Six former Guantanamo Bay prisoners sent to Uruguay as part of a push by President Barack Obama to close the US military's prison camp in Cuba were "turned halfway into vegetables" during their detention, outgoing President Jose Mujica said on Wednesday.
In an interview four days before his predecessor Tabare Vazquez takes office, Mujica said the six men lacked the strength to learn Spanish and integrate.
"These people are destroyed," Mujica said. "They could be here for two years and they won't understand a goddamn thing, because even though you want to teach them Spanish, they lack the inner strength, the will to move on with their lives. They have been turned halfway into vegetables."
The six were flown to the South American country for resettlement in December.
The men who are housed in an old property in the centre of the coastal capital, Montevideo, have yet to find work or be reunited with their families as they struggle to adapt to their new lives in exile.
Mujica is one of Latin America's most popular leaders due to his straight-talking style and empathy with the country's poor. A former Marxist rebel, he spurned the presidential palace and stayed in his ramshackle farmhouse on the edge of Montevideo. He has driven himself around in a battered VW Beetle and donated most of his president's salary to charity.
But Uruguay has struggled to roll out its ground-breaking pot experiment, which is being monitored across the region where the legalization or decriminalization of some softer drugs is increasingly viewed as a better way to fight drug trafficking.
"Growers are going to try and take away as much money as they can, just like any business," Mujica said, adding that producers would be given land and other advantages to keep costs low.
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