Do we like them?

Do we like José Mujica?

Our score: 8 out of 10. He signed marriage equality, gave most of his salary to housing and took in refugees, held back only by his armed-struggle past and some contradictory talk.

Pepe Mujica started as a flower farmer and became a leader of the Tupamaros guerrillas in the 1960s. He was shot six times in a 1970 firefight, escaped prison twice, then spent nearly 15 years locked up under the military dictatorship, much of it in tiny cells with little food or hygiene. He was freed in 1985 under an amnesty and worked his way up through the Broad Front to the presidency in 2010.

The guerrilla chapter is the stain. The AP reports the Tupamaros robbed banks, planted bombs and abducted businessmen and politicians in pursuit of a Cuban-style revolution. He was shot while resisting arrest, and in his own telling the group's cause was injustice. We didn't find a clear apology in the pages we read, and that's the honest reason this isn't a clean sheet.

On the harm check he comes up strong. As president he legalised same-sex marriage, first-trimester abortion and cannabis, and Uruguay ran on about 98 per cent renewable electricity by the end. He also took in six former Guantánamo detainees in 2014. Critics said he was more style than substance and contradicted himself, and two of his officials resigned over the Pluna airline scandal in 2013, but none of that is harm to a group of people.

The good stuff is the stuff the world loved him for. He lived on his modest farm, kept his old Volkswagen Beetle and donated 90 per cent of his presidential salary to a housing project. It wasn't a stunt: he was still living that way decades after he left prison, and he kept preaching less consumerism and more time for life.

Nothing recent turned up beyond tributes since his death on 13 May 2025, aged 89. So the verdict: a genuinely decent leader on people and the planet, with a violent youth he never fully squared up to. On balance, yes, we'd support him.