Behind the Bastards - Part Two: Christmas non-Bastard: The Tupamaros of Uruguay

Episode Date: December 23, 2021

Robert is joined again by Margaret Killjoy to continue to discuss José Alberto "Pepe" Mujica Cordano.PS We will be taking next week off and new episodes will drop again the first of January 2022. Happy Holidays!Join us on 2/17 for a live digital experience of Behind the Bastards (plus Q&A) featuring Robert Evans, Propaganda, & Sophie Lichterman. If you can't make it, the show will be available for replay until 2/24!Tickets: https://www.momenthouse.com/behindthebastards Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse look like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Did you know Lance Bass is a Russian-trained astronaut?

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Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Well, we can't start with Ho Ho Ho, because Santa Claus was murdered at the beginning of the first episode. He was murdered by Paul Schaefer, who just zoomed in to shoot him in a river with a bunch of kids watching. Paul Schaefer. The audience can't see, but I'm shaking my head disapprovingly at Paul Schaefer. But not the Paul Schaefer who had a Nazi Colton Chile, the Paul Schaefer who was Letterman's band leader for years. That's the one. He shot Santa Claus, too, in a lake. So, Margaret, Killjoy, how are you?

I'm good. How are you liking the two Pomaros? You know, I'm really excited to see how it plays out. Yeah, they're endearing. And then even the fact that one of them ends up president, that's interesting in so many complicated ways. I want to see the steps that took them there. Yes, because this does not happen often. Sometimes guerrilla insurgents win their insurgency and then become the president or whatever.

Sometimes guys who are like labor organizers or leftist politicians get imprisoned by a dictatorship and then later become the president. Rarely is a guy robbing banks with a handgun and then gets democratically elected president of the country, like after spending years in a dictatorship's prison cells. That is not a common story. You don't run into that all the time. How much did he change? I don't know. Yeah, that's what we're getting into. It's exciting. I'm excited. So by 1975, the military had successfully rolled over and destroyed the two Pomaros.

1972, when the dictatorship comes into place, is when they start going hardcore cracking down. And by 75, everybody's dead or in prison, mostly in prison. And one of the people who was thrown in prison was our friend and future president, Jose Musica. He was actually captured several times. He was imprisoned like four separate times. He broke out of prison at least once. But the thing he finally gets caught for is he's like drinking in a bar after robbing a bank or something. And a cop who's there in plain clothes recognizes him and gets a bunch of other cops and they have a huge shootout in a bar.

And he gets shot six times and survives. So again, when I say this guy was hardcore, you can't be much more committed than getting shot six times in a gunfight with the police as a revolutionary. So he's cred to bring him down, you know? No, you sell out. Like, I don't know. You certainly can't. Yeah. I got shot with a rubber bullet once.

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, same. But this is a little bit more hardcore than that. And he is one of the last two Pomaros who gets captured and locked up. And by the time he gets locked up, he's fairly high, like in the organization, right? And again, he's kind of in part because he's one of the last ones to get captured. And so he's put in prison for well over a decade. And I'm going to quit from a write-up in The Guardian to describe, like, what his time in the dictatorship's prison is like.

The poet novelist and playwright Mauricio Rosenkoff spent 11 years in a tiny cell next to Musica. For many years, Rosenkoff told me the hostages could only communicate by tapping Morse code on their cell walls, allowed to use the toilet just once a day. They urinated into their water bottles, allowing the sediment to settle and drinking the rest because water was also scarce. It was even worse for Musica, whose bullet wounds had seriously damaged his guts. Solitary confinement drove them half mad. Pepe became, and that's Jose's nickname, became convinced that a bugging device was hidden in the ceiling.

Its imaginary static deafened him. He would put stones in his mouth to stop himself from screaming, Rosenkoff. Now 81 told me. Musica fought to obtain the one item he needed most, a potty. Hostages were allowed occasional family visits. Donna Lucy brought him one, but the guards refused to give it to him. One day, when his jailers held a party, Musica began to scream for it. The commandant, embarrassed in front of his guests, relented.

Musica clung to his sole possession, a symbol of victory over his jailers, each time they were moved to a new army camp. He refused to scrub it clean, Rosenkoff recalled. We all have ticks left from that time. When Pepe came out, he came out with all that baggage. So he is, and some people, some sources kind of frame him getting the toilet as like this victory, him being able to get the one thing he could, the one like way to exert his autonomy, was to force them to give him his own toilet.

Some people should frame it as him like losing his mind a little bit and just becoming obsessed with the idea of having a toilet. Both are probably true. They don't need to, those don't need to be in conflict with each other. There's no way, I think you would have to go a little crazy in specific ways to survive 14 years, which is what he spends in a prison like this, where you're tortured and beaten and starved regularly. You don't, you don't survive that by not changing at all.

You know, like that is, yeah, he does what he has to, he survives. He's imprisoned for 14 years. If you're wondering how he stayed sane during that time in his own words, we have an interview conducted by someone from the site Upside Down World with Musica that shed some light on how he claims he kept himself sane. Quote, I would come up with ideas for tools. I mentally invented farm implements. That would be for this or that.

I calculated them, manufactured them mentally, and so kept myself entertained. I walked several miles a day, more than I do today for sure. And then the journalist asked in the hole, because he's in like this basically a dank hole. And he said, oh yes, three steps one way, three steps the other, three steps one way, three steps to the other until my legs hurt. Like that's how he avoids losing his mind in this prison. It was the early 1980s when cracks finally started to form around the dictatorship. Some of the credit for this goes to the men and women on the legal left,

the same people who'd formed the Frente Amplio. They continued to organize and agitate. And in 1984, people took to the streets in mass, protesting the dictatorship. And it was such a significant number of people that the dictatorship like backs down basically, realizes like we either are going to start killing people in mass in the street, or we're not going to have a dictatorship anymore. And if we kill people in mass in the street, I'm not sure we'll win. And so I'm not going to gamble.

I think is kind of what happens, right? And the liberal, the kind of the dictatorships end is negotiated in large part by the leader of kind of the liberal party, Julio Sanguinetti, who helps to negotiate an end to the dictatorship. And he gets elected president next in a peaceful election. One of his first decisions is to push for an amnesty that frees imprisoned leftist radicals like Mujica, while also providing amnesty to the military leaders who run the dictatorship. So Sanguinetti is like, we're going to release all the two Pomaros.

We're also not going to imprison the military. Because I think the attitude is number one, you have to leave them. We're trying to get them to back down without mass bloodshed in the streets. You have to leave them an exit plan. And I also think it's his attitude is like, well, if we just imprison another group of people, then maybe we'll have a cycle where a new regime comes in and imprisons the old regime. And like, that doesn't like, I don't know how much of it is like trying to give the military an out

and how much of it is trying to stop a cycle of reprisals. But that's what they decide to do. It's better than most, you know, actually getting the political prisoners free. It's better than most movements. Better than most like movements. And it's, it's, I mean, obviously it's controversial, not prosecuting the military. And actually they do start to prosecute and currently are to some extent, some people who like some of the worst people.

But initially it's just like, yeah, let's amnesty kind of for everybody involved in that whole thing. Let's try to put it behind us. Now, Sanguinetti, who's kind of the first post-dictatorship president, is also one of the people who blames the two Pomaros for the coming of the dictatorship, one of the Uruguayans who does his claim for this. Like one of the things he says in an interview I found is that like the bullets that Mujica and the other two Pomaros fired were shots against democracy because they led to the dictatorship.

And he, as Jose gets out of prison and gets into politics, he does not like Mujica. I found some quotes from him in a Guardian article. And I think at least some of his issue with the two Pomaros is that he's not a leftist for one thing. He's kind of like more maybe center left, you could say, but he's not like, I don't think he's a far leftist. And I think some of his frustration comes from the fact that when the dictatorship ends and politics starts up again, the Frente Amplio comes back and it starts siphoning votes away from the liberal Colorado party, Sanguinetti's party.

I'm not going to spend a lot of time like digging into Uruguay and electoral politics because I don't understand them well. Again, I cite two scholarly papers you can read that go into a lot of detail about Uruguay and electoral politics. I would recommend reading that if you want to know it better. But it is interesting to me that to kind of look into which groups of people had issues with the fact that Jose Mujica, when he gets into politics, was a former two Pomaros and which people didn't because like Sanguinetti, this guy who, to his credit,

helps end the dictatorship, dislikes Mujica and the two Pomaros and blames them for the coming of the dictatorship. You know who doesn't blame them and who in fact votes for Mujica when he won, wins the presidency. Is it the products and services that support the show? No, it's not time for that. You remember how I read that story last episode about like that guy who as a kid with his wheelchair-bound sister, Jose robbed the family and threatened to murder his dad?

Yeah, he votes for him for president later. He's like, yeah, we'll talk about that a little more. But he's like, yeah, I think he's probably a good candidate. I'm not angry at him, which is... Gave me my typewriter back. It says something about how polite a robber you are if like later someone votes for you to be president. And imagine that being your backstory, like in the United States being like, yeah, you know, when I was six, Joe Biden robbed my house at gunpoint

and threatened to kill my stepdad. No, and said Biden does all these other crimes that are far grosser. Way grosser. Yeah, I mean, Mujica was at least front and center with whatever he was doing, you know? So we talked earlier about how the Tupamaros are characterized by how flexible they are, how good they are at pivoting from different things and not really staying locked into things that one tendency or another would require of them kind of ideologically. And they do this again.

They don't... they get out of prison or at least, you know, because some of them are just like underground hiding, but like they're able to be public again and they form a political party and join the Frante Amplio again. And so, yeah, the old Tupamaros start getting into electoral politics. And the Tupamaro who is like at the forefront of pushing for the party to get into electoral politics is Jose Mujica. Right. And I'm going to quote from the New Republic here. As the group readjusted to freedom, most of its members wanted to avoid returning to guerrilla warfare,

though what course to pursue instead was unclear. Right-wingers still maintained control over much of the government. Mujica argued for an entry into traditional party politics and staged public forums known as Matedas. Confabs held in village squares over kalabash gourds full of strong mate tea. He'd retained his childhood egalitarian passions, but prison had made him more philosophical and deepened his rough-hewn physical allure. He rapidly developed a following among poorer workers, and in the mid-90s entered parliament.

Then, in 2005, he received an appointment as agriculture minister. It was in that post that Mujica won national acclaim, speaking in almost biblical terms about how government policies affected the common man. For post-dictatorship Uruguay, his language was healing, a triumphant return to the country's traditional values of humility and shared responsibility. Mujica's biggest fight as agriculture minister was to ensure poor Uruguayan's access to asado, the traditional dish of beef rib grilled over an open fire. Enabled to afford the meat, the lower classes often ate less expensive cuts off the neck.

Neck is unacceptable, Mujica told a reporter. When some butchers began selling more affordable asado, people lovingly nicknamed it asado del pepe. A 2007 poll showed that he'd become far and away the country's most liked government official, and he decided to run for president. And that is such a hard work, just being like, wait, poor people, this is our traditional dish that I grew up eating, and you're telling me people are eating using shit meat for it. Now, that is un-fucking-acceptable.

Poor people deserve to eat well, too, and I'm going to fight for that shit. Obviously, people loved him. Yeah, where's the catch? Well, we'll talk about that. It's not perfect. Like, it's not perfect. And we are going to, I think like primarily today, we'll be talking about the catch and the degree to which he, I mean, what has sold out or whatever you want to talk about it like,

yeah, well, I'm excited. I'm excited to have a conversation about that with you. Yeah. So he ran for president in 2009, and he immediately made a massive impact on Uruguay's urban poor, just because of the way he presented himself, not even in terms of policy yet, because the policy impact part is more debatable, but he has this big impact in fact, part because he dresses, he's not in a suit, he's not dressing like a politician,

he's not dressing like him, he refuses to wear a tie. He is often seen at public events in sandals, and like, he would wear dirty jumpers, like at first, they had to like kind of fight with him to get him to wear at least like, okay, you can wear like just a shirt, but a clean one, right? And he's dragging his potty around with him. Yeah, he's got his potty with him. He met poor people where they lived, and he was particularly famous for asking meaningful questions about their lives.

Not like, do you support this policy, but like, asking like very pointed material questions about what they had access to and how they were doing. He also ranted in his public speeches against consumerist capitalism, which he said wasted human strength on quote, frivolities that have little to do with human happiness. Jose was elected president in 2009, and on paper his term is a left liberal wet dream. Under his presidency, Uruguay legalized gay marriage, marijuana, and abortion,

which is pretty good for four years, right? Yeah. Yeah, and it's not like a great, I guess you could say it's not like the ideal abortion policy, it's legalizing I think up to 12 weeks, but like from a point of this is a Catholic country and you can't do it. That's like a huge, that's a big, that's a thing. Like that's worth celebrating.

And also just like being down with gay rights when he was like a 60s revolutionary. Yeah, we will talk about that. Not guaranteed. Not a guarantee. Now these are the cliff notes of Jose's presidency, and so you can see what like the Guardian says is the most radical president in the world. Now, when you get into the weeds a little bit, it is less radical. Well, in some ways less radical thing.

It's certainly in some ways like it's more complicated, but I also think it's a lot more interesting if you look at like his motivations for things. Let's take gay marriage, right? His support of gay rights, because a decent critical piece on Mujica, and I've read a number, will note rightly that he should not be credited with bringing gay marriage to Uruguay, because activists have been working for decades to get to that point, you know? Which is always the case when gay marriage gets legalized, right?

That's the case with Obama too, like I don't give him credit for it, other than the fact that he was the guy who decided not to fight it anymore, you know? I think Mujica gets a little more credit than I would give Obama for this maybe. Telling the press, quote, they fit about his like gay rights, marriage rights. They, those rights fit our sense of freedom in human rights, but they don't solve the basic problem, which is the difference of class. And that's what he'll say is like, I'm happy to legalize gay rights. I don't think this solves the problem, which is primarily a class problem.

He'll say a lot like, look, the issue, like it's important for people to have rights. I believe in people having freedom, but also if you look at it, rich people were always free to be gay. This is something he says in interviews, a number. Rich people have always been able to be gay and pretty much live life the way they wanted. It's if you're a gay woman, a poor woman, you know, an indigenous gay person, like if you're not part of the upper class, that's when it becomes a problem. And so he sees gay rights as primarily part of the class struggle,

is the thing that he always emphasizes in his interviews. So it's interesting because he's not doing full class reductionism. No. He's actually tiny issues in. He is. He's actually doing better than a huge chunk of the state's radical left at the moment. And it's interesting because when it comes to Jose's personal views, one Uruguayan sex health activist called him a bitcrow magnan.

And he refers to, when he refers to gay people, he calls them sexually ambivalent, which is, you know, he was born in 1935, right? You could call me sexually ambivalent. It's not offensive. It's just kind of weird and it's clear. He's just like, I don't really get this, but like my default is that people should have more freedom. So yeah, let's let's do it, you know, like, I think that's kind of his attitude is like, I don't understand this at all, but like it's a question of rights

and people should always have more rights. Which is fine. And it is worth noting that the, so before Mujica gets elected, the broad front elects another president. The first president, the broad front elects is a guy named Vasquez, who is a very left wing dude in a lot of ways. And we'll talk about him a bit more, but he's also very Catholic. And again, like liberation theology and stuff.

So he had, despite being the lefty president right before Mujica, he vetoed a lot of legalized gay marriage during his term. And so again, an abortion too, probably. I don't know as much about that. I don't know if like the fight to legalized abortion was at enough of a point during his presidency where he could. I'm not really sure. But I think you should say, don't give this guy all the credit.

There's a lot of activists. But also the last guy who was on the left vetoed this. So it's not no credit that Mujica gets, especially, I always give credit to like an old dude who clearly doesn't understand anything about it other than that people are being restricted from a thing. And it's like, well, that's bad. There's a degree to which I just inherently respect a man who's willing to say, I'm old.

I don't understand things anymore. But my default is always give people more freedom. So that's where I land on this. That's a really good way to approach aging and not understanding issues. It's just trying to be like, all right, well, what about like where, what is, yeah, I think that's admirable. You know what else is admirable, Margaret? No, I have no idea.

The products and services that support this podcast. Oh, mm-hmm. Very admirable. Admirations will be available from everybody. Yeah, for $9.95. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what, they were right.

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I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me. About a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991, and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left offending the Union's last outpost.

This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space. 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Ah, we're back. So when it comes to how Muzhika talks about legalizing gay marriage, how he talks about like how he deals with like when people like, especially like foreign journalists credit him with this, is really interesting.

And I want to read a quote from him on that subject and some other things from that Guardian article. Quote, All we are doing is recognizing something as old as humanity, Muzhika said. The best thing is that people can live as they want to live. And that's his like attitude to like, why did you, which is, I think, very admirable.

He sees those twice punished by poverty and intolerance as the real victims. Those who are sexually ambivalent have a real problem if they are poor. If they are rich, they are tolerated. That sounds crude, but it's the truth as I see it, he said. And the women most discriminated against are those in poverty. Mashismo hits hardest at the lowest levels. Poor girls are not well treated by our society. There are women who end up abandoned with lots of children.

For me, that is one of the most important battles for fairness. Um, yeah. And during his presidential campaign, he was caught complaining about, quote, intellectual women who think they are downtrodden, but who talk about their company era or cleaning lady when she is really the servant. Which I love that he makes that distinction. Where he's like, there's a lot of rich women complaining about, like how they're not treated equally,

who also have a lady who's basically their slave. Um, like, I don't think that's cool. Yeah. He's, he's, it's hard to argue with the things he says at least, you know. He probably tips well, you know. Yeah, he goes out to a restaurant, probably tips well. We are, uh, yeah, we're actually getting to that in a little bit. Um, yeah.

The fact that Pepe is a quasi anarchist militant president who legalized pot might lead you to, lead you to expect that like he's, does a lot of pot. Uh, he's never smoked marijuana. And I will believe that from a guy who legalized it. Like a lot of times it's like, okay, well, you're probably just, he's like, no, he's fine with it being legal. He just doesn't want to do it. Um, he's, he's heavily addicted to tobacco and he drinks a lot,

but I don't think he's, he's ever smoked pot. He says he hasn't. Um, but in his, he's not like pro weed culture. He just thinks prohibition has been a failure. And there's also a big element of like why he's legalizing pot is to take money away from drug cartels. Cause there's a major, it's essentially like a cocaine derivative problem in Uruguay and slums that his government was fighting.

And so he is not anti the drug war entirely. And this is, I think one of the areas in which I would disagree with him because his attitude is, I think we should legalize the drugs that are not harmful in his view, um, to deny cartels money and we should fight them selling what is basically crack. Um, which like, I'm not pro crack. Uh, it's pretty nasty stuff, but I don't think prohibition works there either. Again, he's not a perfect man.

Um, but this is, I think his attitude towards it. I'm also not an expert in Uruguay's crack cocaine problem. So I'm not going to pontificate there either. Um, and his attitude in general towards drug use seems to be that at least from a user perspective, people, one of the quotes he gave is you want to take users out of hiding and create a situation where we can say, you are overdoing it. You have to deal with that.

So it's a very like Scandinavian attitude towards how drug should be treated. Um, which of like the ways western countries deal with drug use is the most reasonable that kind of states tend to embrace. Um, so whatever, you can think about that the way you do. Uh, but it's nuanced. It's not just like, he's not just pro drugs. He's, he is, he does support some kinds of drug war. Um, I think the place where Jose Mujica is most impressive is in the ways

in which he actually does live cause it's one thing to say all this stuff. He really does live in concert with his values. For example, he speaks all the time about the plight of poor women. Um, and as president, he's, he made like 200 grand a year as president and he donated 90% of his salary to single mothers. Um, and he's not getting into this as a rich guy. You know, like he's not like a millionaire becoming the president. Um, he took enough to like live in the house that he'd occupied most of his life.

Um, and gave all of the rest to like single moms. Um, which is dope. And he had, he has like some land and a bunch of old people live on it and don't pay rent. Like he's, he's a pretty, like he's everything about his life is very much in concert with the things that he said. I want to not like him and you're making it hard. It's hard not to even the people who are very critical of him like him personally.

It's very hard not to like him personally. Uh, despite being tortured in prison, he seems to generally support the amnesty for the military, um, which I find really interesting. His attitude is that, because a lot of people are very critical of this and I'm not saying it's the right or the wrong policy. Obviously people who like had friends murdered or tortured by the military will have issues with the amnesty. I think I would.

Um, Jose's attitude as someone who was hurt as much as anybody by the military was that the men who harmed him were not doing it themselves. They were tools of a system and that system was his actual enemy. Um, there also seems to be beyond his ideological justifications. I think a dimension of emotional pragmatism to this attitude. As he told the economist in an interview, I do not hate. Do you know what a luxury it is to not hate? And so I think there's an element of like, this is the only way I can continue as a

I have to not hate them. Yeah. Like I have to not hate them because otherwise it would destroy me. Um, and it's, it's I'm now that I am out of prison. I have the luxury of not hating. The thing that I enjoy most about freedom is I don't have to hate anymore is I think kind of what he's saying, which is pretty profound actually, I think. Um, it also, I mean, it's funny because then it's like, well, it's the anti-carceral thing

is like you, you, the only defense for prison is to stop people from doing things. And these people are no longer part of a system that is capable of doing these things. So they are no longer capable of committing the harm that they did commit. So in some ways I don't see what would myself speaking as the president of Uruguay. Yeah. Um, you know, I, it makes sense to me. Yeah. It totally makes sense.

Um, I could also understand other people being fucking bad. I don't think I would be as good a person as him in his situation. If I'd been locked up in torture for 14 years, I would want to be as good a person as he is. Yeah, fair enough. Um, but yeah. There's some Catholic in there after all. And it's interesting because there's a number of like, there's one interview I found with

where he talks about how not all the guards were terrible and number of them would like smuggle in food for us or like gifts for us or like things to like make us more comfortable. So as much as the torture was a part of like, I blame like most of the crimes on the system that I recognize that the people in it were also humans and like, I wouldn't want to just like paint them all with one brush. He's very nuanced when he talks about this stuff in a way that is impressive for someone who suffered so much under that regime. Um, you really get a sense of how different he is from like a normal politician.

When you read articles by journalists who actually meet with him, this passage from the Guardian is emblematic of the whole. Mujica emerged from his tiny house dressed in a fawn fleece and gray trousers with sandals over socked feet. The fleece is an improvement which can be credited to his 2009 campaign team who weaned him off tattered jumpers. Age has made his features both more pinched around the eyes and fleshier around the edges. His thick shock of graying hair was neatly brushed, another habit he acquired while running

for president. Manuela, a three-legged mutt, hopped gamely along. The one-story house lies half hidden by greenery, its corrugated metal roof resting on pillars around a narrow cement walkway full of dusty crates and jars. Winter rain highlighted the patchy plasterwork. Mind the mud, the president warned by way of greeting. The narrow elongated front room contains a cheap office chair and desk, bookshelves, a small table with two uncomfortable wood-backed chairs, a roaring log stove, and an ancient,

immaculately restored Pugio bicycle. I've had that bicycle for sixty years, he said proudly, recalling his days as an amateur racer. My God! Mujica could live in the Presidential Palace, a hundred-year-old mansion in the old-money Prado district, but he would rather be here. We think of it as a way of fighting for our personal freedom, he said. If you complicate your life too much in the material sense, a big part of your time goes

to tending that. That's why we still live today as we did forty years ago, in the same neighborhood, with the same people and the same things. You don't stop being a common man just because you are president. I think he might be incorrect about that, in terms of the ability to exert power. He's too nice, but yeah, yeah. But I appreciate the like. Well, and one of the criticisms we're getting to, like, the critiques of him by the left,

but one is that he's bad at using power. He's too much of, and that's part, like, he makes a lot of compromises with the neoliberals and with, like, the conservatives, especially in economic stuff, because he's not very authoritarian. Like, he's not good at that. Like, that's one of the really trenchant criticisms of his time as president, is he's, like, actually bad at forcing his way into things. He's too much of, like, a little too much of an anarchist. When foreign journalists interviewed Pepe about his past as a freedom fighter,

he refuses to apologize for the violence that he took part in. Mujica even expresses scorn for what he calls beatific pacifism and added, the only things I regret are those I could have done, but didn't. Incredible. Flex. I wish I'd robbed more banks. I wish I'd robbed another couple of banks. You know?

It's not too late. It's not too late. No one's going to stop you at this point. In part one, I told you the story of two kids Mujica held up at gunpoint while he was threatening to murder their dad. And again, the young kid he held up, Menice, told the Guardian that he voted for Mujica, saying, I might be expected to feel bitter about him, but he's the only one who practices what he preaches.

Yeah. Just like, yeah, he robbed me at gunpoint and tried to kill my stepdad, but he's an honest man. I mean, it's honest to just actually exert that power as compared to hiding behind this or that institution. Yeah. He never had goons do shit for him. He was out there. Now, given that Jose Mujica has not in fact destroyed the state or the system he railed

against as a young man, you will not be surprised to hear that his largest detractors and the most trenchant criticism against him comes from the left. And the left is to critique him have a lot of very fair points. He found a New Republic article by a journalist who traveled to Uruguay and talked with left-wing organizers, political leaders, journalists, and came up with a very critical article. He was kind of in response to the Guardian saying, the most radical presidency. This New Republic journalist is like, well, let's go see how radical it really is. And the radicals in Uruguay says, not at all.

They all kind of seem to agree that he's a very nice man. Nobody seems to believe that he's like lying and like hiding his life as a rich person, but that didn't make him an effective president. They point out that most of the things that he was elected to do did not happen. He pushed for a massive educational expansion that would include a flood of new technical universities for poor kids, but actually making that happen meant ramming laws through the still very splintered and gridlocked Congress. And Mujica as a political outsider and is not good at being authoritarian was unable to do that.

He did succeed in getting laptops for like Uruguay and school children, which is like one of the big things that his administration would brag about. But test scores, I think, mostly still continued declining during this period. The issues that Uruguay and public school system had had, he didn't fix the problem, even though that was like the main thing he harped on in his campaign. And I'm going to quote from the New Republic here. The story was the same on other policy fronts. Mujica wanted Uruguay's public railway utility to operate under private sector rules to boost

efficiency. Nothing happened. He tried to pass a new tax on the big landowners to help the poor, but failed to ensure that the legislation would be constitutional. The Uruguay and Supreme Court struck it down. If he had taken the opportunity to consult more specialists in law, he wouldn't have failed, said Garce, the political scientist, but Mujica isn't too worried about the legal aspects of things.

One morning over coffee, I spoke to a former Mujica staffer named Conrado Ramos, a budget wonk who looks like a sad Hugh Grant. He had been in charge of an effort to reform the Uruguay and public sector. Mujica said he would make it a priority, Ramos recalled. But that was part of the problem. Mujica's pan-enthusiasm placed everything and consequently nothing at the top of his agenda. From time to time, Pepe would wheel unannounced into Ramos's office and get excited, unfurling

beautiful language about the big changes needed, but he doesn't know how to plan. Mujica appointed as Ramos's boss the disinterested son of a former Tupamaro and appeared to forget the issue. After several fruitless years, Ramos quit in frustration, embarrassing the administration. And again, it's like, I think it's a mix of he's probably a little ADHD and maybe a little too much of an anarchist to be good at making things work in a system. Well, it's like, in its way, it's almost brilliant critique of state and state power because finally, everyone's like, well, if you had the right person in charge, you finally have

the right person. It doesn't get writer. As presidents go, it doesn't get writer. And he can't do anything. I mean, he could do things, but only by not being the right person anymore would be the ways that he would. So it's like this kind of interesting, this is what you all claim we need to do is get the...

No, and the system... ...the 50-year-old bicycle riding guy. Anyway. Yeah. I think everybody loves, like, I think one of the things that endears a lot of people to Bernie Sanders, you see a picture of him in his house and he's got like the chair with crap stacked on it, which you never see a politician have. And it's like, oh, he's a human being.

He's at least a person. And maybe if a person was president, things would be better. And some things are, I think the left and especially this new Republican article goes too hard against him. For one thing, it's interesting, I've talked a lot about what the kind of liberal and centrist sources leave out when they're reporting on this. The New Republic, as they're critiquing him, and we're going to read more critiques, doesn't note that unemployment dropped by half under him.

And maybe they're being fair that like, well, that was there was an economic boom, he doesn't get credit for... Like everything. Every time there's good stuff that happens, it's like, well, but he shouldn't get credit for that or this, but it's like, well, I think you're going a little far here. But still, they have other trenchant critiques that I'm going to continue to read. So the progressives and leftists interviewed by the New Republic have two main arguments. Mujica accomplished few of his actual policy goals.

And while he both lived very consistently to his values and he said wonderful things about anti-consumerism, the horrors of capitalism, he didn't stop them and he didn't try to stop them in particular. The article quotes a journalist Mauricio Rabufetti. I agree with absolutely everything Mujica has to say about materialism, he told me. I believe inequality and consumerism are damaging to society. It was exciting and fascinating to me then that this man became our president, but he has done nothing.

He later added, he's always saying he's a fighter. He's a fighter. So his failure is something that's very hard to understand and hard to forgive. And they could cheat him by pointing out how many more designer stores there are in Montevideo, how much the fact that inequality has grown, the fact that people are increasingly obsessed with Western consumerist things, electronics and all this stuff. And he didn't stop that. And it's like, yeah, he didn't.

How could he have? Because it is like, yes, it is fair to say, it's frustrating that this guy maybe didn't destroy the system when he talked about how the system clearly didn't need to keep existing. But also like, what was he supposed to do? And this is, I think one of the things, if you're going to be really fair, you have to note he was elected president at age 74 after 14 years in prison and getting shot six times. And I kind of think part of his attitude is like, yeah, there's a bunch of shit that I'm not going to be able to fix or do anything about.

And I will talk about it as if it's bad. And then I will engage with the system because I am too old to be a gorilla. And I'm going to try to help people. And you can feel about that the way you want. It's a compromise for sure. And it's a compromise made by a man who did uncompromising things for a very long time. Yeah. And like I said, not in a good place to play any judgment on decisions that this man makes.

I think we can analyze it while saying like, I would be willing to bet that virtually no one could go through what he did and not have his outcome be the best case scenario. That's kind of where I land on this. And for where it, what it's worth, Mujica addresses the fact that like, yeah, he didn't destroy cat, he didn't stop consumers and he talks about that a lot. He talks about the, he like very openly in interviews will address kind of the inconsistencies with his beliefs and what he's doing as president. And I'm going to quote from that Guardian article again, quote, the man who inspired

by Guevara, once blew up factories owned by foreigners, now offers them tax breaks. I need capitalism to work because I have to levy taxes to attend to the serious problems we have. Trying to overcome it all too abruptly condemns the people you are fighting to suffering. So that instead of more bread, you have less bread. And he's like, he talks about like, you know, because he's like, he's been in a bunch of photos with Hugo Chavez and stuff and he's like, but also Venezuela system doesn't work very well.

Yeah. And I don't think the US system works very well either. I'm just trying to like, I'm not, I was not elected to overthrow the government and destroy the system as it exists and build a new one. And I'm too old and tired to do it. So I'm just trying to help people have more bread because I feel like that's all I can do. Not all the two Pomaros have accompanied Mujica on his journey to soft pragmatic socialism.

They left their ideals in their prison cells. The former hostage, George Zabalza, proclaimed recently, some old compañeros won't understand, Mujica said, they don't see our battle against people's everyday problems, that life is not a utopia. And that's interesting. So there are former two Pomaros who are like, you're, you fucking, you, you sold out, you know, like, we were, we were supposed to overthrow the state and you became part of it.

And you are willingly working with the capitalist, working with the conservatives and like, that was never the plan. And Mujica's response is, and that's, that is a fair criticism. That is what happened, right? You can morally land wherever you want on that. That is objectively what happened. And Mujica's, I guess, moral defense is like, yeah, that's true. And I get why you, you're angry, but I can, I think I can help people and we're not living

in a utopian situation. So I'm going to, I'm going to plow the shit, you know? I think that's kind of his attitude. And again, there's a number of ways to feel about that. I'm not going to tell you how to feel about that. I don't know how I entirely feel. Like it's a complicated issue, but he's not, he's not denying the inconsistencies. He's not pretending that he's the same.

He is acknowledging like, yeah, I kind of sold out because I thought I could do these good things. And I, I do, you have to respect that to some extent, I think. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's, it's a, I can see it. It's like, it's one of those things where it's like, I don't, I don't imagine that's like what I would hope for someone, right?

Yeah. Um, but I, I can see it and it's a lot more interesting to me than the people who sell out by, I don't know, just entirely abandoning their values. Yeah. Like the Kristen cinema where you're like in black block at the WTO protests in 2008. And then voting for austerity with Joe Manchin. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. He doesn't, he doesn't do that. Um, it's a perfect. Perfect. And you know who else doesn't vote with Joe Manchin? Oh, gosh. Some of the products and services that some of the products and services supporting our broadcast, uh, do not, uh, vote alongside Joe Manchin and that's about as good as you're

going to get guys. Look, come on. Fair. Life's not a utopia. I thought Joe Manchin was the real person. I thought Joe Manchin was like Joe the plumber. Yeah. Like Joe the mansion.

He took me. Joe Manchin. That's very funny, Margaret. That's funny. It is funny that like one of the men repeatedly holding back any attempts to address inequality in the United States is you, you could, you could call him Joe Manchin. Yeah. That is kind of funny.

I didn't think about that. Um, all right. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations and you know what, they were right. I'm Trevor Aaronson and I'm hosting a new podcast series, alphabet boys is the FBI. Sometimes you got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of alphabet boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters

in Denver at the center of this story is a raspy voiced cigar smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. He's a shark and on the gun badass way and nasty sharks. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. And alphabet boys on the I heart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based

on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman, join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI.

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But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991 and that man Sergei Krekalev is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the I heart radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

Oh, we're back. So continuing because we have actually a bit more kind of grinding through the different sides of how to look at this man to get through because I think he's fascinating. And I think what he represents is fascinating. And I think it's incredibly important for leftists, especially leftists who like dream of some sort of revolution to engage with the Tupamaros and Muzhika and the journey that they went on. I think it's tremendously important to at least try to understand it and come to your

own conclusions about it because it's not a common situation. And I think very worth studying as a result of that. I'm going to read another quote from a little bit later in that same article. Globalization's glaring failure, Muzhika said, is a lack of political oversight. It is bad because it is only governed by the market. It has no politics or government. National governments are only worried about their next elections, but there are a series of global problems that no one deals with.

That does not mean capitalism has won outright. I don't think it inevitable that the world should live in capitalism, he told me. It is the same as not believing in man and man is an animal with many defects, but also with many startling capabilities. He's an interesting guy, yeah. That New Republic article critical of Muzhika saves its most most trenchant criticism of the man for a passage in which it lays out the achievements of his predecessor, Vasquez, who also followed Muzhika.

So you can't do one term after the other as president. Vasquez is the president before Muzhika and the president after. I'm going to read a quote about him. And I think the New Republic, I don't know is the Catholic leftist. Yeah. The Catholic leftist. I don't know. Generally, I'm not super up on the New Republic.

I think they're a little bit more state socialist kind of authority driven than I am. That's my impression, but I'm not trying to, yeah. You get that in this quote because they are critiquing him for the things that we've laid out and some of you can read that. It's a good article. You should read it. I don't agree with everything in it, but it's a good article. And they contrast his failure to overcome a lot of gridlock with this guy Vasquez quote.

In fact, there is a politician in Uruguay who accomplished some of the same kinds of goals people hoped Muzhika could tackle. His name is Tabare Vasquez, an oncologist. He preceded Muzhika as president and will succeed him again come March. In 2005, he inaugurated the first left wing government since the country's dictatorship and took great strides towards restoring the Uruguayan social safety net, rebooting Baze's national health care system, expanding welfare, and making Uruguay the first nation in the world to fully implement the one laptop per child program.

He managed these successes thanks to a political persona as authoritarian and charmless as Muzhikas were gaily anarchic and alluring. With a rough of silver hair, basset hound eyes, and a smile just on the wrong side of lascivious, Vasquez exudes the unsettling aura of a Mr. Rogers impersonator who performs in porn. He rarely consults others on political decisions and projects arrogance in his certitude. Just with the same constraints all modern presidents face with their power, he just goes around them.

When Vasquez decided to ban smoking in public buildings, something that was really important for him as an oncologist, Rabufeti, the journalist said, he didn't involve Congress at first. Instead, he used Uruguay's version of an executive order. The unilateral move prompted a flurry of outrage about personal liberties, and the Uruguayan legislature could have subsequently overturned it. But ultimately, the policy established a new status quo that its opponents decided they didn't want to waste time in political capital to fight. So again, I think that's, again, not, you can think about that whatever you want.

I think it's probably factually a broadly accurate statement, and I get why that is a criticism. And it's probably, it's worth saying that yes, an authoritarian as president will get more done than a guy who's kind of more egalitarian and consensus driven, obviously. And there's good things about that and bad things about that, in part because like I, you know, maybe this guy Vasquez, the executive order use and stuff, that sets a precedent that could be bad when the conservatives get back into power, and they got back into power in 2020.

So like, you know, it's never, none of this is simple, you know? It's also worth noting that like this article doesn't note that Vasquez vetoed a gay marriage bill, and that that was something that happened because Pepe was in power. Because he's an authoritarian. And also, yeah, he believes that he should be able to do what he wants. And like, you know, it's like, I don't want my government to dom me, you know, like. But it's all, I think maybe if you want to engage with it even a little more nuanced. And again, this is just something, maybe this is partially the case that like, if you're

trying to change society, maybe it helps to have people who are broadly politically aligned and have an authoritarian and then a guy who's not authoritarian and kind of like, so that you're not trending too hard in that direction. And you can then like, Pepe is better at building social consensus. I don't know. Maybe that's accurate. Maybe that's not. It strikes me that there's a benefit from Vasquez going to Pepe afterwards, like certainly

within the matter of gay rights and some other issues. Yeah. Because it's more of a. Different ratcheting system. Yeah. In the US, we have a rightward ratcheting system where the Republicans push things to the right and the Democrats don't do shit and then repeat. And then I could, I could see, yeah, I don't know.

Yeah. I don't think anyone does know, but I think like that's something to maybe consider. It doesn't, it doesn't seem to be worse than the way things have been going in the United States. No. Like if I'm comparing it to my government, this sounds all right. You know, by comparison, this, this like method of things is like, well, that, that's okay. You know, right.

I wouldn't, I would have probably, I would definitely have more critiques where I living in Montevideo, but that's always the case. Yeah. And I will note that like in fairness to the author of that new Republic piece, in addition to being coming down very much on the sort of critical of Pepe, Vezquez is, it was a better present. He also does some work in this article that I don't think a lesser journalist would have done in his position because he actually went and spent a lot of time in like cripplingly

poor neighborhoods in Uruguay after talking to these like leftists. And again, the guys that we've been quoting from so far, these journalists and these like, I think they're mostly like middle-class kind of an upper like leftist sort of thought leaders. And he also spends time among the very poor. And what they tell this guy is very different from what kind of the activists he talked you told him. Quote. Of course he understands us better, Almiran said, blinking perplexedly as if my question

itself, whether Mujica had been good for the poor was not even worth asking. She'd received me in a dark but startlingly pretty ante room in the shack she'd built, its floorboards mere planks over the slums off liquid earth. Eagerly, she showed me paintings she'd done on the shack's walls, stylized fairy images reminiscent of Tinkerbell and the new wardrobe and table in her bedroom. The wardrobe she'd recently been given through a work for housing program sponsored by Mujica's government, the table she'd subsequently made on her own. She gave Mujica credit for both interventions.

Having an elective poverty himself, he appreciates the importance of something seemingly as simple as a clean place to keep one's clothes. Once Mujica had come to visit the neighborhood and seen Almiran's shack, he'd asked her a question that had stuck with her ever since, affecting how she thought of herself and her five boys and girls. Does every child of yours have a mattress of his own? Almiran had never considered this. She works at a slaughterhouse and has barely enough to get by.

But she explained, Mujica thinks every kid has the right to privacy with his own fantasies. She had started saving for those beds. The policy makers and opinion setters I'd spoken to had been so spittingly certain that Mujica's presidency had failed Uruguay's poor. And four teachers I spoke with, who work with them directly, believe the opposite. I spent a couple of days touring lower income schools and neighborhoods, and the view of Mujica I encountered was as different as the view of a city from the street level versus looking down from atop a skyscraper.

Everyone, without exception, believed Mujica had improved their lives. Seeing a man who looked like them and lived like them, who even invited them to barbecues at his commune, occupying the land's highest office, had made them feel human again. By noticing them, by speaking to them rather than about them, Mujica had reincarnated them. We are a poor people, Almiran told me with a note of defiance, but we are people at the end of the day. Yeah, fuck yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. I'm pretty pro this guy. Yeah. No, I mean, it's interesting because, yeah, most of the critiques coming from the left are, oh, you're not good enough at wielding institutional power. And his whole thing seems to be a little bit like, that's not the thing he's trying to accomplish is wielding institutional power. That's, it's fucking interesting.

It's very interesting. And I really recommend some of the studies and articles that I've attached to this. He's a fascinating person and what his journey says about everything about radical politics is, I think, really important to understand. And I also should note, he took a bunch of people from Guantanamo Bay and welcomed them into Uruguay so that they wouldn't have to be in Guantanamo anymore because there were people who didn't have a state that was willing to take them. And then he went on a long rant about US torture and how like these people have, like you destroyed

these people for nothing and like this is fucked up and wasn't just like talking about how bad Guantanamo was. It was like, yeah, of course, my country will take some of these people. Bring them here. I killed Dan the Strangler. Of course. Yeah. I killed Dan the Strangler.

Of course, I'm going to take prisoners from Guantanamo. Do you know me? Again, that's a thing like, again, I hope nothing we've come across in talking about the criticism of him is dismissive of those criticisms. I don't agree with all of them. And I think the thing that is most admirable about him is that number one, he never pretends to be perfect or entirely ideologically consistent. And neither were the two Pomaros, you know?

But he's like, he is pretty ideologically consistent. Like he's not just going to talk about the plight of single mothers. He's going to give them all of his money. He's not just going to talk about how Guantanamo is bad. He's going to make his country take people from Guantanamo and re-home them. He's pretty good at that kind of shit. Yeah. He follows his ethical guidelines instead of ideological guidelines.

And that's kind of interesting to me. Yeah. And I've read some quotes about the two Pomaros now because like, especially in 2020, like a more conservative government was elected. There's a lot of like uncertainty about what's going to happen to the education system. Like I'm not getting into that as much as like, I've just got up to speed. And on like the broad strokes of Uruguay and political history, I don't want to like pretend to be any kind of an expert.

But I've read some quotes about the two Pomaros where it's like, yes, they're in politics now. They also still have guns. And they're like, they're flexible, like they're ready to go. If they have to, they'll go back and like do the thing that they were doing. Like, you know, they're not, they're never like, we're a hundred percent for electoralism. Just like when they were terrorists, they weren't a hundred percent for terrorism. Like they're real good at kind of flowing and making ethical exceptions and stuff, which

I think makes them very interesting to me. Yeah. Yeah. No, that's, yeah, I had no idea what to expect with any of this. So this is, yeah. I think it's broadly, again, Uruguay still has plenty of problems. This is an ongoing story, but I think the sweep, why this is a Christmas non-bastards episode, is the sweep of this history is a pretty inspiring, may not be exactly the

right word, but like hopeful. Yeah. Because it's actually slow work to change society. And people think it's slow work, like seize power and then excuse the fact that you've taken power. Yeah. Of course, it takes forever. We have to hold on to power.

But instead the like slow work of like just trying to be good in all of the situations that you've put yourself into and realizing that what it means to be good by your own standards might change depending on, sometimes it means there's, you know, sometimes it means robbing people. Yeah. Sometimes it may mean assassinating a CIA torture. Sometimes it may mean giving documents you stole to a prosecutor who you trust agrees with you on that single issue at least, you know, like that's what they did.

And it's complicated again, like you should feel about this however you feel about this, but maybe think about it because it's, there's some stuff in here that's worth thinking about. I think for the left trying to find its way at this present point in time where things are very scattered and fragmented in ugly, sharp ways. And there's a lot of ideological infighting at a time when we're all kind of staring extermination in the face. These are probably some people to look at and be like, well, maybe we should learn some stuff from them.

Right. Not that you should ever just say whole hog, these guys were perfect and we'll do exactly what they did. But like, let's maybe learn some lessons here because I think there are some lessons here. Right. Yeah. Like, no one ever knows whether or not violent revolution is going to make things better or worse.

It seems including, including both mass, huge uprisings and like target assassinations. It's a total crap shit. It's a complete fucking role of the dice and anyone who pretends otherwise is probably dangerously unhinged. Yeah. Right. Yeah. Like anyone who pretends this will obviously happen if we do this is a lunatic and you

should be scared of them. Yeah. You know, but yeah, I don't know. Cool dude. I think who's saying, as an individual person, he's like my favorite of our people since probably a Wallenberg because he's just, he's very, he's very caring to all of the people around him. And I think that's good.

He's authentic. That's what I think. He's a nice man. Yeah. And my God, do I love the idea of a president who bicycles to work wearing socks and sandals? And it's like, and I want to be around authentic people more than I even specifically want to be around people who agree with everything that I'm saying or do because then you can actually model your decisions based on, well, I expect this person to be morally consistent

to their own values, not to my values, but to their values. Yeah. You know, like, yeah, no, that's, fuck yeah. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Well, that's, that's behind the bastards. Have a merry Christmas.

Have a happy new year. Have a dancing Tet. I don't, I don't know enough about Tet, but have a good one of that too. If, if you're in Vietnam, you know, have, have a good whatever holiday is your next holiday that you're looking forward to. Enjoy it. Yep. Oh, wait.

Shit. I forgot to ask you to plug your plugables, Margaret. Yeah. You got any plugables to plug? Yeah. You can find me on the internet. I'm on Twitter at magpie killjoy. I'm on Instagram at Margaret killjoy.

And I have a new book. It's actually an old book re-released called a country ghost that just came out that answers the question of, well, it presents one of the many, many different answers to the question of what could a society without authority look like and how could it function? But more than that, it's actually just a story about going to go fight people and fun plot things and an adventure. Excellent. Yeah.

And it is great. And also a good companion to this piece because this is, I mean, this actually happened, but it is kind of one way of imagining what happens when anarchists get some of their way, little bits of it, pieces of it, I don't know. Doorbell just rang. Oh, okay. Well, you go do that and everybody else go home. You're drunk.

Bye. Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse were like a lot of goods. It's our federal agents catching bad guys or creating them. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen.

Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science and the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price? New death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Did you know Lance Bass is a Russian-trained astronaut? That he went through training in a secret facility outside Moscow, hoping to become the youngest person to go to space? Well, I ought to know, because I'm Lance Bass, and I'm hosting a new podcast that tells my crazy story and an even crazier story about a Russian astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. With the Soviet Union collapsing around him, he orbited the Earth for 313 days that changed the world.

Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.