On September 24, activists, intellectuals, legislators, and the presidents of Chile, Spain, and Uruguay gathered in New York City on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly to honor the legacy of former Uruguayan president José “Pepe” Mujica, who passed away in May 2025. Mujica’s presidency was only one chapter in an extraordinary life that was shaped by his years as a Tupamaro guerrilla, more than a decade of imprisonment under Uruguay’s dictatorship, and his later reputation as a folk hero and philosopher who chose to live simply on a farm outside Montevideo.
The evening’s theme was democracy and its uncertain future, a concept that, as Stefanos Geroulanos, Director of NYU’s Remarque Institute, observed, currently feels “reedy and not up to the task.” The challenges under discussion were formidable: the resurgence of right-wing authoritarianism, the erosion of democratic norms, and the outsized power of corporate interests, from big tech to fossil fuels. Against this backdrop, participants turned to Mujica’s sweeping humanism, ethical clarity, and lifelong commitment to popular struggle as a compass for envisioning a more resilient democratic politics.
Democracy in Crisis
Wednesday’s event, organized by NYU’s Remarque Institute, the Panamerican Congress, and Foro Iniciativa Mujica, followed a series of meetings that began a year ago during the 2024 United Nations General Assembly in New York, when the presidents of Brazil and Spain launched an initiative titled Defending Democracy, Fighting Extremism. The project aimed to develop strategies and means of coordination to counter what was later described by Chilean President Gabriel Boric as a “new anti-democratic Washington Consensus.”
Over the course of the last year, the countries involved grew to include Colombia, Chile, and Uruguay. The expanded group convened a high-level meeting in Santiago in July under the banner Democracia Siempre, which in turn opened into wider debates at the Panamerican Congress in Mexico City that August, with the participation of progressive legislators from North and South America, and intellectuals such as Naomi Klein and Alvaro García Linera.
The right has increasingly achieved power not through coups or overt coercion but through electoral victories, dismantling decades of hard-won rights from within democratic institutions.
As these institutional efforts take shape, a new generation of right-wing leaders is demonstrating the enduring fusion of neoliberal economics and domestic repression in the region. Leaders like Argentina’s Javier Milei, Ecuador’s Daniel Noboa, and El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele have advanced austerity, embraced tough-on-crime rhetoric, weakened democratic institutions, and deepened cooperation with the United States on both military and economic matters.
Underlying all of this is the difficult fact that the right has increasingly achieved power not through coups or overt coercion but through electoral victories, dismantling decades of hard-won rights from within democratic institutions. Behind this advance lies a network of think-tanks, funders, and international conferences, along with a media environment saturated with disinformation. Much effort has gone into diagnosing these dynamics, but one of the clear themes of the event was the need to go beyond denunciation and build an alternative to the rightwing dystopia that dominates our present.
Constructing Alternatives
It was in this spirit that economist Isabella Weber offered one of the evening’s clearest articulations of what a concrete vision for building countervailing power might look like. Moving beyond slogans, she argued that an antifascist economic policy must begin by securing the affordability of essentials like food, housing, transportation, healthcare, and education in order to address people’s daily needs. Citing Gustavo Petro’s success in lowering inflation in Colombia, she emphasized that many of the most urgent policy decisions will require leaders to defy neoliberal orthodoxies.
At the international level, Weber proposed mechanisms such as buffer stocks to stabilize commodity prices—whose volatility, intensified by climate change, disproportionately harms economies in the Global South—as a way to move beyond the binary of free trade versus protectionism and instead manage global commerce in the service of people. She stressed that both markets and planning must be deployed, with expanded state capacity and renewed collective organizing, in order to “free our material wellbeing from the stranglehold of profit motives.”
The tension highlighted by Weber between the rule of people and the rule of markets—between neoliberal economics and democratic politics—remains one of the defining contradictions of our time. Axel Kicillof, the Governor of Buenos Aires Province—and a man many see as a potential future presidential candidate—declared that the world is witnessing the end of unipolar hegemony and the reign of North American decadence.
While the turbulence and confusion of this era have fueled violence and right-wing opportunism, Kicillof challenged the left to seek ways of navigating this crisis in ways that serve the masses. Argentina’s September 7th election—in which voters rejected Javier Milei’s austerity measures—demonstrated to Kicillof that the downward spiral of neoliberalism could be slowed at the ballot box.
The crackdown on migrants and the ongoing genocide in Gaza—two of the most extreme manifestations of this rightward shift—also loomed large over the discussion. Spanish President Pedro Sánchez unequivocally declared that Israel’s actions amounted to genocide, and had earlier that day announced that Spain would deploy a naval vessel to escort the Sumud Flotilla as it crossed the Mediterranean in an effort to break the siege and deliver humanitarian aid to Gaza.
Mujica’s Vision
During the evening’s second panel, which was preceded by a video call from Mujica’s widow and former vice president Lucía Topolansky, Uruguayan President Orsi reflected on how his country’s international image had shifted. The country was once known best for its triumphs in the realm of sports, but is now most closely associated with Mujica. Central to this legacy is Mujica’s 2013 address to the United Nations General Assembly in which he called for solidarity with the marginalized, international coordination to regulate markets and confront climate change, and decried the way capitalist consumption devalued our humanity.
The speech was a touchstone for many of the speakers and the centerpiece of a documentary previewed at the event, which highlighted Mujica’s idea of Amazonia, a vision that wove together environmental stewardship and continental unity. For Mujica, this shared homeland, a patria para todos, remained an unfinished project.
In his later writings, Mujica insisted that politics required a spirit of creativity, a willingness to imagine a society beyond the logic of the market. He urged people to see capitalism not only as a mode of production or a set of property relations, but also as a culture, a system of values. He argued that countering capitalism’s ethos of selfishness and endless accumulation demanded the cultivation of another set of values rooted in solidarity, humility, and restraint. Mujica embodied this ethic in his own life, living in a modest farmhouse, driving an old Volkswagen Beetle, and donating most of his presidential salary.
Mujica’s moral commitment, evident across all phases of his life, was revolutionary in a world where the logics of the market dominate nearly every facet of our society.
This, perhaps, is his greatest legacy: the reintroduction of a politics in which words and actions align, and in which the way one lives reflects the values for which one struggles. Mujica’s moral commitment, evident across all phases of his life, was revolutionary in a world where the logics of the market dominate nearly every facet of our society. Following his example, the Left must resist nostalgia and embrace the spirit of creativity and experimentation needed to build a truly counterhegemonic project capable of competing with the Right.
The South Points Us Forward
Mujica’s ethics must be understood against the backdrop of our shifting world order. Beneath the cultural and discursive debates lies a material reality: the old order of unipolar dominance and globalized neoliberalism is in crisis, while a new order has yet to fully emerge. The contradictions of this transitional moment will continue to shape politics and press progressive leaders to offer a popular alternative to the right, one that addresses inflation, poverty, and precarity in people’s daily lives. For today’s movements, Mujica’s legacy suggests that moral authority and creativity can strengthen political projects, but history also shows us that without strategies to confront the power of capital directly, reforms risk falling short of the systemic transformation needed to secure and expand progressive gains.
Today, Latin American leaders face these challenges under intensified pressure from a more aggressive northern neighbor. The Trump administration’s use of tariffs, migration policy, and direct military intervention underscores the limits of regional autonomy. Meanwhile, looming elections in Chile, Colombia, and Brazil point to an uncertain future for the Left in the region.
In his 2013 UN speech, Mujica declared, “I am from the South, and I come from the South.” Initiatives like Democracia Siempre demonstrate that the reclamation of sovereignty, democracy, and dignity in international politics is coming from the Global South. Progressive leaders in Latin America can point us toward a future beyond free-market dogma and toward a reinvigorated democracy that serves the collective. Mujica’s life reminds us that realizing this vision demands creativity, experimentation, and an unwavering focus on the everyday needs of ordinary people.
Abigail Kret is an artist and writer whose work focuses on the history of left-wing movements in the late 20th century.