Invited to D.C., Mujica ‘might not go’
President José Mujica of Uruguay said Sunday (March 23) that President Obama has invited him to the White House for May 12, but that he has “80 percent decided not to go [because] we’re in an election year and everything is utilized and I think that it won’t be convenient.”
Mujica was alluding to opposition charges that he acted as a servant of Obama when he agreed to accept detainees from the U.S. Navy base at Guantánamo, Cuba. [For background, read: “Uruguay agrees to accept…”, and “Reciprocity…”, in this issue of Progreso Weekly.]
Primary elections in Uruguay are set for June 1; the general election, for Oct. 26. Mujica is not up for re-election.
“Once this affair is over,” Mujica added, referring to the pre-election activities, “I’m going to make a decision” about traveling to Washington.
The president made those statements during a half-hour radio interview Sunday (March 23) with the multimedia outlet Espectador. Since he announced that he would help Obama by taking some of the “Gitmo” prisoners, he has been under attack by the opposition and some of the media for giving refuge to suspected terrorists. He has defended his decision as a “human rights issue.”
If and when he goes to Washington, Mujica said, he will talk to Obama “about the responsibility that the main countries have today. If mankind doesn’t deal with the key problems, the crisis will lengthen,” he said. “The world needs an agenda and needs world governance and that’s a responsibility of the great powers.”
“Mankind should be governed as a species [because] we’re all in the same shrinking boat. It’s up to countries like the United States, China, Russia, and others. The rest of us are spectators and victims.’
Other subjects that Mujica plans to discuss with Obama are the U.S. trade embargo against Cuba and the release of the three Cuban intelligence agents who remain in American prisons since their sentencing in 2001. He reminded his radio host that, in the 1990s, Uruguay agreed to take 12 Cuban rafters who had sought asylum at the U.S. Navy base at Guantánamo.
The talks with Obama about a possible turnover of Guantánamo prisoners “began about four months ago,” Mujica said, and the initiative came “from the [U.S.] Embassy. We studied the matter and decided to respond positively.”
By that time, he said, “Switzerland, Spain, Slovakia, Portugal, Ireland, Hungary, Germany, France, Bulgaria and several Latin American countries that I’m not going to identify had already received people under the same conditions.”
Once Mujica decided to accept the detainees, he told Cuban President Raúl Castro that he was “going to give Obama a hand in emptying the Guantánamo prison” and said that he hoped that his gesture would lead to “better relations between the U.S. and Cuba.”
“I didn’t consult [with Castro]; I communicated that to him out of courtesy,” Mujica said. “The decision had been made.” Castro accepted the idea without reservations.
“Now, it’s up to the U.S. to respond, but Barack Obama doesn’t have all the cards,” Mujica went on. “The cause is valid but it must go through the filter of a Senate committee in that country.”
Despite the criticism aimed at him, “helping the president of the United States to unravel this mess is a just cause.” Mujica acknowledged that “many times we’ve criticized the U.S. and we’ll continue to do so, but the people who make judgments against our decision never spent even half an hour in a prison cell on nothing but suspicion.”
Mujica speaks from experience. A leftist guerrilla in the 1970s, he spent 14 years in prison.
In Guantánamo “there are people whose freedom has been deprived for 12 years under unbelievable conditions. That’s a shame.” He will welcome the detainees to his country, Mujica said, and “if these people want to leave in the future, Uruguay is not going to stop them.”
The decision to accept the detainees “was not conditioned, but at some moment we can tell the North American government, from a moral standing, that please try to improve your relations with Cuba, remember the people. […] From a strong moral standpoint, a small country can tell a gigantic power to try to relax the tensions. It’s the same attitude we’ve maintained, for example, with the conflict in Colombia and elsewhere.”
His visit to Obama, if it materializes, will be straightforward, Mujica said. “I’m not going to flatter him and I’m not going to carry a stone in each hand.”
[Photograph is of Presidents Mujica and Obama during the Summit of the Americas held in Cartagena, Colombia, in 2012.]
