José “Pepe” Mujica, president of Uruguay from 2010 to 2015, believed that politicians should live like the people who elect them. In an October 2014 interview with CNN en Español he put it bluntly: anyone who is in love with money should go into business, not government. His exact words, in the English translation published at the time, were: “We have to run people who love money too much out of politics.”
He was not attacking wealth as such. His point was about perspective. Someone whose life is organised around money, he argued, will tend to see every decision through that lens, even with good intentions, while a democracy is supposed to be run in the interest of the majority, most of whom are not rich. Here is what he said, who he was, how he lived, and how well the idea holds up.
What Mujica actually argued
Mujica built his case on a simple logic. Representative democracy rests on the idea that the majority decides. If that is true, he said, then the people at the top should live roughly the way the majority lives, not the way a privileged minority lives. A president surrounded by luxury slowly loses touch with ordinary problems such as rent, bus fares and hospital queues.
He also mocked the rituals of power. Red carpets, ceremonial bands and large entourages, in his view, were leftovers from the age of kings, and the staff around a modern president could start to behave like an old royal court. He made it clear he had nothing against people who enjoy making money; he simply thought they belonged in industry and trade, where creating wealth is the goal.
Politics, for him, had a different purpose. In the same interview he described it as “the struggle for the happiness of all”, and that phrase sums up his whole outlook. The question was never whether a leader is rich or poor on paper, but whose interests shape the way that leader thinks.
Who was José Mujica?
Mujica was born on 20 May 1935 in Montevideo. His father died when he was eight, and his mother, who sold flowers, raised him. Angered by the gap between rich and poor in Uruguay and inspired by the Cuban Revolution, he joined the Tupamaros, an urban guerrilla movement that carried out bank robberies, bombings and kidnappings in the 1960s and early 1970s.
He was shot and captured in 1970, escaped in a mass prison break through a tunnel, and was caught again. Under the military dictatorship that took power in 1973, he was held in harsh conditions, often in solitary confinement, and was tortured. He spent around 13 to 14 years in prison in total and was released in 1985, when democracy returned.
Prison changed him. He later said the guerrillas had done more harm than good and that their violence had helped weaken the civilian government before the coup. He entered electoral politics, was elected to parliament in 1994, became minister of livestock, agriculture and fisheries in 2005, and won the presidency in 2009 at the age of 74.
How he lived what he preached
Mujica became famous worldwide less for his speeches than for his lifestyle. A widely shared BBC profile in 2012 called him “the world’s poorest president”, a label he disliked; he insisted he was not poor, just someone who needed little.
- Salary: he gave away around 90% of his presidential pay of about 12,000 US dollars a month to charities for low-income people and small entrepreneurs.
- Home: he refused the official presidential residence and stayed on his small flower farm at Rincón del Cerro, on the edge of Montevideo.
- Car: he drove himself in a 1987 Volkswagen Beetle. When he was reportedly offered a million dollars for it in 2014, he said any money from a sale would go to housing for homeless people.
- Family: he lived with his wife, Lucía Topolansky, herself a former guerrilla who became a senator and later Uruguay’s vice president, and their three-legged dog, Manuela.
- Dress: he usually wore casual clothes and openly disliked neckties, which he described in a 2014 Spanish television interview as useless.
His reasons were practical as much as moral. He often said that the more things you own, the more time you must spend working to pay for them, and that time was the one thing he wanted to keep for his flowers, his land and his friends. He applied the same argument to whole societies, warning that endless consumption was damaging both people and the planet.
Does personal wealth shape how politicians govern?
Mujica’s argument touches a real debate. In many democracies, elected officials are far richer than the people they represent. A 2014 analysis reported by The Atlantic found that the median member of the US Congress was worth more than a million dollars, many times the wealth of a typical American household. In the United States, the 2010 Citizens United ruling also allowed corporations and unions to spend without limit on independent political advertising, which critics say gives money even more influence.
Political scientists have studied whether this matters. Research on the class background of lawmakers suggests that people from business and professional backgrounds tend to vote differently on economic issues from the few lawmakers who come from working-class jobs. That supports Mujica’s instinct that life experience shapes political judgment, even when no one is acting dishonestly.
At the same time, there is no simple fix. Banning wealthy people from office would be undemocratic, and many rich politicians have backed policies that cost them money. The more realistic lessons from Mujica’s view are about transparency and limits: clear rules on campaign finance, public disclosure of assets and interests, strong conflict-of-interest laws, and salaries and perks that do not set leaders apart from the public they serve.
His record in office and the criticism
Mujica’s presidency coincided with an economic boom, rising foreign investment and falling poverty, without major corruption scandals. Uruguay legalised abortion, same-sex marriage and the regulated sale of marijuana, the first country in the world to do so nationally, and in 2013 The Economist named it its first “country of the year”.
He also had critics. Opponents argued that some of his projects, especially in education and public companies, were poorly managed, and that his personal austerity was more symbol than policy. Others never forgave his violent past with the Tupamaros. Mujica did not hide from this; he spoke openly about the mistakes of his youth and, in later years, urged moderation as politics around the world became more polarised.
Even sceptics generally agreed on one point: he made his own life consistent with his message. That is rare enough that it made him one of the most quoted leaders of his generation.
His final years
After leaving the presidency in 2015, Mujica served in the Senate until 2020. In his retirement speech that year he said he no longer planted “seeds of hatred” in his own garden, because hatred only makes people more foolish. In January 2025 he announced that his oesophageal cancer had spread to his liver and that he would stop treatment.
He died on 13 May 2025 at his farm outside Montevideo, aged 89. President Yamandú Orsi announced his death, calling him a friend, activist, leader and guide.
His central idea remains a useful test for any voter: not how much a candidate owns, but whether their way of living lets them understand the lives of the people they want to represent.
Sources: NPR via OPB: Uruguay’s ex-President José Mujica dies at 89 (13 May 2025); Wikipedia: José Mujica. Original interview: CNN en Español (22 October 2014), reported in English by Roque Planas for HuffPost.
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