The Bolivarian military

  Another cat-like day spent sleeping yesterday.  17 hours!  Damn.  I’ve also been craving football, so far as to watch replays of old games on Channel 265.  Strange.

 
Venezuela recently reinstated national military service.  This is only the latest in a series of military reforms.  Taken together, the reforms have fundamentally reshaped the military establishment ... although with so much of the Bolivarian Revolution, its hard to know how well the changes have been executed, or how deeply they run.
 
The reforms started in 2004, when the Army replaced its old woodland camo with a solid olive drab uniform called the “Patriota.”  It was deliberately intended to evoke Cuban revolutionary garb. In 2005, a new National Reserve and Territorial Guard replaced the traditional reserve system.  The National Reserve fulfilled the functions of a traditional reserve, at least at first.  The Territorial Guard went beyond that, establishing a new military branch.  New recruits were trained over 20 consecutive Saturdays, during which they earned 16 bolívares.  By 2006 the government claimed to have trained up 110,000 reservists with a further 800,000 on the waiting lists.  The distinction between the two branches of the reserves, however, had by then blurred.

Those of you have served in a national military will understand that 20 days spread over as many weeks is a rather ineffective way to train soldiers ... whether that was the purpose is left as an exercise for the reader.

The “26 laws” that I marched against in 2008 further extended the reforms.  Superficially, they renamed the National Armed Forces the Bolivarian National Armed Forces.  More profoundly, they put more heft on the Bolivarian National Militia’s bones, constituting it as an official fifth branch of the military, after the Army, Navy, Miltiary Aviation, and National Guard.  (The Guard is oriented towards maintaining domestic order.)  The law also established links between the Militia and the “communal councils” that the government had earlier established.  Communal councils could now go down to the local Bolivarian Militia office and declare themselves an official unit, after which they would receive “advice, adequate training, and all actions pertainining to social questions, the solution of problems.” 

The latest reform took place last month, when the government issued an updated conscription law, replacing the old one from 1978.  The new law strengthens most of the current system of selective service registration, even though the Constitution of 1999 technically bans conscription.  In fact, the government will increase the fines for failing to register, and the new law requires that military documents be presented from anyone desiring to work for the government. 

In theory, now, every Venezuelan now owes a year of military service.  In practice, who knows?

It’s hard to tell what it all adds up to.  The Bolivarian Militia is badly trained, barely uniformed, and generally disorganized.  It might be an attempt to use state resources to train up the “Bolivarian Circles” that used weapons to defend Chávez back in 2002.  In September, the BBC reported that Socialist Party “patrols” were fusing with the militia, but the evidence was pretty half-assed, and it was monumentally unclear what such a fusion would get the government.  After all, the militia thus far seems not a whole lot better than what a devoted political party with government support could do by itself, without the bureaucratic bother.  I understand Rocío San Miguel’s fears, but they seem a bit premature.  The Bolivarian National Militia is still pretty far from a parallel military. 

Conversely, turning the Army into a large-scale conscription machine would be a fairly effective way to implement social change:  the Bolivarian Republic would be far from the first government to use military service in such a way.  Problem is, the Venezuelan military isn’t set up to train the 550,000 people who reach military age every year.  It isn’t even set up to train half of them. 

Of course, we haven’t reached the end-state yet — perhaps the goal is to eventually get to a point where the armed forces are omnipresent enough to serve as a means of social control, and where universal conscription serves as a way to reshape society.  In that view, we are simply not there yet.  Or maybe the goal is just to build up a legal body of Socialist Party thugs capable of breaking heads.  In that view, the mission has been accomplished with just enough socialist rhetoric to hold some weak margin of support that an open program of partisan militia-building would lose.  Or ... and this would be my guess ... it’s a way to give an ideological dressing to a scheme designed to plonk eight dollars into the hands of happy supporters in return for a fun Saturday afternoon playing soldier. 

The military reforms are like so much else about the Bolivarian Revolution over the past year:  too serious to be just window-dressing on a political machine, but not serious enough to be a real attempt to remake the country.  (Rephrased for Chávez’s foreign policy adventures:  too serious to be costless domestic posturing, not serious enough to actually extend Venezuelan power.)  At some point, you’re left scratching your head.  At least I am.

Thoughts?

Comments

[Bernard Guerrero]

I think your last two possibilities have merit. In the short run you get a nice way to direct some cash to people who are inclined to support you. In the medium term you now have a body of somewhat motivated pseudo-military SA style street fighters if you happen to need them.

[Bernard Guerrero]

Follow-up: Juna Vicente's got a little bit of an Ernst Röhm thing going on. Where does he part his hair?