Politics March 24, 2017
The next time you see Bolivia on a world map, you might want to imagine male and female soldiers marching across the country. Why? Although details are fuzzy, mandatory military service plays an important role in Bolivia’s culture.
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What do we know about Bolivia’s military policies and tactics? Here are four facts to keep in mind!
Bolivia’s history of conscription is complicated, but men aged 18 to 49 have been required to partake in military service since 1904. Men used to need to spend two years in the military, but the Bolivia military often lacked the money to pay for even a year of service. By 1980, mandatory military service changed to one year and men had to be 19 years old. In 1998, young women also became liable for “pre-military service,” or receiving military training at their college.
According to the CIA’s website, as of 2013, Bolivia required both men and women between 18 and 49 years old to spend one year in the military. When the number of military volunteers runs low, boys as young as 14 can be conscripted as well.
It’s hard to become a general in the military, not to mention as a woman in Bolivia. However, that is exactly what Gina Reque Teran accomplished in 2015. She is not the first woman in Latin America to become a general, with Chile having a police general in the 1990s and Venezuela boasting both a female general and a female admiral.
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However, Teran is the first woman in Latin America to directly be in charge of combat troops. Analysts trace her success back to the 1970s and 1980s, when most Latin American armed forces started allowing women to volunteer for service.
Despite the progress that women have made in Bolivia’s armed forces, improvements need to be made. For instance, women only make up four percent of all the people serving in Latin America’s military branches.
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As of 2012, women are seeing positive changes. Accommodations for female cadets at the Colegio Militar in La Paz are becoming more common. Women and men also undergo the same entry exams and physical and academic training. For inspiration, female cadets can look to brave women of Bolivia’s past, like Bartolina Sisa. Wife to rebel Tupca Katari, Sisa played an important role in Bolivia’s indigenous uprising of 1781. Lidia Gueiler Tejada, Bolivia’s president from 1979 to 1980, also fought to maintain democracy against a right-wing military coup.
As Lia Yesenia, a 19-year-old Colegio Militar student explains, “[Female representation in Bolivia’s military] is very important as women can be a lot stronger than men. Not necessarily physically, but in certain exercises, such as parachuting, they are much better than men.”
If you’ve seen Bolivia’s military mentioned in the news recently, it’s probably because of Bolivian President Evo Morales’s new “anti-imperialist” military academy. By teaching cadets Bolivian history, geopolitics and military strategy, Morales hopes to counteract the “colonial” and “capitalist” influences of the U.S.
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In particular, Morales claims that, through US-based operations like the School of the Americas, the U.S. is “encouraging congressional coups,” painting Bolivia’s indigenous people as “internal enemies” and promoting “global terrorism.”
Will this new training trigger the changes Morales is looking for? That’s to be determined.
Bolivia might not be a country that you think about very often; however, as these facts show, there are aspects to Bolivia’s military history and policy that are worth some serious contemplation.
