Military of Bolivia - Conscription

Conscription

Since 1904 military service has been compulsory for all fit males between the ages of eighteen and forty-nine. In practice, however, budgetary limitations strictly limited the number of eligible men conscripted, and those traditionally tended to be mostly Indians. Beginning in 1967, conscripts were legally held on active duty for up to two years, but funds seldom permitted even a full year's service. Noncommissioned officers (NCOs) and warrant officers, all of whom were volunteers, generally were drawn from mixed-blood cholos (those of Spanish and Indian descent). In the late 1980s, the service obligation was one year, and conscripts had to be at least nineteen years of age. The FF.AA. commander reported in early 1989 that the largest percentage of conscripts came from the middle class. One explanation for this change could have been the flocking of youths to the lucrative coca paste-making business. Military authorities in the Cochabamba area in particular began to experience growing difficulty in enlisting volunteers in the mid-1980s. Consequently, the military reportedly was resorting to pressganging eighteen-year-olds off the city streets to fill their annual quotas.

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Famous quotes containing the word conscription:

    We have our difficulties, true; but we are a wiser and a tougher nation than we were in 1932. Never have there been six years of such far flung internal preparedness in all of history. And this has been done without any dictator’s power to command, without conscription of labor or confiscation of capital, without concentration camps and without a scratch on freedom of speech, freedom of the press or the rest of the Bill of Rights.
    Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882–1945)

    No Raven’s wing can stretch the flight so far
    As the torn bandrols of Napoleon’s war.
    Choose then your climate, fix your best abode,
    He’ll make you deserts and he’ll bring you blood.
    How could you fear a dearth? have not mankind,
    Tho slain by millions, millions left behind?
    Has not conscription still the power to weild
    Her annual faulchion o’er the human field?
    A faithful harvester!
    Joel Barlow (1754–1812)