Uruguay -- This small country has just elected a former guerrilla fighter who has surrounded himself by radical leftist aides, but there is no climate of panic among opposition politicians and business leaders who are spending the southern hemisphere summer in this posh seaside resort.

José "Pepe" Mujica, the 74-year-old president-elect who comes from the extreme left wing of outgoing President Tabare Vazquez's ruling coalition and will take office March 1, is a folksy politician best known for his humble life-style and frequent verbal indiscretions.

COLORFUL PERSONALITY

Making the most of the fact that he never attended college, in part because he spent 14 years in jail for his urban guerrilla activities, his plain talk and penchant for using bad words in public most often draws smiles from friends and foes alike.

At a private birthday party for former President Julio Maria Sanguinetti attended by about three dozen family members, business people and politicians mostly opposed to Mujica, I found few who feared that the president-elect will lead a Venezuelan-styled radical leftist regime.

"Mujica is not a classic socialist, because he doesn't idolize the state's intervention in the economy," Sanguinetti told me. "Rather, he is an agrarian romantic who believes in a bucolic utopia."

At the most, some at the party expressed concern that Uruguay will fail to accelerate its insertion into the global economy, because most cabinet jobs have been filled with people based on political debts to parties that supported Mujica's campaign, rather than professional skills.

Others worried that some of Mujica's hard-line aides -- including his wife and former fellow guerrilla Lucia Topolansky, who will become a leading senator and interior minister-designate Eduardo Bonomi, who will be in charge of the police -- may support anti-capitalist "Bolivarian" political groups to pave the way for a Venezuelan-inspired radicalization.

`NOTHING WILL CHANGE'

"Over the surface, nothing will change," one of the guests told me. "But under the surface, they will try to erode the country's system of checks and balances to create conditions for their socialist revolution."

In a separate interview a few days later, former President Luis Alberto Lacalle, who lost the runoff election against Mujica on Nov. 29, told me that he is concerned about some recent statements by Mujica's fellow Tupamaro movement leaders.

He cited the case of Julio Marenales, who was recently quoted as saying that Mujica's leftist coalition has won the presidency, but has yet to "win power."

"Marenales' opinions has left many of us worried, because he is a leader of the [Tupamaro] movement," Lacalle told me. He added, however, that "it wouldn't be elegant nor patriotic for me to make gloomy forecasts ahead of time."

Under outgoing president Vazquez, Uruguay has done pretty well by most standards. Over the past five years, poverty has gone down from 37 percent to 26 percent of the population, and a one-laptop-per-child program started by Vazquez has been carried out with great public support in the country.

Senator-elect Pedro Bordaberry, another opposition candidate who ran against Mujica in last year's elections, told me that even if Mujica or his hard-line aides tried to veer this country into radical populism, they would have a hard time trying to impose their will on Congress. Mujica's ruling coalition will have 50 seats in the 99-member lower house of Congress, but it's far from clear that the pro-government majority bloc will be able to avoid dissenting votes.

"Each of Mujica's 50 congressmen thinks that he will have the deciding vote," Bordaberry told me. "That will force Mujica to broaden his base, and seek support from outside his party."

My opinion: Mujica is likely to be a pragmatic leader, whose main challenge will be to modernize this country without much personal knowledge about how the global economy works, nor -- except for Vice President Danilo Astori and a few others -- a staff of high-skilled advisers. The government's main problem may not be one of attitude, but of aptitude.

But, in the big scheme of things, Uruguay is likely to join the group of leftist-ruled countries such as Chile, Brazil and Peru that are running responsible economic policies, and disproving the myth that there can't be a modern, globalized left in Latin America.

That's good news for the region, because these countries are proving to be much more successful in promoting growth and reducing poverty than the narcissist-Leninist leaders of Venezuela, Bolivia and Ecuador.

 

 

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