El ejercito in Santa Cruz

On 14 Dec, I visited my colleagues in Montero, Santa Cruz, as I wrote on the previous blog of 18 Dec, 2005. On 15 Dec, my supervisor and I went to “el Ejercito”, or an army to see her child, José. Every Thursday from 15:30 to 17:30 anybody can enter a site of the army. There was a bunch of people visiting their children, boyfriends, and husbands. They were having juice and food lying down on the grass as if they were having a happy family picnic in a huge park.

In Bolivia it is mandatory for all the men to serve in the army. You can choose: one-year service totally separated from the real world or two-year weekly service with 2-week training camps a few times, if I remember correctly.

It is said that today the Bolivian military service is completely useless, because Bolivia is surely helpless against any other Latin-American countries, since it has less military, less weapons, and less war chest.