José Mujica: The Uruguayan President Who Gave Away His Salary

José “Pepe” Mujica, president of Uruguay from 2010 to 2015, became famous around the world for refusing the trappings of power. He kept only a small slice of his presidential pay, giving roughly 90 percent of it to programmes for poor families and small businesses, and he went on living in a modest farmhouse outside Montevideo with his wife, the politician Lucía Topolansky. Foreign newspapers soon called him “the world’s poorest president”, a label that said as much about other leaders as about him.

This profile looks at how he actually lived during his term, where the habits came from, what he said about money and freedom, and how his reputation holds up now that his life has ended. Mujica died on 13 May 2025, a week before his 90th birthday.

How Mujica lived while he was president

Uruguay offered its head of state an official residence in the capital. Mujica mostly ignored it. He stayed on the small farm, owned by Topolansky, at Rincón del Cerro on the edge of Montevideo, reached by an unpaved road. The couple grew chrysanthemums for sale and worked the land themselves, with a couple of police officers and a three-legged dog named Manuela for security and company.

His salary at the time was reported at around US$12,000 a month. Interviews from 2012 describe him keeping about a tenth of it, an amount close to the average monthly income of a Uruguayan, and donating the rest. The money went mainly to charities and to a public housing programme for low-income families, and to support for people starting small enterprises.

His most talked-about possession was a pale blue 1987 Volkswagen Beetle. When he filed the wealth declaration required of officials in 2010, the car, valued at about US$1,800, was essentially the whole of his personal declared assets (property in his wife’s name was listed separately). In 2014 he was reportedly offered a million dollars for the Beetle by a foreign admirer and said that if he ever sold it, the money would go to housing for the homeless.

He was asked often whether this was a stunt. His answer, repeated in many interviews, was that he was not poor at all. He had what he needed, and the people who were truly poor in his view were those who could never have enough.

Where the frugality came from

Mujica’s simple life was not a branding exercise invented for the presidency. It grew out of a hard biography. Born in Montevideo in 1935, he joined the Tupamaros, a left-wing urban guerrilla movement, in the 1960s. He was shot six times during an arrest in 1970, escaped from prison twice, and was recaptured in 1972.

Under Uruguay’s military dictatorship he spent about 13 years in captivity, much of it in harsh isolation; accounts describe more than two years held at the bottom of an emptied horse trough. He was freed under the 1985 amnesty when democracy returned. He later said that years alone with almost nothing had taught him how little a person really needs.

After his release he entered electoral politics through the Frente Amplio coalition, served as a deputy, senator and minister of agriculture, and won the presidency in the 2009 run-off. He took office on 1 March 2010.

His philosophy: possessions, time and freedom

For Mujica, giving away most of his pay was less about charity than about freedom. He argued in a 2012 BBC interview that owning fewer things means you do not have to spend your whole life working to maintain them, which leaves more time for the people and pursuits you love. Time, not money, was the scarce resource he wanted to protect.

He also tied his own habits to the lives of his fellow citizens. Speaking to the Spanish newspaper El Mundo, he put it plainly:

“I do fine with that amount; I have to do fine because there are many Uruguayans who live with much less.”
— José Mujica, quoted by El Mundo, 2012

His best-known statement on the subject came at the Rio+20 United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development in Brazil in June 2012. In front of heads of government gathered to talk about green growth, he questioned whether a planet of billions could ever consume the way wealthy households do, and whether endless buying actually makes anyone happier. He closed the thought with an idea he credited to the Roman philosopher Seneca: that a poor person is not someone who has little, but someone who always wants more.

He returned to the same themes at the UN General Assembly in New York in September 2013, criticising a culture in which, as he saw it, people are pushed to spend their lives paying for things they do not need.

What his government did

Mujica’s lifestyle drew the headlines, but his administration was also one of the most socially liberal in Latin America. During his term Uruguay:

• became the first country to create a legal, state-regulated market for cannabis, presented as a way to take business away from drug traffickers;
• legalised same-sex marriage in 2013;
• decriminalised abortion in the first weeks of pregnancy, the most sweeping such law in the region at the time;
• expanded wind and other renewable power, which made the country a regional leader in clean electricity.

Not everyone admired him. Critics pointed to weak results in education and stubborn problems with crime. His unscripted remarks also caused diplomatic friction more than once. A humble lifestyle and a perfect record in government are two different things, and fair profiles keep them apart.

Myths and misreadings

“He gave away everything he owned”

Not quite. He donated most of his salary, but he and his wife kept their farm, tools and car, and she had her own income as a senator. The point was living on a modest, ordinary amount, not living with nothing.

“He was the poorest president in history”

That phrase was a media nickname, not a measurement. Mujica himself rejected it, saying he lived a sober life by choice.

“Every leader should copy him exactly”

Personal austerity is a strong symbol, and it gave him credibility when he spoke about inequality. On its own it does not fix poverty. The deeper lesson is about consistency between what a leader says and how they live.

His last years and legacy

Mujica handed over to Tabaré Vázquez in March 2015 and returned to the Senate for a time before retiring from front-line politics. In April 2024 he announced that he had cancer of the oesophagus. Radiation treatment initially helped, but in January 2025 he said the cancer had spread to his liver and that he would not continue treatment. He even campaigned from his sickbed in late 2024 for his coalition, which won the presidency with his protégé Yamandú Orsi.

He died at his farm in Rincón del Cerro on 13 May 2025. President Orsi announced the death, and tributes came from across Latin America and beyond, from people who agreed with his politics and many who did not.

What remains useful for ordinary readers is his question rather than his biography: how much do you actually need, and what are you trading for the rest? For a related idea from the business world, see Carlos Slim’s three-day workweek proposal.

Sources: Wikipedia: José Mujica; Associated Press via CFJC Today, 13 May 2025; original 2012 report: Huffington Post, citing the BBC and El Mundo.

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