Eduardo Bonomi and José Mujica shared a lot. Both founders of the Popular Participation Movement (MPP) met in the clandestine guerrilla movement of the National Liberation Movement – Tupamaros and the arrival of the Broad Front government found them in the front line of battle after long years militating together.
The senator and former Minister of the Interior died this Sunday at the age of 73 and his longtime partner remembered him in dialogue with Informativo Sarandí.
“He is a person, but he represents a human typology as well,” Mujica reflected. For the former president, each person has their own “characteristic”, but there is “a type” of human being, “a minimum percentage in society who are the ones who put their whole lives, with successes and errors, at the service of something they think and dream of”.
These people “do not live just because they were born”, but rather “try to give them a cause”, assured the former president and added: “Bonomi is that, from morning to night. Over the years (…) Something that Bertolt Brecht said: the irreplaceable”.
Regarding when they met, the former president confessed that it seemed “for a lifetime”. But he remembered that those were times when they both went “half clandestine” and that the former minister was “from very early on a militant understood by that utopia that the French Revolution raised”. “That utopia has led us through life with pain, with failures, but it has given us a cause to live. And Bonomi was always a partner in that,” Mujica said.
Mujica also recalled the time when Bonomi was Minister of Labor and Social Security during Tabaré Vázquez’s first term, when the Salary Councils were reinstated. “Bonomi did not invent them,” said Mujica, but “the bonhomie of this country invented themof that old batllism of the forties”. “There is no instrument of distribution of the size of the cake in a society more important than the salary”, he pointed out. “It was enormously important to return to that which has to do with the degree of equity, which later will refresh society.”
When asked why he appointed him as Minister of the Interior, the former president replied that “because of the enormous trust”, being a key ministry for any government”. However, he believed that “it is the tomb of the cracks”, because there “the barbarities committed by society are reflected”.
“It seems that Bonomi’s destiny, and temperament, always made him choose paths full of thorns”, Mujica concluded.
