77,625 views
RINCÓN DEL CERRO, Montevideo.– “Pepe” wants to make it to winter, even though it may be too far away. At 89, with esophageal cancer, a catheter in his abdomen to feed himself and a thousand ailments, it is hard for him to get up from his chair to greet visitors. But he remains lucid, fast. So much so that he cannot fool himself. “I can’t complain,” he says. “With the life I had… getting to 90 is a miracle. I have about seven different bullet wounds in my body. I lost my spleen, I have a smaller lung, my heart leaned that way… I don’t know.” José Alberto Mújica Cordano, militant, Tupamaro, political prisoner, deputy, senator and president of Uruguay, became a reference beyond the borders of his country for a distinctive trait: he does what he says, he lives as he thinks. That is, with just enough. With his wife, former Vice President Lucía Topolansky, he donates the bulk of his pensions to his beloved Popular Participation Movement (MPP), which is part of the Broad Front, and to a community housing construction program.