Constructing Roads, Washing Feet, and Cutting Cane for the Patria: Building Bolivia with Military Labor,

19001975
Elizabeth Shesko
Duke University

Abstract
This article reveals the range of tasks performed by military laborers in twentieth-century Bolivia, distinguishing between martial and nonmartial labor to understand how productive tasks became central to the militarys mission. The detailed exploration of soldiers laboring lives shows that their work as strikebreakers, builders, agriculturalists, and domestic servants reinforced social hierarchies and supported private capital. Despite hopes that military service would unify a diverse populace, soldiers on the indigenous end of the spectrum disproportionally performed the more abject labors. The rst section charts the development of nonmartial labor and shows how some soldiers objected to working conditions by invoking the dissonance between martial discourse and nonmartial experiences. The article then turns to the increasing legibility of nonmartial labor in the aftermath of the Chaco War (1932 1935). The nal section details the Revolutionary Nationalist Movements efforts to fold the army into the 1952 Revolution by emphasizing soldiers productive labor.

Bolivian military ofcers throughout the twentieth century urged troops to embrace the sacred mission that the patria [nation, motherland] imposes on her good sons to prepare militarily for war during times of peace.1 Yet when they adopted European models of conscription, Bolivian generals and politicians faced a multiethnic and multilingual population in a loosely controlled territory that lacked the basic infrastructure of the modern state they envisioned. The military barracks, they had hoped, would help form workers who spoke Spanish, willingly obeyed authorities, and felt duty-bound to dedicate themselves to protecting and unifying the patria. But the realities of a weak state in a thinly populated territory meant that despite ofcial emphasis on armed training, Bolivian conscripts spent at least as much time building roads, harvesting, and serving as domestic servants as they did preparing for armed conict. However, the impact of a disastrous war, social revolution, and ideological shifts made once invisible nonmartial labors a central part of not only the experience but also the mission of military service. A diverse and divided society, Bolivia is characterized by pervasive racism based on powerful social, cultural, and ethnic hierarchies. The barracks were one of the few places where men from across these barriers met in search of the military-service booklets needed to work in the formal sector or conduct ofcial transactions. Thus, entering the barracks was an experience shared by
International Labor and Working-Class History No. 80, Fall 2011, pp. 6 28 # International Labor and Working-Class History, Inc., 2011 doi:10.1017/S0147547911000056

Constructing Roads, Washing Feet, and Cutting Cane for the Patria

generations of Bolivian men who hailed from indigenous communities, the working classes, and the urban poor. In order to understand the trajectory of Bolivian society, we must take military conscription into account, both in how it was imagined by Creole elites and in the multiplicity of ways it was experienced by conscripts. Soldiers labor was fundamental to both. Before looking at this labor, however, it is important to understand the paramount role of the military in the history of twentieth-century Bolivia. Despite attempts to create a professional army under civilian control in the early decades of the century, individual ofcers maneuvered in favor of political parties and personal interest, troops were stationed in urban areas to inuence politics, and coup plots proliferated.2 Fought by drafted and impressed soldiers from all over Bolivia, the disastrous Chaco War with Paraguay (1932 1935) produced widespread discontent and a series of military presidencies that led to a far-ranging revolution in 1952. While the new administration initially considered abolishing the military, the institution regained its prominent role over the next twelve years as US aid ooded in and the government faced factionalism, economic problems, and labor unrest. By the 1964 elections, the leader of the 1952 Revolution had a military vice-presidential candidate who overthrew him ve months later. With only brief interruptions, military ofcers would occupy the presidential palace for the next seventeen years. However, we know very little about the Bolivian military outside of its role in politics. Scholarship has focused on tactical details, leaders actions, and periods of military rule. These works tend to treat soldiers as warm bodies following orders rather than understanding the military as constructed through its relationship with conscripts. Although a few scholars have studied the rank-and-le troops as subjects of state engagement, very little is known about soldiers daily lives and labors.3 As the eld of labor history has repeatedly shown, the bottom-up exploration of work routines and relations of authority present in the workplace often provides broader insights into politics and society. To make sense of the diversity of conscripts labors, I dene all activities they performed under superiors orders as labor. I distinguish, however, between martial and nonmartial labor. Martial labor consists of armed tasks directly related to maintaining internal order and defending the national territory, including ghting international wars, repressing internal unrest, protecting state installations, patrolling borders, and the training necessary to prepare for these tasks. Most narratives of martial labor concentrate on the Chaco War, the 1967 pursuit of guerrillas led by Che Guevara, and the suppression of strikes and uprisings. Full of heroes and victims, these works slight more quotidian aspects of martial labor, such as weapons training, physical training, and the guarding of borders, arsenals, government installations, and barracks. A focus on martial labor alone, however, offers a woefully incomplete picture of Bolivian conscripts experience and serves to conceal the wide array of tasks they performed in uniform under the label of patriotic service.

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Serving both martial and nonmartial ends, conscripts nonmartial labors included preparing land for colonization; populating border regions; ranching; planting trees; logging forests; building and repairing roads, barracks, airports, ports, wells, dams, embankments, irrigation channels, public pools, schools, hospitals, and stadiums; manufacturing items; growing foodstuffs and export products; cooking; washing; cleaning; teaching literacy skills; taking censuses; processing property titles; serving as domestic servants in ofcers homes; extorting low prices from townspeople; and even following orders to steal goods. These nonmartial labors included both physical and intellectual tasks that ranged from the dangerous to the banal, some of which were legal and others illegal but sanctioned by ofcers. The Bolivian military clearly served both martial and nonmartial ends. Despite patriotic rhetoric, the structure of military labor reinforced social hierarchies in which certain groups gave orders and others performed strenuous and sometimes servile work. Corruption and arbitrary implementation meant that soldiers performed martial and nonmartial labor in service not only of national defense and infrastructure but also to benet private interests and individual ofcers. Additionally, the tasks assigned to individual conscripts often coincided with racist hierarchies based on markers such as command of Spanish, place of residence, and level of education.4 Those who fell toward the indigenous end of the spectrum disproportionally performed nonmartial labor of the more abject sort. This article offers a brief overview of the history of conscription in twentieth-century Bolivia, descriptions of soldiers martial and nonmartial labors, and an analysis of the militarys evolving constitutional mission and self-representations. I have drawn on a range of sources produced by and for the Bolivian military, such as conscription records, internal regulations, soldiers testimony in military-justice proceedings, and ofcial correspondence. Sources external to the military include petitions to other governmental ofces, congressional debates, articles and memoirs written by ofcers and journalists, and the observations of US military attaches. These records reveal how hidden dimensions of military service reinforced social hierarchies and contributed to state formation. The rst section examines the budgetary and administrative barriers that led to the widespread use of troops for nonmartial tasks before 1932. The second section details post-Chaco War shifts in the militarys constitutional mission and the corresponding changes in how ofcers, politicians, and journalists portrayed soldiers martial and nonmartial labor. The nal section treats the impact of the 1952 Revolution and the subsequent shift to military dictatorship, arguing that the emphasis on nonmartial labor spanned changes in administrations and traditional political divides. While conscripts tasks changed little across the twentieth century, the visibility of and discourse about their work shifted decisively. Embracing nonmartial labor as an expression of developmentalist nationalism, military ofcers constructed a rationale for expanding the role of their institution in Bolivian society.

Constructing Roads, Washing Feet, and Cutting Cane for the Patria

The Logic of Nonmartial Labor in the Pre-Chaco Army In nineteenth-century Bolivia, soldiers were volunteers or victims of forcible recruitment, and the conscription of tribute-paying Indians was prohibited, at least ofcially.5 With war against Chile looming in 1875, Bolivia rst declared that all male residents owed military service to the patria.6 However, the state did little to implement this law. Bolivia barely mustered nine thousand men to defend its coast in the War of the Pacic (1879 1884) and effectively pulled out in the wars rst year.7 After this defeat, Conservative administrations took the initial steps to transform the military into a modern bureaucratic institution. As part of this process, the army banished rabonas (female camp followers) in 1888 and replaced them with institutionalized meal service.8 When Liberals took power after a civil war in 1899, their efforts to professionalize the military included a series of conscription laws, establishing institutions, and bringing in French (19051909) and German (19111914) military missions.9 The constitution in force at the time set forth a purely martial mission for the armed forces: the conservation of order and the defense of independence and national integrity.10 Having recently ceded territory to Brazil (1867 and 1903) and Chile (1884, treaty in 1904), legislators emphasized that the purpose of conscription was to protect our threatened borders by ensuring that the entire male population had military training.11 Bolivian lawmakers hoped military service would both form a nation and protect it from external and internal threats. Ofcers declared that Bolivia would be great, strong, and invincible only when she could see a soldier in each of her sons who would know how to die for the patria.12 According to this early and idealized vision of military service, conscripts would learn how to march in formation, use weapons, and guard installations. They would become physically and mentally prepared to fulll their duties as citizen-soldiers by following a regimented exercise program and listening to superiors explain military theory and civic obligations. Before being discharged, they would participate in war games to gain the battleeld experience that would prepare them to defend Bolivia.13 This vision of military service was a martial one that understood national strength in terms of the armys size; its goal was to make men into disciplined soldiers loyal to a national-level patria. This effort to create a unied nation-state faced a formidable challenge in the demographic picture painted by the 1900 census, which categorized over fty percent of the population as indigenous even while substantially undercounting this group.14 Conservative administrations had only recently attempted to abolish colonial institutions such as tribute and corporate land ownership after a silver boom in the late nineteenth century provided a new source of income. Like their Conservative predecessors, the Liberals, who took power in 1899, saw the so-called Indian problem as Bolivias principal challenge and began enacting policies to eliminate this obstacle to achieving their ideas about modernization. As part of a positivist project for national improvement through social hygiene, military service was one face of these attempts to

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incorporate the indigenous population. However, divisions among Creole elites as to whether assimilation or segregation should be Bolivias path to modernity resulted in schizophrenic and unevenly implemented policies. And daily practice in the barracks was as slow to conform to the new laws as the state was to fund its decrees. Rank-and-le troops entered the army under the obligatory militaryservice law passed by Liberals in 1907. This law required all Bolivian men to register at eighteen and present for service at nineteen; those chosen by lottery would serve for two years while the rest would receive three months of military training.15 However, practical matters of nance and administration kept the military so small that this obligation did not initially affect many men.16 Although its population was around two million, Bolivia elded an army of only two to eight thousand conscripts from 1907 to 1932.17 Many men thus avoided serving by means of the lottery, exemptions, evasion, and the protection of patrons. Despite claims to equal treatment, the structure of conscription disproportionally funneled indigenous men into the barracks through demands for precise documentation and limits on the service of educated men. Although Liberals claimed to want a professional military that did not participate in politics, the repression of rural uprisings was a common form of martial labor during the rst decades of the twentieth century. Landlords and mine owners often called on government ofcials to employ the states repressive apparatus to threaten their tenants, workers, and neighbors. Conscripts thus marched into indigenous communities and rural properties at least forty times between 1912 and 1925 in just the department of La Paz.18 As described by Captain Samuel Alcoreza, soldiers repressive labor was arduous and unrewarding, sometimes involving a full nights trek through paths full of water and mud, in which the troops have suffered the indescribable in order to arrest defenseless Indians who were sleeping in their homes.19 And army units ended mining strikes: peacefully in 1919, and bloodily in what became known as the 1923 Unca Massacre.20 Far from the ideal of convincing workers in the mines and elds to identify with a national-level patria, this martial labor reinforced social hierarchies and supported private capital. Soldiers who hailed from rural and mining communities were also the most likely to spend their military service colonizing the frontier and constructing the nations basic infrastructure. The sparse population of border regions had already led to several territorial losses, so after ceding yet more land to Brazil in the 1903 Acre War, ofcers and legislators agreed that they could prevent future dismemberment only by colonizing Bolivias territory.21 The government thus began sending military conscripts to act as expeditionary forces and construct border posts.22 Because the state had little infrastructure in these regions and no towns to provide garrisons or provision the troops, these soldiers had to be self-sufcient. The earliest evidence of soldiers nonmartial labor thus comes from accounts of frontier units in the 1910s and 1920s. One ofcer explained that a soldier in these garrisons did rough work and had to be a farmer and also

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a bricklayer, woodcutter, and boat builder. They therefore received military training only in the mornings so afternoons could be spent on farming and other work.23 These conscripts were as likely to hunt monkeys, plant manioc, or cut swathes in the jungle as they were to stand guard, march, or clean their weapons.24 Closely connected to this frontier initiative was the use of military laborers to dig roads between these regions and population centers. Under the command of General Federico Roman, sapper units opened roads throughout the eastern part of the country.25 Despite their manual quality, these labors were linked to national defense: Populating the frontier and connecting Bolivias disparate regions would secure borders, achieve food security, and facilitate the transportation of resources to internal and external markets. Although the daily labor of sappers and frontier soldiers was distinctly nonmartial, this work fell to the armed forces for strategic reasons. The diverse labors of frontier units opened up the possibility of using urban soldiers for similar tasks even if they lacked a logical link to national defense. As it became acceptable for uniformed labor to build national highways, it was less of a conceptual leap to ask soldiers to repair urban roads. If soldiers on the frontier were planting seeds, why couldnt more centrally located units become selfsufcient or be deployed in the harvest if there was a shortage of local workers? If soldiers in border units were building their own barracks, why not use urban soldiers to build schools? Military labor provided an attractive way for the state to establish a minimal presence throughout the territory and to build and maintain infrastructure at low cost. The obligatory nature of military service allowed the state to furnish itself with an almost-free labor pool compelled by law to work. Although the government had to invest funds in order to pursue deserters and recruit, discipline, transport, house, and feed its troops, it paid conscripts only cents a day. The very term used to describe these wagessocorros (literally aid)indicates they were seen not as remuneration for labor but rather as an allowance provided by a benevolent state. Conscripts stationed in population centers thus performed manual labor on public-works projects like wells, embankments, schools, hospitals, and stadiums. For example, in 1913, when the telegraphs director could not nd workers in Pelechuco (La Paz) to install lines due to fears of an Indian uprising, he called on military labor to nish the job.26 And Technical Battalion soldiers stationed in Guaqui (La Paz) reported spending their days excavating stones, building irrigation channels, leveling land, and carrying water in 1921.27 Although the militarys constitutional mission remained purely martial in the 1920s, ofcers discourse about conscription had begun to change subtly to reect soldiers nonmartial work. Like their predecessors at the turn of the century, ofcers in the 1920s were extolling the virtues of obligatory military service to remake Bolivians in a new mold. They claimed conscription was incorporating the indigenous element into civilization and forming men who returned to their homes completely transformed. Yet a new element also appeared. This same ofcer added that indigenous soldiers were learning respect and subordination to their superiors and the civic duties of

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compliance with authorities and perseverance in work.28 Layered atop the idea of unifying the populace through the barracks, ideas about military service in the 1920s invoked an authoritarian fantasy of transforming unruly Indians into disciplined workers. Soldiers in units primarily devoted to manual labor tended to be less educated, more indigenous, and less likely to speak Spanish. For example, a 1921 conscript assigned to the above-referenced Technical Battalion expressed his wish for companions who were more intelligent and better educated than the Indians who make up the majority of the unit.29 And General Gonzalo Jauregui asserted that seventy percent of the Loa and Campero Regiments in 1926 were Quechua and Aymara Indians, noting that Aymaras from Carangas (Oruro) and Omasuyos (La Paz) predominated.30 Soldiers had been performing nonmartial tasks for several decades when the price of tin dropped in 1926 and some international debts came due.31 Prior to this crisis, the minister of war had sometimes hired civilian contractors to build barracks and had even warned that the use of soldiers for manual labor might be detrimental to military instruction.32 However, in the face of increasing decits, he issued orders in 1931 that soldiers repair their own barracks in order to economize for the national treasury.33 Nonmartial labors thus intensied in the late 1920s and early 1930s: In 1927, the Colorados Infantry Regiment was carving out a new access road to the Miraores section of La Paz.34 Soldiers in the Juana Azurduy Infantry Regiment hewed a road between Sucre and the Chaco the following year, using dynamite to break apart solid rock. Observers described soldiers inclined over horrifying abysses, levering apart the rocks with their crowbars, placing quarried blocks from considerable heights.35 Conscripts in 1931 report being ordered to make 2,500 mud bricks per week and to spend several days cleaning, channeling, and clearing the river embankment of the minister of wars private residence.36 That same year the Revista Militar reported that the Bage Engineering Regiments labors had produced almost all the local progress in Cobija, where soldiers had built urban roads and bridges, cleaned cemeteries, erected a stadium, installed street lighting, and constructed public works to collect, channel, and distribute drinking water.37 Although these labors resembled those of their civilian peers, soldiers who made oral, written, or physical attempts to better their working conditions were usually deemed mutineers, arrested, and judicially processed. Thus mutinies that resemble strikes dot the military history of twentieth-century Bolivia; some soldiers even used the language of work stoppage to express their demands and defend their actions. In 1906, for example, conscripts abandoned Puerto Heath on the Peruvian border, citing excessive work, having served double the promised tour, and their complaint that our Patria pays us poorly.38 Various groups of conscripts in the 1920s were formally accused of mutiny for collectively requesting promotions, petitioning that a specic commander remain in the regiment, and objecting to, in their words, working like donkeys or doing excessive work, day and night.39

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Conscripts labor experiences, even during this early period of obligatory military service, were thus far more diverse than the martial activities cited in the Constitution. The dissonance between martial vision and nonmartial experience sometimes became a subject of debate from below as soldiers invoked ofcial rhetoric of what military labor should do (defend the patria) in their written complaints and oral statements during military-justice proceedings. In a striking 1931 case of adopting ofcial rhetoric to make demands, a group of seventeen soldiers from the Colorados Regiment sent a letter to the division commander to complain about superiors who imposed forced labor upon us and made us complete work that does not correspond to military service, like making mud bricks.40 Military labor thus became an arena of contestation as the gap between theory and practice opened a space for dissent. Turning to Nonmartial Labor in the Aftermath of Military Defeat A semi-arid region sparsely populated by lowland indigenous groups, the Chaco had long been claimed by both Bolivia and Paraguay. The dispute came to a head when Paraguay invited Mennonite immigrants to settle the region in the late 1920s. A 1928 are-up brought mass mobilization on both sides but was quickly quelled through diplomatic means. When Bolivian president Daniel Salamanca faced popular mobilization and a hostile Congress, however, he turned to the Chaco to strengthen his political position. Escalation became inevitable as Salamanca gave increasingly aggressive speeches, increased the militarys budget, and sent troops to establish outposts in previously unpenetrated regions. Skirmishes became a full-scale war in July 1932.41 Salamanca was sure that Bolivias victory would be swift. Its German-trained standing army of 7,267 soldiers seemed far better prepared for war than Paraguays 4,100 French-trained troops.42 But after Bolivian forces suffered a crushing defeat at Boqueron (September 1932), General Hans Kundt was recalled from Germany to take control of the oundering offensive. This change in command did not, however, translate into victory on the battleeld, and Bolivia continued to cede ground. Despite having mobilized 77,000 soldiers, Bolivias army was reduced to a demoralized contingent of 15,000 by the end of 1933. Kundt was soon ousted, and Salamanca faced renewed opposition in La Paz.43 As Paraguayan troops approached the heart of Bolivian territory in November 1934, army leaders arrested Salamanca and forced him to resign. The nations signed a peace agreement in June 1935. Given the undeveloped status of the Chaco frontier, the military had to devote substantial attention to infrastructure projects while ghting. In a wartime context, these nonmartial labors were clearly linked to national defense; without them, there would have been neither roads to bring mobilized soldiers to the front nor hospitals to care for the wounded. Reservist Juan Laime testied that when his combat unit was in Villa Montes, all of us bricklayers were chosen to occupy ourselves with work on the new hospital, for which I was entrusted with making mud bricks.44 And when asked about his role in

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the war, indigenous soldier Florencio Vazquez distinguished his labors from the martial ones of other soldiers, remembering having worked with tools on roads to get foodstuffs to those who were ghting.45 Over the course of the war, Bolivia mobilized 250,000 men, thirty-four percent of whom died, deserted, or fell prisoner. As Herbert Klein points out, given its small population, these losses were on par with those suffered by European nations in the First World War.46 One of the bloodiest conicts in South America, this war left an indelible scar on the memory of Bolivians, meant yet another territorial loss, and led to a questioning of traditional political structures. Coups in 1936 and 1943 brought to power reformist governments led by junior military ofcers, who advocated something they called military socialism. Like their contemporaries in other parts of Latin America, these leaders were inuenced by European fascist movements and worked to mold the population through a strong state.47 In the face of territorial loss, useless death, and mounting war debt, the traditional military emerged from the war disgraced and denounced as a parasite on the nation. Yet it was still one of few options available to fulll new leaders plans for a prosperous and unied Bolivia. The sense that the military had profoundly failed at its martial tasks therefore led to an ofcial expansion of its mission to include cooperation in work on roads, communications, and colonization.48 During debate over this clause in the 1938 Constitution, legislators declared the value of this work to be indisputable and agreed these labors could be done without compromising in any way the mission of preparing for war. They hoped emphasizing these tasks would repair the institutions image. It is necessary to change, stated one representative, the impression of the people that the Army only consumes and does not produce.49 A 1939 measure then created farms on state land with the goal of agricultural selfsufciency for military forces.50 These laws were premised on the conviction that the military could redeem itself through nonmartial tasks that would literally build Bolivia. Soldiers nonmartial labor thus gained prominence in the aftermath of a disastrous war, both in ofcial discourse and in practice. The La Paz newspaper El Diario emphasized the promise of using military labor in infrastructure projects, publishing photographs of soldiers moving earth with their shovels and arguing that their sweat and toil would surely bring economic expansion to the country.51 As a series of Left- and Right-leaning military men seized control of the government, the army steadily grew to as many as twenty thousand conscripts per year.52 The increase in troops meant that many more indigenous men were serving; in many rural and mining communities, military service became a rite of passage men needed to complete before they could marry and hold leadership positions.53 Like their pre-Chaco peers, however, indigenous men were more likely to perform manual labor than participate in armed training. Typical of soldiers sent to 1940s sapper units was conscript Pedro Ayadiri Ohari, a twenty-two-year-old agricultural laborer from Pocoata in the mining region of Potos. Described in military records as a mostly illiterate Quechua speaker

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who understood a little Spanish, Ayadiri served eight months as a sapper.54 US military attaches visiting these units in the 1940s conrmed this trend, reporting that the enlisted men are Indians with very slight knowledge of Spanish who live under very primitive conditions.55 Even conscripts assigned to urban regiments faced labor discrimination, as superiors often gave military training to the better educated and used the rest as manual laborers. For example, the commanders of a company garrisoned near La Paz explained that they picked the soldiers least capable of carrying out individual training to use as a special group of workers. They classied at least one of these workers as an uncommunicative indigenous soldier who did not speak Spanish and was illiterate and very slow in his mental activity.56 In the post-Chaco War period, military authorities assigned conscripts to more than seventy different units named for types of manual labor (Agricultural, Colonization, Hydraulic, Engineering, Railroad, Sapper) rather than for programs of military training (Infantry, Artillery, Cavalry).57 However, all types of units performed nonmartial labor: In 1941, a sapper unit carved roads into the steep hillsides surrounding La Paz, and the famed Colorados Infantry Regiment hacked out an eighteen-kilometer stretch between Corocoro and Ballivian.58 As part of his duties in the Loa Infantry Regiment, 1946 conscript Edwin Silvetti Baldivieso received dynamite along with orders to make the hill that was on the runway disappear. He began work at 8:30 and had set off twelve rounds, when, around 12:45, he heard someone calling right before the dynamite exploded in my hand.59 In 1948, over one thousand conscripts worked on the construction of a new general barracks in La Paz.60 The same year, conscript Rafael Montero of the Colorados Infantry Regiment described the seventeen months he had spent building a school in Sucre as: treading on mud, making bricks, putting stone over stone.61 Like their predecessors before the war, soldiers in the 1940s also completed agricultural tasks. Those stationed in the countrys thinly populated northeast, for example, spent part of each day raising crops for their own consumption.62 Given strategic needs during the Second World War, conscripts were ordered to engage in food production in the region bordering Brazil so locals could devote themselves to producing rubber for the Allies. The same period provides evidence of military labor benetting private individuals. For example, six soldiers under the orders of Captain Hugo Antezana in Aiquile (Cochabamba) claimed to have spent three days on the property of Isa de Romero dekernelling corn, peeling coffee, and rounding up cattle. Several soldiers noted this was not the rst time their labor had served private interests: Each time that Dr. Loma said to him why dont you lend me your soldiers to do work on my irrigation ditches, he would send us.63 More strikingly, other conscripts, like Diego Bernal, Daniel Bernal, and Cayetano Pacajes, followed orders to commit crimes. Testifying at their noncommissioned ofcers (NCOs) indictment in 1942, they described being awoken by Sergeant Valencia and Corporal Zapata, who in an authoritarian manner

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ordered us to get out of bed . . . and go out barefoot to carry corrugated-metal sheets from the barracks to a house across the street. Although they had participated in this robbery of government materials, the military tribunal found no fault with their actions since these indigenous soldiers had acted out of fear.64 For some conscripts, threatening or even committing acts of violence to force locals to sell foodstuffs and supplies at far below market value was a quotidian task. Soldiers serving in Curahuara de Carangas (Oruro), for example, received orders in 1946 from Lieutenant H. Guzman to pay no more than twenty bolivianos per lamb despite the fact that in no area have such prices been seen.65 Following a tradition that dated back at least to the 1920s, ofcers in the post-Chaco War period beneted from the nonmartial labor of conscript assistants. Internal regulations limited their work to the washing of garments, the cleaning and training of horses; mandated that ofcers pay assistants a dened monthly salary; and insisted that soldiers were not domestics, were not to provide childcare, and could not be obligated to serve as assistants.66 In practice, however, limits on assistants duties were quite blurry. In 1945, for example, one of soldier Enrique Beltrans responsibilities was to drive around Colonel Arturo Armijos wife.67 And 1948 conscript Vctor Gutierrez routinely spent part of his day in Colonel Ricardo Ross house, cleaning his rooms.68 Other conscripts reported sleeping in ofcers homes, serving them meals, and carrying their bedding.69 At least one ofcer made all his soldiers into domestic servants, requiring them to cook, serve, wash, and perform for parties he hosted; to pursue a favorite servant who had run away; and even to wash his feet and also those of his little daughter.70 Taking on work that would otherwise be performed by family members or paid servants, these conscript assistants allowed ofcers to maintain the lifestyle of a higher social class. Soldiers martial labor of internal repression, training, and guard duty was similar to that of the pre-Chaco War period. Their military training consisted of classroom instruction on the theory of combat and weapons use, practical training in the same, and physical-tness programs that emphasized endurance and precise obedience to orders. Although most soldiers stood guard at some point during military service, their labor differed depending on the commander and regiment. Some guards had two-hour shifts while others served a twenty-four-hour duty day. Some sentinels set up their cots and slept by the main entrance. Others were expected to actively patrol the installation as a roaming armed guard. Long periods of boredom could be punctuated by a moment of panic, such as when conscript Miguel Fuentes, during the course of a twenty-four-hour shift in 1937, shot alleged Chaco deserter Gregorio Merida as, at least according to Fuentes, he attempted to sneak across the border from Argentina.71 These martial labors often supported existing power structures, especially during periods of right-wing military rule (1939 1943, 1946 1952). Troops regularly suppressed rural and mining strikes, most famously at Catavi (1943), Ayopaya (1947), and Siglo XX (1949). General Enrique Penarandas

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administration (1940 1943) demonstrated overt support for the mining compa nies by garrisoning 250 conscripts at the Catavi mine and 550 at Unca to quell labor unrest.72 An ofcers 1949 campaign diary offers some sense of these repressive labors: As approximately eight hundred miners advanced on them, conscripts positioned their heavy machine guns and called on the masses to halt, receiving petards of dynamite as a response.73 Conscripts thus labored as strike breakers, agriculturalists, builders, robbers, extortionists, and domestic servants in service not only of the patria but also of their ofcers, NCOs, and private capital. Although these labors differed little from those performed before and during the war, nonmartial labor was becoming increasingly legible within the institution and, in fact, offered it a new path forward during a period of upheaval. Inuenced by international ideologies and their own experiences in the Chaco War, the opinions of many junior ofcers about the institution and its relationship with conscripts began to shift. These changes burst onto the national stage during reformist military administrations led by Colonel David Toro (1936 1937), Major German Busch (1937 1939), and Colonel Gualberto Villarroel (1943 1946). The 1942 and 1946 writings of two ofcers in the Revista Militar reected new ideas about the transformation of conscripts that was being sought through military service. Colonel D. Arturo Arevalo dened ofcers duty as to mold in conscripts the national soul so they would be a useful element for work and social harmony.74 And Lieutenant Guillermo Garca emphasized ofcers responsibility to mold men not only t to defend the Patria but who are also efcient citizens, who, upon changing their uniforms for civilian or professional clothes, take up the peaceful weapons of work, cementing our nationality upon the indestructible bases of order and culture.75 Like early-twentieth-century ofcers, they imbued military service with the power to create a unied nation. But instead of using explicitly civilizing terms to depict the transformation of abject and barbarous Indians, they used the language of nationalist modernization to describe their efforts to form workers and Bolivians in the barracks. However, ofcers still drove this process; authority and notions of racial ized hierarchy had not disappeared. Indeed, Garcas praise of order and culture implied that conscripts communities lacked precisely these character istics. The difference in Garcas formulation was that ex-conscripts were capable of taking up the weapons of work and cementing the nationality. In many ways, this nationalist project paralleled the Villarroel administrations 1945 sponsorship of the rst National Indigenous Congress, which brought more than 1,500 indigenous delegates, many of whom were Chaco veterans, to the national capital of La Paz.76 These reformist military ofcers aimed to instill a national identity that would eventually override other identications, but they publicly sought indigenous allies. Like Garca and Arevalo, state agents at the congress constantly reiterated the redemptive power of work; Villarroel had even insisted that human value can be measured only by work.77 In the

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aftermath of the Chaco War, work had emerged as a credible terrain in which all Bolivians could come together discursively. Ofcers like Villarroel in the Presidential Palace and Garca in the barracks aimed to form Bolivians who understood their labor in the mines, elds, and building Bolivia as directly contributing to national interests.

In One Hand a Weapon and in the Other a Tool: The Embrace of Nonmartial Labor The Revolutionary Nationalist Movement (MNR), a middle-class party that sought to represent workers and peasants, formed in the aftermath of the Chaco War and briey participated in the 1943 1946 Villarroel administration. After a mob lynched Villarroel in 1946, a series of conservative governments reestablished control. A 1949 coup attempt by the MNR was unsuccessful, but its exiled candidate, Victor Paz Estenssoro, emerged victorious in the 1951 election. The presidents subsequent installation of a military ruler to prevent Paz from taking ofce eventually led to an armed insurrection on April 9, 1952. Supported by the police, the MNR seized control of government installations. After three days of combat, army units defending the previous administration collapsed in the face of the popular mobilization of workers, miners, and townspeople. By August 1953, the new administration had nationalized the largest tin mines; expanded suffrage to explicitly include women, Indians, and illiterates; and decreed radical agrarian reform. Often called reluctant revolutionaries, the MNR was internally divided between factions that advocated limited reform and those that wanted to dismantle the old system in favor of more radical social change.78 Widely viewed as a tool of the oligarchy and oppressor of the people, the army was substantially weakened by the events of April and faced signicant rivals in newly formed peasant and worker militias. The MNR dismissed at least a hundred ofcers and cut troop levels to 5,000.79 Yet it did not abolish the military, instead choosing to congure an Army in its image, to quote the words of President Vctor Paz.80 MNR leaders thus constructed a discursive contrast between the old oligarchic army and the new productive army. Many troops were immediately discharged while others were reassigned to nonmartial labor on infrastructure projects. Conscript Oscar Rocabado, for example, began his military service in January 1952, immediately prior to the revolution. He received military training and passed individual review during his rst four months of service, but after the events of April he was assigned to Camp Mochara (near Tupiza, Potos) to work on airport construction. With his fellow conscripts, he loaded mud bricks, gravel, sand, and barrels of water onto trucks and transported them to a construction site about a mile away. Rocabado noted that they lived in isolation and infrequently left the camp. Even on Sundays, he reported, despite the fact that we were off-duty, we did not go anywhere because it was too far to walk to the nearest village.81

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In keeping with the new emphasis on productive activities, the MNRs minister of defense revised the text of conscripts ritually intoned oath. The previous formula, set in 1924 and printed in each conscripts military-service booklet, emphasized duty to country, martial labor, and obedience to commands: Swear before God and the Patria to defend your ag even to the sacrice of your life, never to abandon those who command you during war, and to apply yourself to superiors orders.82 The 1953 text retained elements of obedience and defense but put considerably more emphasis on nationalism and labor: Swear before the Patria and the National Revolution, with the idea that from now on our ranks are devoted to the sacred feeling of nationalism, as much to work for the material and spiritual prosperity of Bolivia as to defend her from internal enemies and from those beyond her borders. Soldiers: SUBORDINATION AND PERSEVERANCE!83 Work and defense were balanced in this version; the nationalism invoked was sacred; and repeated emphasis on following orders had been reduced to the single word subordination. Hierarchy and authority had not disappeared, but in asserting soldiers devotion to revolutionary nationalism, the portrayal of the militarys relationship with its conscripts became, on the surface, less authoritarian. The MNR rewrote the constitution and laws to highlight the militarys mission to cooperate in the countrys economic promotion through a combination of military training and the productive labor of agriculture, ranching, industry, construction, and colonization.84 In keeping with this emphasis, the government proudly publicized the militarys nonmartial accomplishments: The president bragged that military labor had dug 219 wells in 1953; a 1956 pamphlet chronicled a highland soldiers work in a lowland colonization unit; and a 1958 documentary lm entitled The Peace Offensive positively depicted military laborers to the general public.85 Newspapers and the military magazine regularly published images of soldiers manual labors. In Figure 1, ofcers and civilians show off the levees constructed by soldiers on the San Jeronimo farm.86 In another such

Figure 1. Levees built by soldiers for the San Jeronimo farm, 1952. Reprinted from Revista Militar 178 182 (1952): 90

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image, conscripts pose with a bulldozer on the bare Altiplano; the caption describes the heroic efforts of the Revolutions Army to forge a highway.87 Units named for productive activities proliferated and even infantry, cavalry, and artillery regiments dedicated their labor to these tasks: In 1954, fty percent of the Colorados Regiment spent their days working on the highway between Tarapacaya and Potos; the Eighth Infantry Regiment was repairing La Pazs urban roads; the Eguino Cavalry Regiment was growing foodstuffs behind their barracks; and the Camacho Artillery Regiment was cultivating peas, beans, quinoa, barley, and potatoes on forty-three hectares.88 Between 1955 and 1961, successive cohorts of conscripts in a single army unit built sixty-one kilometers of roads, fty-ve bridges, and seventy drainage systems.89 The number of conscripts assigned to colonization work increased after the Revolution as the MNR mandated that battalions aid in its push to develop lowland regions. According to newspaper reports, soldiers like the one pictured in Figure 2 were replacing the rie with the spade to dedicate themselves to

Figure 2. Colonization battalion solider with a spade at his shoulder, 1958. Reprinted from La Nacion, August 15, 1958, 6.

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agricultural work in the scorching earth of Santa Cruz.90 Like their predecessors in the 1920s, these conscripts received reduced military training to devote their time to nonmartial labor. Between 1955 and 1957, 3,600 conscripts traveled to the lowlands to prepare land for settlement; by 1962, they had cleared over 11,800 hectares.91 Legal reforms under the MNR ofcially sanctioned the use of military conscripts for commercial operations and as contract laborers for private companies.92 Hired-out soldiers did the same labor as those on military farms, but rather than saving the state money, they brought it income. Reformers hoped that codifying this long-standing practice would limit opportunities for corruption and ensure that the prots from this labor did more than just augment ofcers salaries. As early as 1954, the revolutionary governments ofcial newspaper was bragging of the Vergara Artillery Groups help with the cotton harvest at Finca Menonah in Robore and at the La Algodonera farm in Santa Cruz.93 And lm clips from the 1960s show conscripts cutting sugarcane, loading it onto carts, and feeding it into a pressing machine.94 All of these manual labor tasks had been performed by conscripts prior to the Revolution, but the discourse surrounding this labor had profoundly changed. In stark contrast to the martial emphasis that allowed some pre-Chaco War conscripts to object to nonmartial assignments, the MNR gloried this work. It sought not only the labor of conscripts hailing from rural areas and the mines but also their political support. How conscripts might perceive their quotidian labor for the patria mattered in ways that it had not before 1952. While still emphasizing the need to defend frontier regions and the savings for state coffers, politicians and ofcers began to depict underdevelopment as a battle that the country needed to win, thus expanding the list of threats against which Bolivia needed protection. Their argument that national defense must be achieved through economic development not only responded to the specic situation faced by the MNR in the 1950s but also echoed voices emerging throughout Latin America.95 Phrases that militarized development labor abound after 1952, popping up in military-magazine articles, presidential addresses, speeches to soldiers, and even laws. Military labor would save our Patria from economic chaos; the army must wage the peaceful and edifying battles of national economic emancipation in which victory was a road bulldozed or a farm mechanized.96 The most enthusiastic proponents went so far as to insist that building roads would allow Bolivia to impose its hegemony on the continent.97 This discourse not only imbued nonmartial labor with a higher purpose, it also attempted to mobilize conscripts as actors invested in Bolivias future and gave the military as an institution a new and popular mission. These changes were clear and profound. But the Revolutions Army was also characterized by many continuities from the pre-1952 and even pre-Chaco army. Although the MNR advocated workers rights, its leaders still saw military service as teaching discipline in work and observed the signicant evolution that it produces in the peasant who enters the barracks.98 The MNRs attempt to form a

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revolutionary peasantry was primarily characterized by land-reform efforts, but the barracks would also be a key site of identity transformation. However, the allocation of labor assignments continued along racial lines. Indigenous soldier Juan Acarapi Mamani, for example, spent his days laboring with a group of soldiers charged with making tiles for the Regiment rather than participating in military training with the other conscripts in the Castrillo Infantry Regiment.99 Growing steadily in size and prestige after its very existence had been threatened in 1952, the military regained a prominent role in the mid- to late 1950s. In the face of regime factionalism and economic crisis, the administrations of Hernan Siles (1956 1960) and Vctor Paz (1960 1964) relied increasingly on US aid and advisors. Military assistance to combat potential counterinsurgency ooded in after the Cuban Revolution, and a new term for nonmartial productive labor was introduced: Civic Action. US leaders conceived of Civic Action as ghting communism by both contributing to economic and social development and improving the standing of military forces with the population.100 Higher standards of living would increase resistance to communist propaganda, and the militarys involvement in these activities would guarantee local support against internal and external subversion. After a denitive break with the left wing of his party in 1963, President Paz was left with few supporters and accepted General Rene Barrientos as his vice-presidential candidate in 1964; Barrientos would form part of the junta that overthrew him a few months later. Like their predecessors in the MNR, military administrations under Barrientos (19641969), Ovando (19691970), Torres (19701971), and Banzer (19711978) continued to emphasize the militarys productive contribution to the nation. In 1967, President Barrientos declared: The Bolivian soldier carries in one hand a weapon and in the other a tool, [has] one foot in the barracks and the other in the eld of economic development. Disorder and chaos, he warned, were fatal enemies of the Patria, so each conscript must become a permanent sentry, a lookout, who guarantees the dynamic process of development.101 Films and photographs from the era routinely depict uniformed soldiers mixing cement, operating well-drilling equipment, and roong schools.102 And newspapers bragged of the quota of blood paid by the seless members of the armed forces who work for the progress of the Patria.103 These administrations also increasingly called on the armed forces to end labor disputes, sending troops into the mines in 1964, 1965, 1967, and 1974. Newspapers printed photographs of soldiers loading bazookas, occupying the mines, and training machine guns on union buildings. Conscripts repressive labors prior to 1952 had served private interests by intimidating workers demanding better pay, safer conditions, or the release of prisoners. However, the state faced similar demands from nationalized mines after accepting the International Monetary Funds stabilization plan that ended subsidies, held down wages, and maintained a single exchange rate.104 In the face of this conundrum, ofcers aggressively invoked the militarys right to power based on its

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self-denition as the guardian and ultimate expression of Bolivian nationalism. In a statement to the press during the 1974 strike at Unca, the commander of the Second Division argued that anyone who resisted was, by denition, an extremist since the Bolivian people never feel dissatised but rather very happy when a military unit holds watch to ensure order, tranquility, and the integrity of the citizenry.105 Despite assertions as to the legitimacy of the militarys guardian role, the use of conscripts for repressive labor complicated the idea of citizen-soldiers by forcing individuals to choose between local and national loyalties, just as it had for Captain Alcorezas troops in 1915, when they were deployed in service of the landlords against sleeping Indians. For the conscripts engaged in this martial labor, orders to repress miners might mean turning weapons on friends or even family members. A particularly poignant example can be seen in anthropologist June Nashs oral history of miner Juan Rojas. Although he had himself experienced military repression, Rojas insisted that his son complete military service, even threatening to bring him back to the barracks like a child if he deserted. However, when his son mentioned that he might be ordered to attack miners with machine guns, forcing them to work with guns at their throats, Juan responded that he must remain loyal to the miners and liquidate the ofcials that command [him] to re.106 Although this was likely empty bravado, the military experience was a conicted one for many conscripts. Nonmartial assignments could also complicate the idea of the military as the epitome of nationalism. The 1967 example of the Manchego Assault Regiment is particularly striking. After intense training with US Green Berets, soldiers from this unit captured Che Guevara. President Barrientos descended upon La Higuera to personally congratulate the troops, promising them an early discharge in reward for their efforts. Yet, after spending months pursuing the remaining guerrillas, the Manchego unit returned to their barracks in Guabira (Santa Cruz). As retired general Gary Prado Salmon writes: After having been covered with glory for their performance at La Higuera, the soldiers suddenly realized that the presidential promise of discharge would not be fullled, and that, on the contrary, they were destined to cut sugarcane on private property for the benet of their superiors. So they captured the garrisons armaments, made prisoners out of their ofcers, and shot at the warplanes sent to scare them into surrender. The authorities quickly capitulated, promising to honorably discharge the mutineers within sixty days.107 In some ways, the Manchego mutineers were not dissimilar to their counterparts in the early twentieth century, who had complained about the nature and conditions of their labor. Despite the efforts of the MNR and military administrations to celebrate development labor, conscripts still understood it to be fundamentally different from martial labor. But unlike the 1931 Colorados conscripts who had complained about making mud bricks, the Manchego soldiers never faced a military tribunal even though they had, in fact, mutinied. The hiring out of conscripts as agricultural day laborers was common and

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legal, but these soldiers, due to their well-publicized martial accomplishments, could take advantage of an institutional fear of embarrassment to avoid reprisals. Conclusion Throughout the twentieth century, soldiers martial and nonmartial labors defended Bolivias borders, developed the nation, maintained the military, and beneted individuals and private companies. The diversity of soldiers labor originated with the creation of frontier units, the states nancial needs, and ofcers taking advantage of military hierarchy. After the Chaco War, however, political and military leaders used nonmartial labor to justify their portrayal of the military as essential to the patrias integrity. The use of military labor for development was not solely a practical matter of nances but also a discursive project of nation building and on-the-job training for the nations future laborers. In the words of President Paz, conscripts would serve the Patria by building the new Bolivia.108 Not only would their labor literally build their countrys roads and schools, their experience in the barracks would also instill an identication with Bolivia and a desire to work, both in and out of uniform, for the greatness of the patria. And, in some ways, it worked. Impressment gangs had long ago disappeared, and the military could rely on community norms and a more effective state to supply it with conscripts. In fact, the president of the state-owned Bolivian Development Corporation may have been exaggerating only slightly when he declared in 1957 that military service was fullled in an almost religious manner.109 However, budget shortfalls, political upheaval, corrupt ofcers, and conscript resistance still meant that military barracks were sites of conict and negotiation. Dominant ideas about the correlation between ethnicity and ability meant that many indigenous conscripts continued to do the most menial of labors. And there were always ofcers who mistreated their soldiers or sought to hire out conscripts labor for personal gain, as happened with Captain Antezana in 1946 and the Manchego Regiment in 1968. Although ofcial representations of military service had expanded to include far more than armed defense, ofcers had always presented this duty as a sacred one. The image of conscripts willingly serving the patria was so integral to the perpetuation of compulsory military service that, in at least one case, it became more important than insisting upon strict enforcement of authority over soldiers. In 1974, the commander of a unit garrisoned in Cochabamba denied press reports that his soldiers had mutinied, claiming that the incident was only conscripts complaining about not having been discharged on the anticipated date. He added an assurance that they would be discharged with all honors . . . because they took part in fullling the sacred duty to which the Patria has called them.110 Far from being mutineers, he portrayed these soldiers as having honorably fullled the terms of their contract laboring for the patria.

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NOTES
I would like to thank John D. French, Jocelyn Olcott, Dirk Bonker, Orin Starn, Pete Sigal, Robert Smale, the members of the Latin American & Caribbean Graduate Student Workshop at Duke University, and the International Labor and Working-Class History reviewers for their comments on earlier drafts. , 1. Speech to Yacuma Regiment conscripts, San Joaqun de Mamore August 7, 1947, El actual soldado boliviano, Revista militar 120121 (December 1947): 3945. All translations are my own unless otherwise noted. 2. James Dunkerley, Orgenes del poder militar, trans. Rose Marie Vargas (La Paz, 1987), 7 8, 23, 65, 131. 3. See Rene Danilo Arze Aguirre, Guerra y conictos sociales (La Paz, 1987); Andrew Canessa, Minas, mote y munecas (La Paz, 2006); Dunkerley, Origenes del poder militar; Lesley Gill, Creating Citizens, Making Men: The Military and Masculinity in Bolivia, Cultural Anthropology 12 (1997); Luis Oporto Ordonez, Conscripcion militar e insercion como mano de obra minero, in Unca y Llallagua (La Paz, 2007); Juan R. Quintana Taborga, Soldados y ciudadanos (La Paz, 1998). 4. A highly developed literature on the way race functions in Bolivia describes ethnic categories as seemingly denable, static, and carrying immense social import but individual classication as uid and situational, based on shifting sociocultural markers such as dress, hairstyle, language, diet, surname, schooling, occupation, region, residence, and income. See, for example, Laura Gotkowitz, A Revolution for Our Rights: Indigenous Struggles for Land and Justice in Bolivia, 1880 1952 (Durham, 2007), 13; Waskar T. Ari, Race and Subaltern Nationalism: AMP Activist-Intellectuals in Bolivia, 1921 1964 (Ph.D. diss., Georgetown University, 2004), v. Previous generations of scholars either took indigeneity as an ontological category or argued that ethnic and racial terms served to mask class relationships. 5. James Dunkerley, Reassessing Caudillismo in Bolivia, 1825 79, Latin American Research Review 1 (1981): 19. 6. Ley militar: organizacion del servicio, conscripcion y sorteo, August 6, 1875. 7. William F. Sater, Andean Tragedy: Fighting the War of the Pacic, 18791884 (Lincoln, NE, 2007), 2022. 8. The military also established the Military Academy in 1891 and the Quartermaster Corps in 1899. Legislators reiterated the obligation to serve in a September 20, 1892 conscrip tion law. Julio Daz Arguedas, Historia del ejercito de Bolivia, 1825 1932 (La Paz, 1940), 2325, 57, 177; Dunkerley, Reassessing Caudillismo, 57. 9. Daz Arguedas, Historia del ejercito, 45 192, 760 64. 10. Art. 87 (b), Constitucion poltica de la Republica de Bolivia, October 28, 1880. 11. 23a Sesion extraordinaria, January 5, 1907, Redactor de la H. Camara de Diputados, Tomo III (La Paz, 1907): 1460. 12. Capt. Camilo Unzaga, El ejercito en la vida social, Revista militar 39 (1908): 341 49. 13. Minister of War to Prefects, January 21, 1907, Boletn militar, Tomo III (La Paz, 1907), 2128. 14. Ocina Nacional de Inmigracion Estadstica y Propaganda Geograca, Censo general de la poblacion de la Republica de Bolivia segun el empadronamiento de 1e. de septiembre de 1900, vol. 2 (La Paz, 1904). The 1950 census categorized sixty-three percent of the population as indigenous. Grieshaber argues that the 1900 census only counted tribute payers as indigenous rather than using markers such as language and dress. Erwin P. Grieshaber, Fluctuaciones en la denicion del indio: Comparacion de los censos de 1900 y 1950, Historia Boliviana 5 (1985). 15. With minor changes, this law remained in force until rewritten in 1966; that version still stands today. Ley de servicio militar, January 16, 1907; Ley del servicio nacional de defensa, August 1, 1966. 16. Rates of participation in the Bolivian military were on a par with other Latin American countries but far lower than in European countries. Miguel Angel Centeno, Blood and Debt: War and the Nation-State in Latin America (University Park, PA, 2002), 225. 17. Ley que ja el numero de plazas, November 16, 1907, November 16, 1909, February 2, 1910, December 12, 1918, and May 18, 1932; Bolivia: Combat Estimate, August 25, 1926 and January 10, 1928, RG 165, NM 8477, b. 557, f. S-C Intelligence Reference Pubs, National Archives and Records Administration, College Park, MD (hereafter cited as NARA).

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18. See correspondence in Prefecture-Admin 147, 148, 149, 208, Archivo de La Paz, La Paz, Bolivia (hereafter cited as ALP). 19. Minister of War to Prefect of La Paz #1730, January 30, 1915, Prefecture-Admin 148, ALP. 20. Robert L. Smale, I Sweat the Flavor of Tin: Labor Activism in Early Twentieth Century Bolivia (Pittsburgh, 2010), 87 91, 110 43. 21. On the Acre War, see Robert L. Scheina, The Acre War, 1903, in Latin Americas Wars: The Age of the Professional Soldier, 1900-2001 (Washington, 2003), 7 9. 22. Julio Sanjines Goitia, El militar ingeniero (La Paz, 1975), 350. 23. My. Julio Bretel, Mision del ocial en fronteras, Revista militar 6 (1922): 41423. 24. My. Marcelino Guzman y B., La vida del ocial en fronteras, Revista militar 16 (1923): 31219. 25. Sanjines Goitia, El militar ingeniero, 320-21. 26. Prefect of La Paz to Minister of War #1849, August 16, 1913, Prefecture-Admin 147, ALP. 27. INS-59-003, Tribunal Permanente de Justicia Militar, Archivo Historico Militar, La Paz, Bolivia (hereafter cited as AHM-TPJM). 28. My. Luis Emilio Aguirre, El nuevo ejercito, Revista militar 44 (1925): 597 604. 29. Victor Zambrana Flores statement, November 6, 1921, INS-59-003, AHM-TPJM. 30. Gen. Gonzalo Jauregui, Las razas indgenas en Bolivia y su educacion en los cuarteles, Revista militar 55 (1926): 533 37. 31. Herbert S. Klein, A Concise History of Bolivia (New York, 2003), 168. 32. Orden Suprema, February 18, 1925, Anuario de leyes y disposiciones supremas de 1925 (La Paz, 1926): 22829. For instances of hiring civilian contractors, see Decreto Supremo March 6, 1918, Anuario de leyes y disposiciones supremas de 1918 (La Paz, 1919): 345 46; Resolucion Suprema July 30, 1919, Anuario de leyes y disposiciones supremas de 1919 (La Paz, 1920): 690. 33. Minister of War to Chief of Staff, January 26, 1931, ABA-01-004, AHM-TPJM. 34. En la region de Killi-Killi ocurrio un desplome de tierra, El Diario, August 24, 1927, 8. 35. Jaime Mendoza, Una valiosa opinion acerca del camino carretero al Chaco, Revista militar 79 (1928): 43335. 36. Lt. Col. Alberto Sotomayor statement, October 1, 1931, ABA-01-004, AHM-TPJM. 37. Cronica, Revista militar 117 (1931): 77679. 38. Ignacio Torres and Sarg. Manuel Flores statements, November 18, 1906 and November 28, 1907, Prefecture-Expedientes 189, doc. 177, ALP. 39. Soldiers to Minister of War, November 1, 1920, MOT-71-001; Julio Rendon and Jose Sinani statements, October 4, 1921 and November 17, 1921, INS-59-003; soldiers to Junta de Gobierno, November 18, 1920, INS-59-002, AHM-TPJM. 40. Seventeen soldiers to Second Division Commander, September 22, 1931, ABA-01-004, AHM-TPJM. 41. Bruce W. Farcau, The Chaco War: Bolivia and Paraguay, 19321935 (Westport, 1996), 1115; Klein, A Concise History of Bolivia, 16877. 42. Ley que ja el numero de plazas del ejercito, May 18, 1932; David H. Zook, The Conduct of the Chaco War (New York, 1960), 75. 43. Zook, The Conduct of the Chaco War, 174. 44. Statement of reservist Juan Laime, December 16, 1932, DES-16-007, AHM-TPJM. 45. Arze Aguirre, Guerra y conictos sociales, 251. 46. Klein, A Concise History of Bolivia, 183. See also Centeno, Blood and Debt, 59. 47. Klein, A Concise History of Bolivia, 186 203. See also Brian Loveman, For la Patria: Politics and the Armed Forces in Latin America (Wilmington, 1999), 101 11. 48. Art. 169 (b), Constitucion poltica de la Republica de Bolivia, October 30, 1938. This clause remained unchanged until 1961. 49. 128a sesion, October 24, 1938, Redactor de la Convencion Nacional, Tomo V (La Paz, 1939): 325. 50. Ley de zapadores, October 29, 1939. See also Las granjas agrcolas del ejercito nacional, Revista militar 3132 (1939): 883. 51. El camino de Padcaya a Fortn Campero, El Diario, June 12, 1936, 8. 52. Charles D. Corbett, Military Institutional Development and Sociopolitical Change: The Bolivian Case, Journal of Interamerican Studies and World Affairs 14 (1972): 403. 53. Gill, Creating Citizens, Making Men, 53739.

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54. Hoja de Servicio no. 039933, August 28, 1944, Registro Territorial, Archivo Central del Ministerio de Defensa Nacional, La Paz, Bolivia (hereafter cited as ACMDN-RT). 55. Military Attache Report: Bolivia, June 9, 1944 and June 17, 1942, RG 165, NM 84-77, b. 191 and 189, f. MA Reports vol. 2 and 9719965, NARA. 56. My. Hugo Arteaga and Capt. Walter Castellon statements, April 20, 1948, ACC-07-007, AHM-TPJM. 57. Index of folders, 2008, ACMDN-RT. 58. Prefect of La Paz to Minister of Defense #365, February 28, 1941, Prefecture-Admin 141, ALP; Commander of 1st Military Region to Prefect of La Paz #210, May 3, 1941, Prefecture-Admin 209, ALP. 59. Statements of soldier Edwin Silvetti Baldivieso and Sub-Lt. Alberto Albarrecn Crespo, June 17, 1946, ACC-07-002, AHM-TPJM. 60. El ano militar, Revista militar 135 137 (1949): 107 9. 61. Capt. Hugo Suarez Guzman, Cronica sobre la construccion de Escuela Modelo Ricardo Mujia en Sucre, Revista militar 154 (1950): 3547. 62. My. Hugo Rene Pol, Notas editorials, Revista militar 95 96 (1945): 711. 63. Nataniel Morales statement, August 30, 1946, ABA-03-006, AHM-TPJM. 64. Diego Bernal and Daniel Bernal statements, June 29, 1942 and July 1, 1942, ROB-86-006, AHM-TPJM. 65. Prefect of La Paz to Minister of Defense #2558, November 23, 1946, Prefecture-Admin 141, ALP. 66. Legal copy of reglamento de regimen interno no. 6, October 2, 1931, ABA-01-004, AHM-TPJM. 67. Enrique Beltran statement, September 5, 1945, ACC-07-001, AHM-TPJM. 68. Vctor Gutierrez statement, March 1, 1949, HER-52-010, AHM-TPJM. 69. Tiburcio Flores statement, December 18, 1947, DES-23-007; Rene Murillo statement, April 23, 1947, DES-22-015; Lt. Hugo Baldivieso statement, September 7, 1948, HUR-56-005, AHM-TPJM. 70. Antonio Orellana, Mauro Gutierrez, Bautista Acuna, and Nataniel Morales statements, August 2830, 1946, ABA-03-006, AHM-TPJM. 71. Statements of Miguel Fuentes Orellana, October 27 and November 10, 1937, MUE-69-06, AHM-TPJM. , 72. Report on Patino Mines for US Military Attache June 24, 1942, RG 165, NM 84 77, b. 190, f. Subversive, NARA. 73. Entre talones de la masacre de Catavi: Mayo 1949, La Nacion, December 29, 1952, 4. 74. Tcnl. D. Arturo Arevalo, La contextura moral del ocial, Revista militar 99100 (1946): 7184. 75. Tte. Guillermo Garca, Instructores e instruidos, Revista militar 5758 (1942): 95101. 76. Gotkowitz, A Revolution for Our Rights, 192 232. 77. Mensaje del Presidente de la Junta de Gobierno al Pueblo Boliviano. La Calle, January 1, 1944. 78. Klein, A Concise History of Bolivia, 197 222. The ideology of MNR administrations and whether the revolutions leaders were radicals or moderates pushed by the masses has been a subject of intense historiographical debate. See a summary in Gotkowitz, A Revolution for Our Rights, 268 90. 79. William H. Brill, Military Intervention in Bolivia: The Overthrow of Paz Estenssoro and the MNR (Washington, 1967), 15 17. 80. Vctor Paz Estenssoro, Mensaje del Presidente Constitucional de la Rep. de Bolivia, Revista militar 188194 (1952): 8 20. 81. Oscar Rocabado statement, January 20, 1953, ACC-07-009, AHM-TPJM. 82. Decreto supremo que ja la formula del juramento, August 4, 1924. 83. Gen. Luis Ernesto Arteaga, El juramento del lealtad a la bandera, Revista militar 188194 (1953): 2025. 84. Arts. 1, 23, 54 62, Ley organica de las fuerzas armadas de la nacion, Law # 280 of December 20, 1963. See also Art. 201, Constitucion poltica de la Republica de Bolivia, August 6, 1961. 85. Paz Estenssoro, Mensaje del presidente; Historia de un soldado-colono, La Nacion, July 28, 1956, 5; Historiando algo con respeto a la pelcula Ofensiva de Paz, La Nacion, August 15, 1958, 6.

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86. Revista militar 178182 (1952): 90. 87. El camino Coroico-Caranavi estara a cargo del ejercito de la revolucion, La Nacion, November 11, 1952, 5. 88. El Regimiento Colorados realiza ecaz labor de benecio publico, La Nacion, May 8, 1954, 5; Varias obras publicas ejecutaron unidades del Ejercito, La Nacion, June 21, 1954, 5; Actividad territorial y desarrollo de la exposicion agrcola ganadera de Challapata, Revista militar 199 200 (1954): 70. 89. Lt. Col. Hugo Antezana, El camino al Ichilo, Revista militar 246248 (1961): 8185. 90. Historiando algo con respeto a la pelcula Ofensiva de Paz, La Nacion, August 15, 1958, 6. 91. Joaquin de Lemoine, Proyecto de Migraciones Internas, July 3, 1957, 49, 34 BoliviaGeneral, Papers of Robert J. Alexander, Rutgers University Libraries, New Brunswick, NJ (hereafter cited as RUL/MC974); Bolivia. Direccion Nacional de Informaciones, Bolivia: 10 anos de revolucion (La Paz, 1962), 147. 92. Arts. 23 and 58, Ley organica de las fuerzas armadas de la nacion, Law # 280 of December 20, 1963. 93. La Region Militar no. 5 ayuda al autoabastecimiento, La Nacion, May 19, 1954, 5; Activa labor de la Region Militar No. 5 en el Oriente, La Nacion, June 7, 1954, 5. 94. Civic Action, Bolivia, South America, July 1963, RG 111, LC-47212, LC-47214, LC-47215, NARA. 95. Brian Loveman and Thomas M. Davies Jr., eds., The Politics of Antipolitics: The Military in Latin America, 2nd revised and expanded ed. (Lincoln, 1989), 7 8. 96. Actividades del ejercito de la Revolucion Nacional, Revista militar 184 185 (1953): 106 8; Col. Clemente Inofuentes, Necesitamos un ejercito que sea sntesis del anhelo popular, Revista militar 184185 (1953): 63 68; de Lemoine, Proyecto de Migraciones Internas. 97. My. Elka, La vialidad y el ejercito nacional, Revista militar 174 175 (1952): 1415. 98. El camino Coroico-Caranavi estara a cargo del ejercito de la revolucion, La Nacion, November 12, 1952, 5; Col. E. M. Clemente Inofuentes G. Plan de cooperacion del Ejercito a la produccion agraria, Revista militar 186 187 (1953): 61 65. 99. Juan Acarapi Mamani statement, May 1, 1953, MUE-71-009, AHM-TPJM. 100. Undated Department of Defense Handout on civic action, quoted in William H. Brill, Military Civic Action in Bolivia (Ph.D. diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1965), 23. 101. Gen. Rene Barrientos quoted in Barrientos dijo que cada integrante de las FF.AA. es viga del desarrollo, El Diario, November 22, 1967, 6. 102. Community Development, May 1966, RG 111, LC-50029, NARA; Civic Action US Military Group, September 1970, RG 111, LC-56148, NARA; Accion cvica militar en todos los ambitos de la patria, Revista militar 291 (1967): 139. 103. Faltan 6 kilometros para concluir camino de Riberalta a Guayaramern, El Diario, September 14, 1969, 5. 104. Klein, A Concise History of Bolivia, 220. 105. Susceptibilidad en mineros por presencia de la FF.AA., Presencia, May 26, 1974, 10. 106. June C. Nash, I Spent My Life in the Mines: The Story of Juan Rojas, Bolivian Tin Miner, updated ed. (New York, 1992 [1979]), 346 50. 107. Gary Prado Salmon, Poder y fuerzas armadas, 19491982 (Cochabamba, 1984), 212 14. 108. Historiando algo con respeto a la pelcula Ofensiva de Paz, La Nacion, August 15, 1958, 6. 109. de Lemoine, Proyecto de Migraciones Internas. 110. Aclaran que no hubo motn sino queja de conscriptos, El Diario, February 23, 1974, 3.