Pepe Mujica, the former Uruguayan president, removed the splendor of politics

José “Pepe” Mujica was not much use for the three-storey presidential residence of Uruguay, with his chandeliers, lift, marble stairs and Louis XV furniture.

“It’s nonsense,” he told me last year. “They have to make it a high school.”

So when he became president of his little South American nation in 2010, Mr Mujica decided that he would commute from his house: a messy, three-room hut so large as a studio apartment, crammed with a wooden stove, surrendered bookcases and pots of planted vegetables.

For His death on TuesdayMr. Mujica has been living with that for decades His lifelong partnerLucía Topolansky-yourself a former vice-president and their three-nasty dog, Manuela. They processed Chrysanthemums to sell in local markets and drove their Sky Blue 1987 Volkswagen Beetle to their favorite tangobars.

It was a political master. His chairmanship was unobtrusive due to many policy measures. But his sober lifestyle made him honored through many Uruguayans for life as she, while giving him a platform in the international press to warn that greed was erosion. He insisted that it was really how he wanted to live, but he also acknowledged that it was serving to illustrate that politicians had had a long time.

“We have done everything possible to make the presidency less worship,” Mr Mujica told the predecessor of the New York Times in South America, Simon Romeroin in 2013Sharing a Calebas from partner, the herbal drink went back and forth about conversation in this part of the world.

I got Mr. last year Mujica visited in his same house. He was bundled in a winter coat and woolen hat for a wood -burning stove, vulnerable and hardly able to eat as a result of radiation treatment for a tumor in his esophagus. But opposite a journalist who could spread his ideas for perhaps one of the last times to the world, he kept the court for almost two hours and explained how he could find goal and beauty in life and how he did not tell me: “Humanity, as it goes, is doomed.”

He also explained why he believed that the attributes of chosen office – the palaces, the servants, the Luxurious jets – were the opposite of what democracy should be about.

“The cultural remains of feudalism continue to exist- within the Republic. The red carpet, the bugles when the feudal lord came out of the castle on the bridge. Everything that remains,” he said. “The president likes to be praised.”

He remembered a visit to Germany while he was president. “They brought me in a Mercedes-Benz. The door weighed around 3000 kilos. They put 40 motorcycles in the front and another 40 at the back,” he said. “I was embarrassed.”

The international press gave him the “poorest president” in the world, and noticed that his assets was $ 1,800 when he took office. Mr. Mujica removed the name and often quoted the Roman court philosopher Seneca: “It is not the man who has too little, but the man who craves more, that’s bad.”

It would be difficult to find a striking contrast with President Trump, who made life a gilded life central in his identity. In our interview, three months before the elections, Mr Mujica repeatedly brought up Mr Trump. “It seems like a lie – a country like the United States has a candidate like Trump,” he said. “Democracy at the height of a doormat.”

Mr Mujica entered politics in the 1960s as a bank-robbing left guerrilla. His group, the Tupamaros, became known for their violence. Mr Mujica said they were trying to prevent civilians, but added that the left -wing battle sometimes required violence.

After escaping the prison twice, he was imprisoned for 14 years under the military dictatorship of Uruguay, much of his sentence spent on lonely imprisonment. In a hole in the ground, he said, he became friends with rats and A small frog Psychological survival.

He was released as Uruguay recovered democracy and was eventually elected in the congress and drawn attention to the appearance to work on a Vespa. In 2009, Voters have made him president of the nation of 3.3 million.

Under Mr Mujica, the Uruguay decriminalized abortion, legalized from the same sex, pushed into renewable energy and became the first nation to Fully legalize marijuana. Yet many of his goals, such as considerably reducing inequality and improving education, became the victims of the reality of politics.

But while the news about his death spread on Tuesday, people around the world did not remember him for his policy. It was his humility that was his legacy.

Earlier this year, his political protégé, a former history teacher named Yamandú Orsi, recorded as new President of Uruguay. He has shuttled to work from his parental home and the Presidential mansion of Uruguay has usually remained empty.