Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (52 page)

I was about to discover the answer to a question that had hung over me from the start. What happens when you legalize a drug? I booked my flights, and I discovered that the president who stands at the end of the drug war has a story far stranger than I could have imagined. I interviewed
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his wife, his closest friends, his biographer, his critics, his chief of staff, and finally him. This is what I learned from them.

José Mujica looked up at the light. It seemed that the roof of the long, damp well where he had been kept prisoner for two and a half years was covered with only a flimsy sheet of aluminum. If he could reach it, if he could stretch, he could—surely—push it aside, and he would be free. He would be back in the world at last.

He was as emaciated as a concentration camp prisoner by now, and he stank from drinking his own piss.

“It taught me to talk—talk to the person that we all have inside,” he told me years later. “Since I couldn’t talk to the world, I tried to stay alive by calling on the world I had inside myself.” He would pick up one of the many bugs crawling all around him, hold it to his ear, and then—inside the tremendous silence—he would hear the insect shouting to him very loudly. He had also made friends with the frogs. When he was thrown water by the guards, he would try to share a little with them. “Those were the only nonaggressive live beings I had surrounding me in those days,” he would explain to another interviewer later.

But Mujica did not let the insects and frogs shout their messages to him for long, because he was afraid for them. The government, he believed, had planted a secret listening device in his ear, to hear everything he could hear and to read his thoughts. He knew this was true, because he had a burning sensation
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in his ear, and because the people who would do this to him could—he was convinced—do anything.

Perhaps it was for the best that Mujica didn’t know that the metal at the top of the well couldn’t be pushed away, by him, or by anyone. It was part of a tank. The dictators who had seized power in Uruguay were not taking any chances. They wanted him sealed away from the world. “The only thing worse than solitude,” he tells me softly, “is death.”

As he and his friends were being sealed into separate wells, the guards told them: “You guys are being held as hostages. If anybody on the outside does anything crazy, we’ll kill you. We’ll kill you.”

José Mujica had grown up not far from this prison in Montevideo. It was in one of those neighborhoods where the countryside bleeds into the city, and half-built slums form the scar tissue in between. As a boy, he had watched the farm fields just beyond the city wither and empty out one by one. The farmers who had worked those fields were streaming hungrily into the town to try to hustle a living. Mujica’s father lost everything and died when the boy was just seven. His mother grew flowers, and the young Mujica was sent out to sell them. It was only because they all worked
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constantly that they did not starve.

By the time Mujica got to the university, the country’s economy had gone into a deep depression. Kids with distended stomachs toddled around the slums, wasting away, and the political mood began to darken. Some of the worst of the Nazi war criminals—including Josef Mengele—were living in the country, with the tacit approval of the regime. Then one day, a senior general in the Uruguayan military revealed that the army was planning a military coup. Mujica and his friends believed they couldn’t just sit back and watch, so they formed a group called the Tupamaros and started to hijack food trucks
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destined for wealthy areas, driving them to poor neighborhoods and giving all the contents away. They went to the sugarcane workers and gave them arms, so they could take over their fields themselves. They began to seize control of whole cities, and they quickly became known as the “Robin Hood guerrillas.”
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They chose to name a woman as their honorary leader—Miss Marple,
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the elderly spinster who solves crimes in Agatha Christie’s novels. She represented for them the principle of justice, and that, they said, is what they were fighting for.

Like the French Resistance, the Tupamaros were organized into different “pillars,” all operating separately—so that if one pillar was captured, the movement would live on. José and his wife Lucia belonged to pillar number 10. They lived underground and spent their time being bundled from one safe house to the next, planning operations—until one day, as Mujica was waiting to meet a contact in a bar, suddenly, something hit him in the chest.

The police shot him six times,
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but they didn’t let him die. They needed him as a hostage, to discipline his comrades.

Mujica does not talk about the torture he endured while in prison, but some of the other survivors from that time told me about what happened to them. The guards were fond of “the submarine,” where you hold a man’s head underwater until he is about to drown, and then suddenly yank him out. They also applied electric shocks to men’s cheeks, nipples, and testicles.

From his well, Mujica was only allowed to write to Lucia, his wife, once. She was being held in prison, too; she was also being tortured. If we ever get out of this, he told her, we are going to get a little plot of land somewhere—a farm—and make it ours.

There must have been days when it seemed that this would never end, that this would be his reality forever. In a well nearby, one of his comrades had died, although Mujica didn’t know it yet, and wouldn’t for years. And then, one day, alone, José Mujica heard a human voice. Then there were lots of voices. It was a chant. “Your struggle is our struggle!”
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the voices said. “Your struggle is our struggle! We are here! We believe in what you’re doing! We are here! We believe in what you’re doing!”

This time, it was not a hallucination. It was the beginning of the end of the dictatorship.

Mujica kept the promise to Lucia that he had scribbled in the silence of the well. They bought a tiny shack
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on the outskirts of the city with an iron roof and a little stretch of farmland, and there, they planted flowers, like the ones his mother had grown in his childhood, long ago.

One night in November 2005,
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José Mujica and his wife returned to this shack, to find it looking a little different. All their neighbors were there, cheering and singing, and there were barbecues all around them, where everyone was cooking their best meat and offering it around in jubilation. Mujica had just been elected president of Uruguay. He announced that he would not be moving into the Presidential Palace. He would be staying right here, in his shack, for his full five-year term. He would be giving 90 percent
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of his income to the poor and living on $775 a month. And as for the presidential limousine—no, thanks. He would take the bus.

In Uruguay, the president is sworn in on inauguration day by the most popularly elected senator. That senator was Lucia. He introduced a law providing a laptop for every child in Uruguay, and he legalized same-sex marriage and abortion. But there was another issue waiting for him.

His cabinet had been watching the news from northern Mexico as it was cannibalized by cartels. Uruguay similarly sits on the transit route for marijuana and cocaine being transported to Europe. The cartels already have a role in controlling Paraguay, the country next door. If the cartels chose to seize Uruguay, they realized, the country would be defenseless. Mujica would have liberated his nation for nothing.

So he began to look at the history of drug policy and realized, he told me, that “we have for over one hundred years been following the policy of repressing drugs—and after one hundred years we have realized that it has been a resounding failure . . . We have to try other ways.”

But what is the alternative? It was explained to them that when you legalize drugs, you bankrupt most of the cartels. Government regulation can provide a product that is cheaper, higher quality, and not sold in dark alleyways. The drug dealers would go the way of alcohol-selling gangsters into the dustbin of history. Mujica decided he would start with marijuana, on the assumption that over time, other drugs would follow, until they were all regulated.

Previously, presidents across the world had held back from legalization because of two fears. The first was of the United States. The second was of their own people. But President Mujica, from his shack, was noticing a crucial shift. In the United States, several states were poised to vote to fully legalize marijuana—to allow it to be grown and sold to adults, as we’ll see later. And he resolved to persuade his people to do likewise. In solitary confinement, he tells me, he had learned “that life is a fine thing—[so] above and beyond everything, we have to defend life . . . We shouldn’t sacrifice a generation in the name of a dream.”

To figure out how to make legalization work, he turned to two men from the land of his old honorary leader, Miss Marple: Britain.

Many people will begin to travel some way down the road leading away from the drug war, but then they smack into a concrete wall. Written on that wall is the word “legalization,” and next to the
l
word, there is a mural of a man named Timothy Leary. He was the most famous face of 1960s drug legalization, a Harvard professor who dropped out to preach that everybody should take drugs and sail away on the trip that would finally bring Western civilization crashing
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down.

His eyes flashing, Leary
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evangelized on a cascade of TV shows that he was the founder of a new religion, with cannabis and LSD as its sacraments. These drugs should, he said, be given to twelve-year-olds so they can “fuck righteously
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and without guilt”—and to prove the point he gave them to his own young teenage
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children, even as they went slowly insane.
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“Please wake up,”
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Leary’s daughter wrote to him in letters while he swallowed more tabs than Pac-Man. “You are destructive and evil.” She later dissolved into insanity
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and committed suicide. Leary had already told his friends: “You know, I really
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am a psychopath.”

At first, Leary had argued that drugs made you blissed-out and pacifist. Then he argued that his followers should shoot policemen because “total war is upon us.”
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When he ended up on the run in Algeria, he told the Islamic fundamentalists there that they should like him “because he had screwed up
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the brains of so many American middle-class white people.” By the end of his life, he was arguing we should all live in space, because “I’ve always been an enemy of gravity.”
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