Conscript Nation: Authority and Belonging in the Bolivian Barracks

Drawing on a wide range of unpublished internal military documents, including correspondence, service records, and transcripts of military justice proceedings, this paper draws out the continuities and ruptures of the conscript experience in Bolivia before and after the 1952 National Revolution. An embodied understanding of individuals’ experiences in the barracks shows how military service, despite the new administration’s emphasis on class, continued to reinforce social hierarchies based on education, language, profession, and heritage. Yet this research also brings to the fore the importance of the homosocial bonds that formed through experiences of not only survival but also work, competition, horseplay, and alcohol. I argue that obligatory military service exceeded its design as a state project to impose national unity by assimilating and disciplining a diverse population; indeed, it became deeply rooted precisely because of participation from below, as disparate social actors negotiated its meanings and implementation in ways that led many to see it as a useful and even meaningful endeavor in terms of their personal and communal lives.