Greg Morsbach in Caracas
Now Playing: Around 500,000 Venezuelans will start a four-month military
Greg Morsbach in Caracas
Saturday March 4, 2006

The Guardian

Around 500,000 Venezuelans will start a four-month military
training programme today to turn them into
members of the country's territorial guard. They are the first group of a total of 2m
Venezuelan civilians who have so far signed up to become armed
reservists. By the summer of 2007, Venezuela is likely to have the
largest military reserve in the Americas, which is expected to be
almost double the size of that in the United States.
The huge
recruitment drive is part of President Hugo Ch?vez's plan to create
a people's army that would answer directly to him in the event of
civil unrest or an armed conflict.

General Alberto Muller Rojas, one of the members of the army high
command who helped to devise
the new thinking in military
strategy being adopted by Venezuela's leftwing government, said: "If for example the United States were to invade Venezuela one day, and that's what many people are expecting,
the only way we could repel such an attack would be a full scale guerrilla war against the
foreign aggressors. "Our professional army only numbers 80,000
soldiers, so we would need to use civilians like in Iraq to fight
the Yankee forces." Top military officials are confident that a
reserve force of 2m, or one in five adults, would be sufficient to
dissuade any country from invading Venezuela, the world's fifth
biggest oil exporter and fifth biggest supplier of crude oil to the
US.

Many of Venezuela's state-owned companies, such as the oil
giant PDVSA, have started their own territorial guard units.
However, they are being asked to join the formal training programme offered by the armed forces. Richard Arrais, 40, a marketing executive who works at PDVSA's headquarters in Caracas, has his own office and works in a nine-to-five job Mondays to Fridays. But once a week he and his friends meet up as reservists. He said: "Since January we've been holding informal meetings to discuss military tactics and to receive courses such as first aid. "But the training starting this Saturday will be tougher. There will be drill, weapons training and assault courses, as well as a military exercise in the countryside."

Mr Arrais and others like him say they are happy to give up every Saturday in defence of their fatherland and the values of President Ch?vez's socialist revolution. They believe internal opposition forces and the United States could strike at any moment. So far service in the territorial guard is voluntary. But the Venezuelan parliament is studying proposals to make it obligatory for all Venezuelan adults to join the territorial guard. Mr Ch?vez has sought to position himself at the vanguard of a bloc of Latin American leftist leaders acting as a counterpoint to US hegemony in the region. Tensions between Caracas and Washington have simmered in recent weeks with an espionage row that has resulted in a US naval attache being expelled and disputes on a range of issues from the war on drugs to aviation safety restrictions.