Only 6% of the approximately 1.5 million people who sign up for compulsory conscription at the age of 18 join the Armed Forces. Congress is debating a change in compulsory conscription.
(DW) A bill that has been pending in the Chamber of Deputies since 2023 aims to make military conscription optional in Brazil, mandatory for men who turn 18 and, since this year, optional for women. Presented by deputy Weliton Prado (PROS), the proposal is awaiting an opinion from the Committee on Foreign Affairs and National Defense.
After this analysis, the bill still needs to go through the Constitution and Justice and Citizenship Committee. In a statement, the Chamber’s press office said that “as the matter is being dealt with conclusively, if approved by the two committees it can go straight to the Federal Senate, if there is no appeal for the text to be considered in plenary”.
According to data from the Ministry of Defense, an average of 1.5 million young people enlist every year, but only 6% end up joining. “Most of the discharges are due to overcrowding, because of the limited number of vacancies for entry,” the ministry said in a statement. “Other reasons for dismissal are health problems, family support, residence in non-taxable municipalities and other situations provided for by law and regulation.”
The ministry points out that anyone who doesn’t enlist in the year in which they turn 18 is in debt. “In addition to paying a fine, they will be prevented from obtaining a passport or extending its validity, taking an exam or enrolling in any educational establishment, obtaining a professional card or registering a diploma in a liberal profession, registering for public office, holding public office, in addition to other penalties,” it warns.
This obligation explains the fact that the number of people enlisted each year does not vary much. Asked if there are any records of evasions, the ministry said it was unable to answer. The Army was also contacted, but did not respond to the report.
On the official enlistment website, the Armed Forces argue that compulsory military service “represents the opportunity for Brazilians to exercise the act of citizenship of serving and defending the Homeland” and that the work means “making a commitment to defend the sovereignty of the Homeland and the integrity of its people”.
For Deputy Prado, making conscription optional would simplify life for Brazilians. He justifies his project as something to “reduce bureaucracy in the lives of young Brazilians”, understanding that “this simple legal change” would free “millions of young people from state bureaucracy, which lasts for almost their entire adult lives, since [reservist] certificates [proving enlistment] are required for the most diverse acts”. In the proposal, the MP also argues that the change would allow “the Armed Forces to concentrate on selecting those who really have an interest in doing valuable military service”.
In Europe, few countries currently have compulsory military service – Denmark, Austria, Sweden, Norway and Greece are among them. With the conflict between Russia and Ukraine, some politicians from other European nations have brought up debates about the possible need for compulsory military service.
Obsolete model
The discussion in Brazil is far from being consensual. For historian Paulo Henrique Martinez, a professor at São Paulo State University (Unesp), compulsory service today “makes no sense at all” because, in his opinion, it doesn’t bring any training benefits to young people and, at the same time, it doesn’t provide effective training in the event of a war, in times of “push-button and remote sensing” conflicts, with “fewer and fewer conventional battlefields”.
“The functioning of the Armed Forces in Brazil is largely obsolete and inadequate for the challenges of the 21st century,” he says. “The mobilization of a large contingent of young people to maintain this structure, in addition to being extremely expensive, is becoming less and less relevant. It is, in fact, a compulsory requisition of temporary labor, with low technical and professional qualifications and generally poor schooling. After all, these are young people who have just entered adulthood. And they go through compulsory military service, performing temporary functions and activities, working, for example, as drivers, in administrative routines, kitchens, vehicle mechanics, information and communication equipment operators.”
On the other hand, there are civic and citizenship issues. Historian Victor Missiato, a researcher at Unesp, adds that “in times of peace, military conscription has always had a civic character, within a vision that the state would develop the citizen, in quotation marks, a vagrant, a troublemaker, who should set himself up as someone more civilized”.
He is also against making service compulsory, pointing out that today “many young people have a voluntary interest” in enlisting – because a portion of society sees service as a gateway to a career.
Long history
Military conscription in Brazil began to take its current form 150 years ago. At the time, military conscription was literally a manhunt – the expression appears in debates that took place in the Chamber of Deputies and the Senate during the Second Empire period.
As there was no legislation providing for compulsory military conscription, recruitment took place by force, with career soldiers raiding villages and arresting men seen as ideal for the Army and Navy.
“Conscription is a violent means that necessity forces us to employ, because without it we wouldn’t even have enough people to crew the twentieth part of our warships,” argued the then senator Manuel de Assis Mascarenhas (1805-1867). His colleague Pedro Fernandes Chaves (1810-1866) recalled that the flight of those who didn’t want to be hunted was justified by the “cruelty with which some commanders punish soldiers with the lash”, citing that there were cases in which the punished lost consciousness and fell to the ground. Senator Francisco de Montezuma (1794-1870) compared military service to forced labor.
“The point is that nobody wanted to serve in the army because the conditions were inhuman,” comments sociologist Paulo Niccoli Ramirez, a professor at the São Paulo School of Sociology Foundation (FESPSP) and the School of Advertising and Marketing (ESPM).
The government had been concerned with training national military personnel since the beginning of the imperial period. Due to the small number of local forces, Dom Pedro 1° (1798-1934) had to make use of European mercenaries in the wars he waged against those who resisted the process of Independence or the way in which he formed Brazil.
During the Paraguayan War, a bloody conflict that lasted from 1864 to 1870, human hunts were already standard practice in army training. Of course, many were immune. Sons of the elite and religious people escaped. Poor people who lived under the protection of regional oligarchs were also passed over. The main target ended up being indigenous people and Afro-Brazilians, in this case former slaves who had been freed.
“Military conscription was always an operational challenge because it meant compulsory labor and deprivation of social life,” Martinez explains.
Finally, the law
It was in an attempt to organize military conscription in Brazil that the second and last emperor of Brazil, Dom Pedro 2° (1825-1891), published the first legislation on the subject, exactly 150 years ago. According to the provision, those who voluntarily enlisted were enlisted first, and then, to make up the number, “by lot of Brazilian citizens enlisted annually in accordance with the law”, i.e. “all suitable citizens” aged 19 and over.
The expression “military conscription” was used in Brazil for the first time with this law. According to Martinez, the terminology is “a testimony to the negative effect of the training practices of the military corps under the colonial period and the Empire”. “The new term suggested that there was no coercion, when in essence it remained the same,” he compares.
There were several exceptions to service, such as the disabled, the chronically ill, university students or graduates, religious belonging to holy orders, the only children of widows, among others.
In practice, however, the legislation didn’t work and hunting continued to be the main method. According to experts, this was because the rich didn’t want to lose their children’s exemption and large rural producers couldn’t afford to lose their employees if they were raffled off.
In republican Brazil, a new law ratified the idea of the lottery in 1908. The current model is the result of legislation adopted in 1940. A new law improved the model in 1964, with regulations published two years later. And compulsory military service for men who turn 18 is provided for in the 1988 Federal Constitution.