Civilian Military Training in Bolivia

Ugh. Apparently, the Bolivian government is offering military training to civilians as a form of national defense preparedness. According to the AP:

Vice President Alvaro Garcia, a former leftist guerrilla, said the purpose of the training is to enable civilians to assist in defending the homeland. He called participation "a citizen's duty."

Officials said there were no plans to arm civilians.

"These training activities that we have with the citizenry are for the defense of the country," Gen. Ramiro Siles, commander of the army's 8th Division, told reporters.

The division is based in Santa Cruz, the seat of opposition to what Morales calls the "re-foundation" of Bolivia — returning power its indigenous majority.

The AP article itself, while sadly not atypical of US press reporting on Bolivia, is quite biased against the Morales government. The prominent references to Venezuela's Chavez and neatly varnished references to Bolivia's right-wing political opposition make what's happening look nothing but menacing. I think the imagined scenarios in which citizens would be called upon to defend the country probably do involve internal violence against the government more than they do invasion by outside forces. But that's not completely outrageous given the violence that has been employed against the Morales government and its supporters over the years. For example, the rancher from Montana who had land confiscated by the government has been accused - not only by the government but by indigenous and human rights groups - of keeping indigenous peons working his land in conditions of forced servitude. He has vast holdings of fallow land, and when government officials approached his property to investigate, the Vice-Minister for Land Reform was held hostage by the armed rancher and his friends, and government vehicles had their tires shot out. In September of 2008, during the lead-up to the referendum in which Bolivia's new constitution was ultimately passed, well-organized groups of thugs throughout the country's eastern lowlands took over airports, tax offices, and other government buildings in an effort to render the Morales government unable to govern the region. The opposition has actually been in disarray ever since, but the threats are not merely imagined or invented as a pretext for creating "pro-government militias," a fear the article attributes to the opposition.

Of course, some of that fear, too, no doubt comes from the prospect of armed indigenous Bolivians. There are a lot of racial divisions in Bolivia right now, and extreme opposition groups have exploited the fears of urban, mestizo, and midddle-class Bolivians by conjuring the specter of angry mobs of Indians given carte blanche by the Morales administration to attack and steal from their paler compatriots. In Santa Cruz, the city in the eastern lowlands where the opposition has its strongest base, the fear is specifically of invasion by indigenous groups from the Andean regiogns of the country. So, it's not hard to imagine how people responded to this:

a television station broadcast images Thursday of young men armed with rifles taking target practice at a base in the eastern provincial capital of Santa Cruz. Also seen in the video were indigenous women in their 20s and 30s in billowing skirts and bowler hats [the traditional clothing of indigenous women from the Andean regions] doing calisthenics.

As for me, I am deeply disappointed by this news, but mainly because I think the goals of national security through civilian-based defense could be achieved much more effectively through non-military, nonviolent means.

Weapons instruction and physical training began on Monday for hundreds at military bases in Bolivia's east, a stronghold of the pro-business opposition, and army officials said it would extend to all bases.... Officials said there were no plans to arm civilians.

Now, I have to question how helpful weapons instruction for civilians is ever going to be if there are no plans to arm civilians. The fact that this training is being carried out by the military, on military bases, and seems to have a strong focus on weapons instruction would tend to suggest a violent approach. I have a hard time imagining a scenario in which this would lead to anything but tragedy.

And what is really sad to me personally is that I have long argued that Bolivia would be the perfect country for a Costa Rica-like experiment in demilitarization. Bolivia, I believe, is a prime candidate - small, relatively defenseless, non-aggressive, engaged in international organizations like the United Nations and regional alliances - for dismantling its armed forces altogether, and investing the money saved in professionalizing its notoriously inept and corrupt police force, as well as perhaps contributing to health and education. In place of a military, Bolivia could very plausibly depend on international organizations and diplomacy to protect it in the unlikely event of foreign invasion. But against the more probable threat of a coup or other form of internal attempt at violent overthrow, civilians could be trained to render an illegitimate government incapable of functioning. In fact, the citizenry could be trained for this right now, instead of the current military training program, but without needing to first jump over the admittedly massive hurdle of convincing the voters to support doing away with the armed forces.

Don't believe me? There is actually a lot of research going on about just how a program like this can work. One of the most important groups doing such research is the Albert Einstein Institution, a small organization based in Boston and led by groundbreaking political theorist and nonviolence advocate Gene Sharp. They make many of their publications available for free and in multiple languages. For civilian populations interested in stopping a coup, there is Sharp's booklet, "The Anti-Coup." And on the related subject of civilian-based defense, Sharp has written both a booklet and a longer book, and there is also a related paper by Johan Jørgen Holst. These, along with the work Sharp and others have done on the power of strategically applied nonviolence more broadly, are well-worth reading, and could prove invaluable resources for Bolivians who believe that the Morales government, however flawed, is worth defending as both a legitimate, democratic government and as what many have identified as the country's best political option for achieving long-sought and much-needed change.

What really gets me is that I actually delivered Spanish-language copies of some of the above publications to now-Vice President Alvaro Garcia Linera several years ago. I had met Alvaro when he was in prison for guerrilla activities, and we had discussed nonviolence, of which I was a proponent and he was a skeptic. He has since spoken often of his conversion to a democratic approach to change, rather than armed struggle, but it is fairly clear this was a pragmatic choice and did not represent a conversion to pacifism. The reason I thought he might appreciate Gene Sharp's work is that one of Sharp's main theses is precisely that practical, strategic nonviolence is an effective tool that should be employed because it works, regardless of one's ideology concerning violence/pacifism. I was convinced then as I am today that a leader like Alvaro could credibly promote nonviolent tactics in Bolivia, and they could help the country immensely in its march toward greater peace, freedom, and justice for all of its citizens.

Unfortunately, there is not only resistance to nonviolence as a concept on the part of Morales and his colleagues - I suspect there is specifically resistance to Gene Sharp and the Albert Einstein Institution. Right-wing opposition groups, including individuals who've been directly connected to the horrific violence for which right-wing governments in Latin America have long been known, have been forced to re-evaluate the tactics at their disposal as leftist governments like those of Morales and Chavez have taken power. While the opposition here in Bolivia has hardly maintained a pacifist discipline, I've read amazing newspaper columns extolling the virtues of Gandhi and King and promoting the adoption of their tactics as a way to stop the "totalitarian" Morales regime. In Venezuela, prominent opposition leaders have used Gene Sharp's materials and, at their own request, met with people connected to the Einstein Institution. And, while I generally resent the constant references to Morales' alliance with Chavez in the US press, as it tends to undermine the protagonism of Bolivians in the changes going on here, and often draws false parallels between events in the two countries*, it is true that Morales and Chavez are friends, and Chavez has personally and publicly accused Gene Sharp of being a U.S.-funded political operative attempting to promote the overthrow of Chavez's government. Sharp has written a strong response (opens pdf file), but I don't know if Chavez ever read it. Meanwhile, other leftists - most prominently journalist-cum-Chavez-propagandist Eva Golinder - have picked up on Chavez's baseless accusations, and are subsequently further undermining the potential for strategic nonviolence in the region.

There are a lot of exciting changes happening in Bolivia. Unfortunately, the change from dependence on arms to institutionalized nonviolence is not one of them.

Yet.

* A classic example is the common implication in US press reports on the new Bolivian constitution that Morales was following Chavez's lead and seeking to pass a constitution that would allow him to stay in power forever; in reality, the old constitution had put no limit on presidential terms as long as they weren't consecutive, allowing for a revolving door in which a few elite politicians and their parties tended to take turns at the helm, whereas the constitution the Morales government proposed, which was adopted by the voters, does allow for consecutive terms, but only allows for two, or a total of 10 years - exactly what the U.S. constitution dictates!