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Politics & Current Affairs

Can Uruguay’s Pauper President Be an International Role Model?

Far from questing after the fame and fortune that often accompanies state-sanctioned power, Mujica prefers to live quietly with his wife and their three-legged dog in a farm house.
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Uruguayan President Jose “Pepe” Mujica is among the rarest of heads-of-state thanks to his generous and humble personality. Far from questing after the fame and fortune that often accompanies state-sanctioned power, Mujica prefers to live quietly with his wife and their three-legged dog in a farm house. Having declined an official state residency, he also donates 90% of his presidential salary to charity. Yet he rejects the notion that he is poor, saying: “Those who describe me so are the poor ones… My definition of poor are those who need too much. Because those who need too much are never satisfied.”

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To be sure, Mujica’s personality has tempered since his days as a Marxist guerrilla fighter, a status for which he would spend 14 years in jail. But the pauper president seems to have taken every event in his life as a lesson on how to do good in his official station. “Earlier this year, he offered Uruguay as a refuge for six Arab detainees from the illegal US detention centre in Guantanamo Bay,” partly, he says, as a result of his own time spent in prison. Besides granting a small number of Syrians refugee in Uruguay, his policy of legalizing marijuana has transformed the war on drugs, which may become a model in violence-plauged countries like Mexico.

Read more at Al Jazeera

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