Conscript Nation makes an important contribution to the literature on Bolivia and to our understanding of the armed forces' place in Latin American society. Scholars have frequently positioned Bolivia's military as a pivotal player throughout the nation's history, but its internal functioning, its transformations over time, and the importance of conscription as a form of facilitating national integration have been grossly understudied. These omissions have been detrimental to Bolivianists' understanding of the military's role in politics, state making, and nation building. Elizabeth Shesko's study provides several correctives to prevailing misconceptions about the military during the twentieth century and explores how conscription created a form of national belonging for the nation's Indigenous majority that relied on assimilationist ideas and coercion while also providing a space in which conscripted soldiers could and did contest the boundaries imposed on the citizenship offered to them.The book is a national study of military conscription and citizenship from the aftermath of the 1899 civil war to the 1964 coup. Shesko interrogates the disjuncture between the nature, structure, and actions of the military establishment, as well as the experiences, interests, and participation of conscripted soldiers. In so doing, she explores the complexities of state formation in a context of relative state weakness. While “the Bolivian state lacked the coercive power to impose” national identity on subaltern men through force, men from the lower classes increasingly saw military service as a mode of social advancement, a way to access patronage networks, earn masculine credentials in their home communities, and make claims on the state (p. 4).Many of the central questions in Bolivian historiography—state formation, Indigenous identity, revolutionary nationalism, dictatorship—are tangled up with the military. Heretofore Bolivianists, lacking a deep empirical study of the military's role in shaping the political system and the nation, have been left only with politicized narratives created in the aftermath of pivotal historical moments. While such narrations merit analysis in their own right, they have proven a poor substitute for empirical evidence. Shesko does this crucial work based on new sources from the Historical Archive of the Estado Mayor: internal military records, including testimony from military proceedings on mutinies, abuse of authority, and desertion. This allows her to narrate conscript experiences as well as the vicissitudes of military leadership's decision-making, providing the raw material for her important intervention into the literature on state making. This study sets a new empirical foundation for understanding nation and state making in Bolivia.Conscript Nation's contributions are numerous; I will highlight three. First, the book provides an essential corrective to Chaco War history. In analyzing the war, scholars have largely relied on ex post facto narratives of the conflict produced by reformist actors—political treatises preoccupied with the political imperatives of the moment. As Shesko argues, reliance on these documents, and the absence of hard statistical data, has skewed scholars' understanding of the composition of the armies raised, the experience at the front, and how the conflict affected nation building and state formation. Pointing out how postwar political treatises “implied that rural indigenous men had made for poor defenders of Bolivia's territory,” Shesko demonstrates how these narratives justified postwar assimilationist policies aimed at “improving” Bolivia's Indigenous population (p. 90). These narratives—in their multiple iterations—tended to depict Indigenous soldiers as victims while “implicitly blaming them for Bolivia's loss” (p. 91). Shesko instead foregrounds how Indigenous soldiers employed the dominant narratives of race and class as a form of resistance against state coercion and used their position as soldiers and veterans to make claims on the state.Second, Shesko puts a finer point on the meanings of the Chaco War for the political class that emerged from it. Bolivianist historians have often referred to the “generation of the Chaco” as crucial to the development of the Revolutionary Nationalist Movement and ultimately the political orientation of the 1952 revolution, but the politicization of this generation has been underanalyzed. While framing the Chaco conflict as a formative experience for a generation of middle-class men, Shesko analyzes how they in turn framed the war as an imperialist manipulation by Standard Oil. This narrative allowed military leaders to pass the buck but also shaped subsequent histories of the conflict.Last, Conscript Nation's broadest intervention regards Indigenous citizenship. Military service did not immediately make conscripts full citizens; to the contrary, the disjuncture between citizenship and obligatory military service remains stark throughout the book. But the military institution offered a space from which lower-class men challenged, resisted, and made claims on the state. Joining historians who have contended that spaces of state power are also sites of contention, Shesko illustrates how an oppressive institution that sought to homogenize, assimilate, and integrate Bolivia's Indigenous men was also a site of negotiation, in which conscripted men shaped the military establishment.
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Jun 1, 2022
André Thiemann + 1
Open Access