Building Bridges with Society? Reservists and Democratization of the Armed Forces in Argentina

FREDERIC SABINA; MARINA MARTINEZ ACOSTA

Contemporary Military Reserves. Between the civilian and military worlds

Routledge

Año: 2023; p. 167 - 182

Since the suspension of the compulsory military service in 1995, Argentina is characterized by a legal vacuum regarding the recruitment and training of military reserves . The weakness of its Armed Forces within the democratic state has marked the period since the fall of the last military dictatorship. . The military defeat in the Malvinas/Falkland War, the terror perpetrated by the military in the name of the "War against subversion" and the end of the Cold War converged in the democratization of the Armed Forces but with meager resources. Facing this situation, in 2008 the Army tried to fill the legal vacuum using fragments of different laws, by creating the Argentine Army Reserve System (SIREA) in order to expand its ties with society.Our analysis of SIREA’s creation process and the condition of "transitory military state" that it instituted, led us to the multiple relations of exchange between a group of ex-conscripts members of the Union of Reserve Officers and the high command of the Army. Those exchanges were reinforced during the War in 1982 and became an agreement embodied in the SIREA and its Course of Reserve Officers (2011) to recruit college graduates from different professional fields. The military gave in to, what may be named the “reservists lobby” (Gazit, Lomsky and Ben-Ari, 2020) and led them lead the SIREA. The main goals was to renew recruitment and training, restore military prestige and rebuild bridges with new generations of civilians. However, contemporary debates about the role and size of the Argentine Armed Forces led to the use of reservists as substitutes for regulars, a move resisted by the Army’s high command. Our study is an ethnographic analysis comparing the military and active reservists’ perspectives, in terms of the following questions: Which are the narratives of exchanges between the different reservists generations, ranks, and degrees and the Army, that legitimize one orientation or the other? What do reservists receive and what do they give in each case? How are those orientations expressed in recruitment, discipline and training criteria? Finally, what are the effects they have on the configuration of alliances between the military, reservists and political officials?