Jose Pepe Mujica: Warrior Philosopher President by Stephen Gregory

Author:Stephen Gregory [Gregory, Stephen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, Presidents & Heads of State, History, Latin America, South America, Political Science, World, Caribbean & Latin American
ISBN: 9781845197896
Google: cYBWjwEACAAJ
Goodreads: 28592656
Publisher: Sussex Academic Press
Published: 2016-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Horizontal and Egalitarian or Vertical and Hierarchical?

The Batlle y Ordoñez early twentieth century welfare state model left a culture – some would call it a sick hangover – that promised or attempted to provide for its citizens a dignified way of life literally from the cradle to the grave. In this still active Uruguayan mindset, the purpose of the State is to provide people and families with jobs and all you need to live, instead of being there to actually help others to do productive activities. There has for decades existed a culture of public employment rather than of public service which is only now beginning to change, although not consistently and not across the board. There is, then, a general view in Uruguay that public servants are not in their offices or at their counters to work but to ensure that at last some citizens can avoid the dole queue and get a pension at the end of a limited and unadventurous life on low to moderate pay. Nationalist president Luis Lacalle once infamously said of his public servants that they pretended to work and he pretended to pay them, an opinion for which he was, not unexpectedly, much criticised. The central question is not how true this statement was, however, but how well it encapsulates a mentality to which many, even most, contemporary Uruguayans are willing to conform. Its downside is a distrust or envy of excellence (except in sport, perhaps) since in a republic in which no-one is supposedly better than anyone else, acquiring more than most becomes suspicious even if others might really want more than a bit of it! As the aforementioned writer Mario Benedetti once remarked as far back as 1970, when Mujica was still fighting his guerrilla war, Uruguay was a small country that seemed made for socialism. However, even under capitalism, there remains the very real issue that in a country of only three million or so inhabitants the State is almost inevitably going to be the biggest employer because there are simply not enough customers of any kind to support large numbers of private businesses of all sorts and sizes, unless they are at least partially and successfully export-oriented. These are complex matters involving nebulous concepts like ‘national character’ and consensus about them is either unlikely or impossible, yet what is undoubtedly true is that there exists a whole library of Uruguayan books and films about them and that most Uruguayans, when prodded, seem to have lengthy, loud, more or less informed opinions about any or all of them.

Enough has been said on all this already in one way or another to know where Mujica stands in principle with regard to it. He favours the kind of social organisation that allows the fullest participation of the largest proportion possible in making the decisions that affect them all. His preference for cooperative enterprises is well known because he believes that people give their best when they have a material and moral stake in what they are required to work at.

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