'I Am Enlisting'—What Is the Civil Militia That Venezuela Is Mobilizing?

By Irene Zugasti – Sep 8, 2025

“I am enlisting”: Images of the enlistment campaign issued from Caracas following the announcement of the deployment of US warships to the Caribbean Sea have been shared worldwide and have attracted the attention of international media. The campaign to join the ranks of the national civil militia (Venezuela’s Bolivarian Militia), which began at the end of August following the first movements of warships off the coast of Venezuela, has become a permanent enlistment system and according to the Venezuelan president’s report last Monday, there are now 8.2 million people in its ranks, including reservists and militia members.

However, behind the photos showing the lines for enlistment in the streets and barracks across the country—from coastal fishermen to the boulevards of the capital—lies an entire doctrine of active defense that is worth understanding beyond the caricature to which many would like to reduce it. The militia, far from being an unstructured or improvised organization, as its detractors portray it, is an institutionalized and consolidated body that responds to an idea, a military and political doctrine regarding how a nation defends itself in times of war and how it prepares for peacetime. All states with an army have military doctrines, and while in the West, these doctrines are often carried out from an apparent technical or strategic logic, under a deceptive neutrality, it would be a fallacy to assume that behind each one there is not a political and ideological vision. In the case of Venezuela, this second idea—the political vision—is clearly expounded, because it underpins the civil militia’s raison d’être.

Its formal existence dates back to 2005, when under President Hugo Chávez, Venezuela created the General Command of the Military Reserve and National Mobilization, providing it the form of an auxiliary body to [Venezuela’s military] the Bolivarian National Armed Force. Underlying its creation was Simón Bolívar’s doctrine of the “people in arms,” born during the wars of independence, a military and political principle holding that the defense of the homeland should not depend solely on a regular army but that all people should participate in it and that the civilian population has a fundamental role in the nation’s liberation. The doctrine constructed by Chávez, based on the idea of the “war of all the people,” sought to prepare the population to resist possible foreign invasions, particularly from the United States, through a decentralized territorial defense, which also drew on the experiences of Cuba, Vietnam, and China.

While the idea of an armed civilian force dates back centuries, to the resistance against Spanish colonialism, its most immediate rationale can be found in the far-right coup d’état of April 2002 against the then-nascent revolutionary Bolivarian government of Venezuela, which was met with broad social support. This episode raised the question of establishing an armed civilian force under a much broader Constitutional principle: that of “co-responsibility” between the people and the state, a central concept of Chávez’s ideology. This idea, lacking in European liberal constitutions—which instead establish rights, duties, forms, and limits of political representation and participation—implies that the management and defense of the country’s interests do not fall solely on the state but are a shared task, both among public institutions and organized citizens, including in the military.

The progressive growth and institutionalization of the militia ultimately led to its incorporation into the Bolivarian National Armed Force in 2020, whose law regulates its functions and the way it is activated and mobilized in times of war, internal crisis, or natural disasters, for example. Throughout the previous decade, this body played a key role during the harshest years of the economic war and the blockade in Venezuela: it was the civil militias who worked, alongside the community and social fabric, in the deployment of the CLAPs, the Local Supply and Production Committees that distribute state-subsidized food.

For someone writing from Europe, this idea of a civilian militia is difficult to conceive of, but any visitor to Venezuela can see them working daily in the streets. They are present in the so-called “missions” or at polling stations during election days; they are responsible for housing or infrastructure rehabilitation work across the country, and they perform civil protection functions.

However, it is not civilian functions that are required of those who volunteer to join the ranks of the militia today, but rather military ones, which, like any other force, require hierarchy, structure, and training. The militia is divided into two strata: the Units, either territorial or sectoral (workers from a given institution who form corps), and the National Reserve, which is made up of all citizens who are not in active military service or who voluntarily join them. The ranks are identical to those of the Army or the National Guard, except for the common soldiers, who have the equivalent in the militia. They receive instruction not only in tactics, weapons, and territorial defense but also in civic principles, community organization, and Bolivarian political doctrine.

The opposition has often described this training as a form of collective indoctrination, but the very doctrine that underpins the militia clearly sets forth its vision, which is not to create soldiers but rather to integrate the military, social, and ideological aspects into a single training process.

Listening closely to President Maduro or his senior officials—something unusual in the media—reveals many clues about this conception of national security, so lacking in Europe today. The most recent reform, following the escalation of accusations of “narcoterrorism” from the US State Department, has been the creation of a Communal Militant Combat Unit in the country’s 5,336 communal circuits. President Maduro announced this reorganization, focused on grassroots and local roots, which will occur in parallel with a massive preparation and training process for the population starting in early September.

The existence of civil militias such as the Bolivarian National Militia opens up a rare perspective in modern history and one that is rarely heard or understood in Europe or North America. For this reason, these militias often tend to be parodied or pointed to as a symptom of ideological repression or authoritarianism. However, it is paradoxical that these criticisms come from a West that is focused on increasing military spending and whose roadmaps—from the US “pivot to Asia” to NATO’s Strategic Doctrine—do not hesitate to point out threats and enemies.

Trump renames the Department of Defense the Department of War; Germany reactivates military service under a rhetoric of lebensraum. In Ukraine, martial law forces men to go to the front under threat of imprisonment—unlike Venezuela’s voluntary Bolivarian Militia—and Romania boasts of building NATO’s largest military base on the continent, while the European Union’s highest-ranking diplomat, Kaja Kallas, doesn’t hesitate to brand China an enemy despite Beijing never having threatened Brussels. It is not even necessary to leave Spain, where the Armed Forces have become symbolically and politically linked to the far right, reflecting a historical legacy marked by Francoism. Is Europe really in a position to point the finger at militarization when it has renounced the culture of peace that it claimed to champion?

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In the West, military knowledge and practice tend to be concentrated in closed academies, professional forces, and hierarchical structures where access is mediated by elites who determine who can and cannot pursue that training. The result is a monopoly on military knowledge—even though strategic decisions that affect our lives depend on it—and a separation of the two spheres, the civilian and the military, which distances and creates divisions. Those who control both enjoy a clear advantage. This is a very old and profound debate that goes far beyond these pages, but an illustrative example serves: the annual National Defense course offered by Spain limits its offering to a very few civilians, always appointed from the highest levels: eight parliamentarians in the Cortes [Spanish parliament], 11 senior officials in the state administration, two academic professionals, three professionals from the Spanish defense industry, and two members of think tanks.

The remaining eight positions are for military officers, who evidently have access to ongoing free training and knowledge in the performance of their duties. The logic of a civil militia suggests the opposite, both in terms of military knowledge and practice, and given the obvious discomfort that militarization provokes as an issue for reflection from much of the Western left, it seems at least interesting—if not advisable—to reread doctrines and strategies carefully and not to relinquish that knowledge to a select circle that does possess the know-how… and the practices. While opinion columns on both sides of the Atlantic are still debating whether or not it is legitimate to attack another state (be it Venezuela, Colombia, or Mexico) in the name of the fight against “terror” or “narcotics,” the Department of War of Trump, Hegseth, and Rubio has already made up its mind.

Irene Zugasti is a journalist and a political scientist from Madrid who studied Political Science and Public Administration at the Complutense University in Madrid and Charles University in Prague. She holds an MA in International Relations and Diplomacy from the Diplomat School of Spain, where she researched on gender and IR studies. She currently works as an anchor for the Diario Red platform in Spain.

(Diario Red)

Translation: Orinoco Tribune

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