Meet the Pioneering Uruguayan Politician Who Just Resigned From Parliament

On March 3, Lucía Topolansky sent a letter to the General Assembly of the Uruguayan Parliament expressing her desire to “pass the baton to someone younger who will be able to participate with more strength.” The senator also blamed the pandemic for her decision. “I have worked with all the dedication I could over the years and with an open-door office,” she said. “My office could no longer receive people as before. For many reasons, I could not adapt to working through Zoom, so I have decided to resign.”

Topolansky’s resignation is meaningful to many Uruguayans, especially Uruguayan women in politics, because Topolansky was a pioneer in this sphere in the country.

In the 1960s, Topolansky joined part of the then-newly founded National Liberation Movement called Tupamaro, an urban Uruguayan leftist guerrilla organization. The group was named for Túpac Amaru II, the leader of an 18th-century revolt against Spanish rule in Peru, and fought against foreign interests in the country as well as for social justice, especially for those who worked in rural areas. Under the pseudonym “Ana,” Topolansky was first arrested for her involvement in Tupamaro in 1971 when she was 25 years old. Two years later, the military seized power in Uruguay, installing a dictatorship that increased political repression and persecution of its opponents until 1985. From 1972 until 1985, Topolansky was detained, and even tortured, in a prison built especially for Tupamaran women. She hasn’t spoken publicly about the experience often, however, since she says she prefers to tell stories of resistance rather than of suffering.

While in prison, Topolansky exchanged letters with fellow Tupamaro guerrilla José Pepe Mujica, who was in prison at that same time. “Of all the letters I sent to him, only three of them arrived, and from him to me, only one arrived. We had almost no communication,” she said in an interview in 2016. Mujica and Topolansky were released from prison on the same day and have lived together on a farm in a lower-class neighborhood on the outskirts of Montevideo ever since.

After her release from prison, Topolansky was one of the founders of the Popular Participation Movement (MPP), a political party that believes in promoting socialism in Uruguay, and of which she is still a member. In 2000, she was elected to the Chamber of Deputies and, in 2005, she was elected to the Senate. She received the most votes of any senatorial candidate in the 2009 elections, and because of that, on March 1 of 2010, she administered the oath of office to her partner, Mujica, as he was sworn in as president. On two occasions, due to the absence of Mujica and Vice President Danilo Astori, she served as interim President of the Republic and was the first woman in the office in the history of Uruguay.

In 2017, the vice president at the time, Raúl Sendic, resigned. Under Uruguayan law, in this case, the senator who receives the most votes when elected then assumes the position of vice president. Topolansky received the second-most votes, but her husband, Mujica, won the most and had already been president. Topolansky, therefore, assumed the position of vice president under Tabaré Vázquez, who served as president from 2015 to 2019, which made her the first woman in Uruguayan history to occupy this position. In Uruguay, the vice president also has the duty to be the president of the Senate and the General Assembly of the Parliament, so Topolansky also held these important positions for five years, until 2020, when the new president, Luis Alberto Lacalle, and vice president, Beatriz Argimón, were elected.

Though she was the first Uruguayan woman to hold multiple political positions, Topolansky has resisted identifying as a feminist. “I was born in the armed resistance and things didn’t go through the gender issue in that context,” she explained of her stance in an interview in 2016. Nevertheless, as president, her partner Pepe Mujica legalized abortion and same-sex marriage, causes she also supported as a senator. “We have had the privilege of carrying forward this individual rights agenda,” she said during an interview with the Associated Press in 2013 on the same day that the Uruguayan Senate was preparing to approve a legal marijuana market law, a project with international visibility, in which she was a central supporting figure.

Lucía Topolansky transitioned from a Tupamara legend into a legend in Uruguayan parliament, which both her party colleagues and opposition politicians noted in light of her resignation. “Lucía Topolansky, the militant, will continue to walk with us, as she has done from the beginning, since she was very young,” said Senator Alejandro Sánchez, from her party. Sebastián da Silva, from the center-right National Party, emphasized having been able to get to know “the woman behind a Tupamara legend” and recognized that she is part of a generation defeated in the war between Tupamaros and militaries, but victorious in the elections.

By way of saying goodbye to the parliament, Topolansky stated that she has to take advantage of the time she has left to be in the streets, side by side with social movements and closer to people. In her words, she will continue “working and dreaming to build a better tomorrow.”