Petro in the Mujica mirror

The death of Pepe Mujica, this strange specimen of the Latin American left, has served to speak for a few hours – but it will undoubtedly be discussed for many days – everything that politics could be and almost never is. Mujica was a wise man without alharaca, and had won wisdom at the tip of Dolores; He went through violence and lived in it, as an actor and much more as a victim, but he was one of the very rare revolutionaries who know what failure is for. He did not resemble anyone, not only because of the rare coherence between his private life and his public convictions, but because he briefly made the possibility that political power really served to improve the lives of citizens. And it does not escape that in his case, as in so many others, the image that we have those who saw it from the outside can omit or ignore or suffer biases, and it does not escape that its presidency, like all, had errors (power is what it is impossible to have without mistake); But even those who have already lost all the illusions we saw in its passage through the presidency of Uruguay an irrefutable test, in front of our eternal cycles of corruption, indolence and idiocy, that another way of doing things is possible.

The presidents of the Latin American left hastened to say goodbye, and the most silly right – that of Milei, for example – kept a restrained silence when it could have been as silly as ever: there was a lot of silly and a lot of hypocrisy after the death of Pope Francis. In that, in that silent silence, there is some of the moral authority that Mujica had in his last years of life. As for the left that lamented his death, I have not been able to not regret, at the same time, the huge distance between Mujica and the Colombian president Gustavo Petro. Someone will surely write a long attempt to draw their parallel lives, and we will notice that the two were guerrillas, and the two were in jail, and the movements of the two-the M-19 and the Tupamaros-looked a lot like (in a certain sense, the M-19 had more in common with the tupamaros than with the guerrillas of the Colombian field: the FARC or the ELN, for example). But then the differences are visible, the unbeatable differences between the two men: of ideas, of temperament, of what we call leadership. Of course they also separate them several years of age, but I don’t think Petro will learn in what lifesses everything that Mujica knew before he died. Because it is not a matter of time, but of character.

And it is not about practical differences: it is true that Mujica despised social networks and never used them to do politics, and not even, for what they tell me, I had your own cell phone; And it is true that sometimes Colombians, if they offered us a wish, we would ask that Petro not had a cell phone: because Petro not only uses his social networks to do politics, but sometimes it seems that he only did politics in them. And it is always a bad policy: outside its deranged trills, where it ventilates its incoherent resentments and creates economic catastrophes or political crises in two seconds of its unfathomable Bogotanas early morning, Petro has been unable to bring absolutely nothing to reality, and rather has used that formidable speaker to threaten or insult – the adjective Nazi He is one of his favorites – to everything he represents his ideological contradictors. Of course, behavior in social networks is the best comment about what a person is; And one can try to imagine what Pepe Mujica would have trinated if someone had opened an X account to force. But I suspect that I would have understood the deep inanity, involuntary venality and irresponsible narcissism that pass through politics in those places.

But I don’t mean that. I mean the small and large coherence: Mujica managed to pass – he or his own – immense laws on the right to abortion, equal marriage and decriminalization of marijuana, and Petro, who has always defended the same thing, has not seemed contradictory to bring to his movement to an anti -abortion and homophobic evangelical preacher of rubber with a knife while pronouncing a kind of charm), or maintaining as an interior minister a dark manipulator that has been denounced several times for gender violence. Nor has it seemed contradictory to give political asylum to the former Panamanian president Ricardo Martinelli, a copy of that new Trumpist right, a convicted of economic crimes that evaded his hidden sentence in the Embassy of Daniel Ortega. And I do not say that Petro should donate 90% of his salary, as Mujica did, and I do not say that he has no right to make a cosmetic hair implants or surgeries while ranting against capitalist materialism. The psyche of men is very complex; Anyway, living in a coherent way is very difficult.

Sometimes I think of the serene mujica that always seemed willing to spend time talking to people, hearing others, without losing the deepest convictions: those that are deeper than any ideology, because they are ethical convictions. One has the impression that it went in life after having retired from the presidency: trying to see the world lucidly, trying to understand what they had not understood before, trying to reach good terms with their own mistakes. What a brutal contrast with Petro, which is unable to do any form of dialogue – even with those who have the closest – that only the world can see between the glasses of his ideology, which fills his mouth with words such as love and peace and life while dedicating every second to fostering the hatred between his and others, those who are with him and those who do not remember: remember the unfortunate speech – one between so many days – of a supporter of his to make cheap politics: “Alberto is the first dead thanks to the decisions of that congress, for having denied the transit of the Labor Reform Law,” he said, and even called a senator by name: “Although Mrs. Blel did not order, Alberto’s blood today dirty her and your family.”

What do you want: no matter how much I try, I cannot imagine Pepe Mujica descending to these levels of meanness that scratch, themselves, in the incitement to violence. While Petro dedicates every second to divide and face Colombians from the cheapest of the resentments, from the most simplistic of demagogies, Mujica – who had to endure hard criticism for not chasing justice to the military coup players of his country, who tortured him for years – spent recent times trying to speak to heal wounds. Many called him a philosopher, maybe in spending. But philosophizing, the old Montaigne left us, is learning to die. Mujica arrived death with the well -learned lesson. They would like others – we would all like – to be able to say the same.