SANTIAGO, Chile — Uruguay's former guerilla-turned-president, Jose Mujica, best known for transforming his tiny country into one of the most socially liberal in all of Latin America, said Monday that he has esophageal cancer.
“This is obviously very complicated and doubly so in my case,” the former president told reporters on Monday, adding that doctors were assessing the best course of action but told him chemotherapy and surgery posed challenges. As a leftist guerrilla in the 1960s and early 1970s, he wielded weapons in the streets in an effort to overthrow the government, getting shot by police several times and ultimately landing in prison until the fall of the country's brutal dictatorship led to his release in 1985.
Although Mujica left the Senate in 2020, he remained politically active in the Broad Front, a coalition of leftist parties and centrist social democrats.