I'll say this much about Mujica. He may be one of the most coherent leftist in as much as he has managed to kept a simple, humble image and he projects himself as an idealist old sage. But he is also a hypocrite. He keeps defending a lost cause, a cause that has done more harm to the poor because it used their expectations not only to keep them being poor, as it has been the case in Venezuela, but also made poors of the middle class, the demographics that could have done much for the country.
He publicly acknowledged that Maduro was an idiot, an animal, literally, and yet he was cynical about questions regarding Maduro's abuses and the political prisoners.
True capitalist societies have promised too much and delivered too little in terms of american-dream sort of expetations, but to think that it'd be better to lean towards socialism because capitalism has screwed up and take leftist latina american as an example shows either great ignorance of what is happening here or even greater cynicism.
Mujica does nothing different from what "comunist" china and russia have done. They recognized that private enterprise is the only way a country can suceed economically; what they have managed is to combine a capitalist economy with communist/socialist social and political control of the population.
Latin american leftist leaders have done worse because they have not even been able to guarantee that the patient/disease host will survive so that they, the disease, can continue feeding and prospering from it.
The leaders of the venezuelan revolution have been cynical enough to admit it publicly, they'd rather see the country destroyed.