Jose Mujica is the President of Uruguay, a South American nation of 3.3 million people.
He does not live in a presidential palace. He lives in a run-down house on the capital Montevideo’s outskirts with no servants at all. This is the home where he and his wife have lived for years, on a plot of land where they grow chrysanthemums for sale in local markets.
His security detail: two plainclothes officers parked on a dirt road.
Jose Mujica's net worth upon taking office in 2010 amounted to about US$1,800 — the value of the 1987 Volkswagen Beetle parked in his garage. He never wears a tie and donates about 90 percent of his monthly salary of around $12,000 largely to a program for expanding housing for the poor.
His charitable donations mean his salary is roughly in line with the average Uruguayan income of $775 a month.
“We have done everything possible to make the presidency less venerated,” Mr. Mujica said in an interview with the New York Times one recent morning, after preparing a serving in his kitchen of mate, the herbal drink offered in a hollowed calabash gourd and commonly shared in dozens of sips through the same metal straw.
Passing around the gourd, he acknowledged that his laid-back presidential lifestyle might seem unusual. Still, he said it amounted to a conscious choice to forgo the trappings of power and wealth. Quoting the Roman court-philosopher Seneca, Mr. Mujica said, “It is not the man who has too little, but the man who craves more, who is poor.”
INDEED, if there is any country in South America where a president can drive a Volkswagon Beetle and get by without a large entourage of bodyguards, it might be Uruguay, which consistently ranks among the region’s least corrupt and least unequal nations.
President Mujica's VW Beetle which he drives to work daily
Mujica spent the 1960s and 1970s as part of the Uruguayan guerrilla Tupamaros, a leftist armed group inspired by the Cuban revolution.
Donald Ramotar was also inspired by the Cuban Revolution. Will he follow the Uruguayan president's example and not Bharat Jagdeo's?
[Source material from NY Times]