Why in hell does Bolivia have a 'Naval Attache'?

Jonathan_Chance · February 10, 2003, 2:08pm

I’m going through one of my magazines foreign service lists and there it is…

Commander XXX
Naval Attache, Embassy of Bolivia

Why?

Bolivia is landlocked!

Coldfire · February 10, 2003, 2:15pm

Maybe they misspelled it, and this guy’s in charge of all Bolivian bellybuttons abroad?

Coldfire · February 10, 2003, 2:15pm

Oh, and BTW: Switzerland has a navy. It’s one ship on Lake Geneva, IIRC.

flodnak · February 10, 2003, 2:20pm

Bolivia wasn’t always landlocked. Once they had a coastline, but they lost it in a war with Peru. But they’re going to get it back someday, dammit! And when that day comes, they’re going to have a navy ready!

Yes, I’m serious. Mostly.

JRDelirious · February 10, 2003, 3:36pm

Bolivia has numerous navigable rivers in the lowlands along the Brazilian/Paraguayan borders, and a navigable lake (Titicaca) in the highlands. The organization in charge of patrolling those is the Bolivian Navy, probably because they were the ones doing that at the time of loss-of-seashore. As flodnak mentioned, they don’t consider the issue of the coastal provinces – lost in a war with Chile, on the side of Peru – as completely ‘closed’. I can only imagine that at the time it happened, disbanding the Navy and replacing it with a “River Patrol” was politically out of the question

A somewhat dated report from the Library Of Congress Research Tools page (can’t link to the specific page of the article itself) reads in part:

Bolivia had a small navy, which in 1989 had approximately 3,800 personnel, including 2,000 naval infantry personnel and marines, as well as about 1,800 conscripts. *[I take this to mean there are 1800 conscripts overall, between both marines and sailors]*The navy’s small motor launches operated mainly on Lake Titicaca and the numerous navigable rivers of the sparsely populated northeastern portion of the country[…] riverine patrol duties included dislodging Brazilian and other foreign gold miners and interdicting smugglers of narcotics and contraband. Its areas of operation were divided into five (or possibly six) naval districts–Lake Titicaca, Río Beni, Río Madre de Dios, Río Mamoré, and Río Paraguay–each with one flotilla. […]The “Admiral Grau” Marine Infantry Battalion (Batallón de Infantería de Marina “Almirante Grau”) was based at the Fourth Naval District, Titicaca, in Tiquina.

In the late 1980s, the navy had several dozen boats in service, including about ten river patrol craft. It received its first United States-built, river-patrol launch, the twenty-meter Santa Cruz de la Sierra, in 1985. In 1986 the navy acquired nineteen outboard motors for its five- and six-meter patrol boats, effectively doubling its reconnaissance capability. Bolivia’s only seagoing vessel, the Libertador Bolívar, was normally docked at Rosario on the Río de la Plata (Plate River) in Argentina and was used to and from Bolivian free zones in Argentina and Uruguay. The navy also had two Cessna aircraft

JRDelirious · February 10, 2003, 4:02pm

… a visit to the Bolivian Navy’s webpage ( www.armada.mil.bo ) indicates that indeed they DID sensibly call it a “Fuerza Fluvial Lacustre” – Inland Waters Force – between 1897 and 1966, as a branch of the Army. Then as political evolutions went along, it was spun off as a re-independized “Fuerza Naval” or “Armada”, either which translates as “Navy”.

It also shows that its major units afloat are two Hospital Riverboats.

GingerOfTheNorth · February 10, 2003, 8:55pm

Coldfire almost has it correct. They needed a case to carry their belly buttons.