Rather than moving into the country’s presidential palace, his home is still the ramshackle one-bedroom farmhouse he’s shared with his wife for the past 30 years.
But his views on world affairs are anything but understated… he’s legalised gay marriage, abortion and marijuana, and courted controversy by agreeing with Barack Obama to accept prisoners from Guantanamo Bay.
“Uruguay is a country which has grown from immigration, people from all over, that is our origin,” he told Dateline, as they sit in his untidy garden surrounded by chickens and dogs.
“These people are broken, downtrodden in a way,” he said of the Guantanamo inmates. “There’s no prosecutor, no judge, nothing. It’s kidnapping from a formal legal perspective.”
He has thoughts too on Australia’s asylum seeker policy.
“It’s not very generous to humans. We should be aware there is a kind of racial selfishness [that is] growing, or an ultra-nationalism, that says ‘this is for us’”, he said.
“It's not a very good image of Australia in the world.”
Mujica is a former guerrilla leader, who joined the revolutionary fervour sweeping through Latin America in the 1960s following Fidel Castro’s victory in Cuba.
He robbed banks to source funds for the uprising, and spent 13 years in prison, where he was held in solitary confinement and tortured.
“I haven’t forgiven, but I don’t have any score to settle,” he says of his captors. “I have to live, because nobody can compensate us for what we have lost.”
“In life, you can fall down 1,000 times, but the point is to have willingness to stand up and start again.”
He was released in 1985 under an amnesty at the end of the country’s dictatorship, and since then he and his wife, Senator Lucia Topolansky, have become a formidable yet controversial force in Uruguyan politics.
But their unpresidential home life and the trusty old VW Beetle they drive around in have also become just as well known across Uruguay.
“The President gets the food for our pet dog,” she says of life at their home on the outskirts of the capital Montevideo. “If we’re having lunch and I have to leave in a hurry, he’ll wash the dishes.”
“If we ever need to entertain a lot of people, we go to the neighbours’ house where there is a barbecue.”
But at work, it’s major global issues that occupy the 79-year-old president’s mind, including the current situation in Syria.
“Another crazy situation, isn’t it?” he says. “We complained about the Cold War, but the Cold War was in an orderly world, they used to consult by phone… this one seems like chaos, doesn’t it?”
And he said that the world also needs to be united on another of his favourite subjects, the environment.
“No country can solve climate change alone, we have to take global measures,” he said. “I see the world’s powerful leaders worrying themselves with who is going to win the next election. What are we missing? We are missing leadership… to say ‘we are going to improve the entire planet.’”
Under Uruguay’s constitution, Mujica can’t stand for a second term as president. Whether his party stays in power or not in next month’s election, Lucia said her husband has changed the perception of what a president should be like.
“A president who is accessible, simple, direct and who says what he thinks,” is how she described him.
“And I think that this mark that he’s left on the presidency will be very difficult to undo because people have got used to this... you can knock on the door and be heard.”
