clear that I was not going to apply the veto during my term. I believe that the Parliament has enormous defects, but it also has a transcendent virtue. It is the most representative body a country has and so I believe that the executive should not second guess them. He should respect them, whether he likes them or not.
There has been a lot of nervousness among the retired military who claim that they held conversations with you in the ‘90s to resolve this question.
Through the years we have had many conversations with the military and we will continue having them. And I grant a lot of importance to the military factor. They are not the motor of history but they are usually the door that is opened and closed. A republican democracy should cultivate the loyalty of its armed forces. They will never have loyalty for someone who scorns them. This is the paradox. This wound we carry from the past means that, subjectively, many people in this country are blaming today’s military for what the military was in the past. And that is a mistake for the future.
If it had all depended on a decision that was strictly yours, what would have happened?
As a person, I am not addicted to looking backwards, because life is always in the future and there is a dawn every day. But that is my way of being. I can’t impose that on my fellow citizens.
Let’s talk about a different topic. Do you believe that there is a Latin American democratic left that has given new hopes to an important sector of the population?
It would seem that what remains of a left in the world has taken refuge in South America. But no. The left is as old as man. As is the right. Man has a conservative face and another for change; that is part of the human condition. Man will live with that contradiction. The conservative face, which has its very serious reasons, because you can’t live making changes every day, but when it becomes chronic and fiercely closed, it stops being conservative and becomes reactionary. The left face, when it is tremendously radical, becomes infantile. The party will be worked out by those in the center, who are the majority.
To move people to that center, did you have to temper your own ideas?
We have to learn from the center also. When we were young, we saw it as full of petits bourgeois. When we look at it now, with the perspective of time, we see it as an expression of love for the small things of life, which in the end are very important. We need that center. If we we are in such a hurry that we miss it, we will be left alone.
The first one to see that clearly was Lula?
Yes. Of the modern people, Lula was probably the first. Lula was criticized a lot from the left for being too conservative. Nevertheless, he managed to impart very important changes for Brazil. He also left a series of questions. One learns a lesson from walking on the left: you don’t do whatever you want with people. You have to try to help people and, to the extent you can, guide helpful phenomena toward the future. But we should never believe that we are going to construct people as we ourselves would like.
Do you feel that you are criticized as being too moderate, like Lula?
Yes, that is going to be there, inevitably. What happens is that we want to redistribute a lot, that is why we are going slow. Philosophically, we do not like capitalism, not by a long shot. From that point of view, we have a socialist conception of man. But I think it is not possible to build socialism with societies of semi-illiterates. Capitalism has to complete an important cycle, to expand the media, to expand knowledge and culture and it is going to end up digging its own grave because we also are going to get our fill of its absurdities and the number of injustices it commits.
That’s why you advise going slow.
I’m in a hurry to have good universities, I dream of expanding wealth, which is not the equivalent of increasing equality. There will still be injustice, because capitalism is not just, it is exploitative and it creates differences, but it has tremendous energy. There are two forces in the human mind, egoism and solidarity. The affirmation of the individual and the affirmation of the collective. Only culture can make solidarity prevail.
And in the meantime?
The facts show that it is possible to engineer changes that could be considered relative, but that are changes in favor of what we always considered, from the point of view of the left, to be an obligation. We have not built a revolutionary government in these years. We have reduced poverty and indigence greatly, we have improved considerably the access to public health, the delivery of education, we have spent a lot of money on social problems.
Are those advances possible only with a government of the left?
In the final analysis, although it is schematic, progressive leftist governments tend to favor the broadest sectors with the least resources. They may have many defects, but they tend to distribute. Conservative governments tend to concentrate more. That is the difference. It is possible for Lula to be criticized a lot, but the truth is that 40 or 50 million Brazilians stopped being chronically poor and today make up what we could call the “small middle class.” For someone who eats every day, that might seem like too little, but for someone who has been hungry it is enough.
Do you think that in your 13 months in the presidency that redistribution has accelerated?
We gave continuity to certain policies that came from the previous administration, which was of the same kind, and we have had some results. For example, infant mortality decreased by two points; unemployment in Uruguay, which was a calamity, is now at 5.5 or 6.0 percent. We have lowered considerably the number of indigents, there are 35,000 left and we are going to find them, one by one. We have decreased poverty considerably. Is that enough? No, it is not enough; for example, we have more serious security problems than before.
Why has juvenile delincuency increased so much?
We are paying the price for things that happened in 2000. A very serious crisis that affected the social fabric of our country. We are harvesting the bitter fruit of those years of crisis and we have to overcome this situation. The juvenile problem is for us one of the most important priorities. A fringe of the kids who are not motivated to work or to go to school.
How can that be fixed?
We have to provide social answers, we have not found them and, like everyone, we are finding fault with education. There will have to be great changes. It occurs to me that in the future education will have to be very different. We have to teach the kids to stand up again when they fail. The knowledge is there, they will find it if they look for it, but they need the basic questions for life, to which we devote very little time.
In your country there is a strong argument concerning the possiblity of lowering the age of responsibility.
That fixes nothing because I don’t know of any delincuent, especially the young, who thinks about what might happen before they commit a crime. In general, they come from broken families. Let them do what they will, lower the age, raise it, the problem is elsewhere.
Back to Latin America, what are the greatest questions at this time?
I believe that Brazil has a great responsibility concerning the future of Latin America. There are two roads it could take: to try to colonize us, although that would be a mistake, because this is no longer the era of England, or try to connect us and bring us together. What can we Latin Americans do if we are divided, a heap of republics? Bringing Brazil and Argentina in tune with one another is key to this development. It is not easy and we could fail, because there are always short-term interests and patriotism. We Uruguayans are very clear in this discourse, we raise this flag of unity and association.
What do you think of Ollanta Humala and his possible victory in Peru?
It is a very important country, large and with great reserves. I don’t know Ollanta Humala well, but I believe that he must have learned much in these years, because we men learn much more from defeat than from triumphs.
Do you share the view that there are two poles in Latin America, one that would be represented by Brazil and the other represented by Venezuela?
No. We are struggling to have Venezuela taken into Mercosur. The conflict that may exist with Hugo Chávez is short-sighted because it is being forgotten that governments go but peoples remain. And Venezuela is a great country, a strategic one. I want to see what Europe does on the day that Russia knocks on the door and wants to come in.
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Tags: Brazil. gradualism, Frente Amplio, impunity, Inter-American Court on Human Rights, Jose Mujica, Latin American integration, Ley de Caducidad, Tupamaros, Uruguay, Venezuela