{"id":35917,"date":"2013-12-18T09:43:10","date_gmt":"2013-12-18T09:43:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/organicconsumers.org\/?p=35917"},"modified":"2013-12-18T09:43:10","modified_gmt":"2013-12-18T09:43:10","slug":"article_28930","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/organicconsumers.org\/article_28930\/","title":{"rendered":"Uruguay’s President Jose Mujica: No Palace, No Motorcade, No Frills"},"content":{"rendered":"

For related articles and more information, please visit OCA’s Politics and Democracy page<\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n

If anyone could claim to be leading by example in an age of austerity, it is Jose Mujica, Uruguay’s president, who has forsworn a state palace in favor of a farmhouse, donates the vast bulk of his salary to social projects, flies economy class and drives an old Volkswagen Beetle.<\/p>\n

But the former guerrilla fighter is clearly disgruntled by those who tag him “the world’s poorest president” and – much as he would like others to adopt a more sober lifestyle – the 78-year-old has been in politics long enough to recognize the folly of claiming to be a model for anyone.<\/p>\n

“If I asked people to live as I live, they would kill me,” Mujica said during an interview in his small but cozy one-bedroom home set amid chrysanthemum fields outside Montevideo.<\/p>\n

The president is a former member of the Tupamaros guerrilla group, which was notorious in the early 1970s for bank robberies, kidnappings and distributing stolen food and money among the poor<\/a>. He was shot by police six times and spent 14 years in a military prison, much of it in dungeon-like conditions.<\/p>\n

Since becoming leader of Uruguay in 2010, however, he has won plaudits worldwide for living within his means, decrying excessive consumption and pushing ahead with policies on same-sex marriage, abortion and cannabis legalization<\/a> that have reaffirmed Uruguay as the most socially liberal country in Latin America.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

If anyone could claim to be leading by example in an age of austerity, it is Jose Mujica, Uruguay’s president, who has forsworn a state palace in favor of a farmhouse, donates the vast bulk of his salary to social projects, flies economy class and…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[80,9],"organicbytes":[],"countries":[],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nUruguay's President Jose Mujica: No Palace, No Motorcade, No Frills - Organic Consumers<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/organicconsumers.org\/article_28930\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Uruguay's President Jose Mujica: No Palace, No Motorcade, No Frills - 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