What we can learn from the life of Uruguay’s former guerrilla and leftist president Pepe Mujica.

I met the “poorest president in the world” in late 2023. I had seen him before, at an event in Washington, DC, ten years earlier, but at that time, he was surrounded by wild throngs of adulators — shaking hands, snapping selfies, kissing babies. You might have thought he was a pop-star influencer rather than a man pushing eighty and the sitting president of a small, far-flung South American country. But this was the allure of Pepe: ex–guerrilla fighter, political prisoner turned president, viral phenomenon, philosopher, farmer, survivor.

When I finally had a chance to talk with José “Pepe” Mujica in person, he was no longer the president of Uruguay and had recently resigned from his seat in t

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