José Mujica
Uruguayan guerrilla fighter and politician
José Alberto "Pepe" Mujica Cordano (20 May 1935 – 13 May 2025) was a Uruguayan politician, revolutionary and farmer who served as the 40th president of Uruguay from 2010 to 2015. A former guerrilla with the Tupamaros, he was tortured and imprisoned for 14 years during the military dictatorship in the 1970s and 1980s. A member of the Broad Front coalition of left-wing parties, Mujica was the minister of Livestock, Agriculture, and Fisheries from 2005 to 2008 and a senator afterwards. As the candidate of the Broad Front, he won the 2009 presidential election and took office as president on 1 March 2010.
Mujica's administration implemented a range of progressive policies, including the decriminalization of abortion, the legalization of marijuana consumption and the legalization of same-sex marriage. Additional measures strengthened the country's trade unions and significantly bolstered minimum wages.
While in office, Mujica was described as being "the world's poorest president" due to his austere lifestyle and his donation of around 90 percent of his US$12,000 monthly salary to charities that support low-income individuals and small entrepreneurs. He was an outspoken critic of capitalism and characterised it as having a focus on stockpiling material possessions which do not contribute to human happiness.
Early life and education
José Alberto Mujica Cordano was born on 20 May 1935 in the Paso de la Arena neighbourhood of Montevideo to Demetrio Mujica Terra and Lucy Cordano Giorello. Demetrio was a descendant of a Spanish Basque family who arrived in Uruguay in 1842.
“José Mujica” enters the record as uruguayan guerrilla fighter and politician. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what José, Mujica and Uruguayan can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Biographical claims are most persuasive when dates, appointments and relationships can be traced to records created close to the events described. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 23, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q9094. The first chronological checks are 1935, 2025, 2010 and 2015.
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This entry incorporates text from “José Mujica” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.