Dismembering the Peace Corps

Lot #11: 1 cork bulletin board, 1 wooden desk with glass top, 1 medium sized wooden bookshelf, 1 chair, 2 Spanish/English dictionaries, three books in English.

Behind a long adobe wall, just outside the small town here of Sacaba, the U.S. Peace Corps' training center has been converted into an auction house. The last material evidence of the Corps' presence in Bolivia is up for bid.

Those looking at Lot #51 can get a former staff refrigerator with a bedspread thrown in. Those interested in Lot #62 can have 7 former Peace Corps rulers, 10 folders, a stack of books that volunteers left behind for their successors, and a map of Bolivia.

In September, against a backdrop of political violence in two of Bolivia's nine departments, the Peace Corps pulled out all 113 of its members, flying them to Lima, Peru. Many people thought, at the time, that it was just the U.S. taking a temporary safety precaution. But as it turns out, the Peace Corps evacuation from Bolivia is not a temporary one.

The Bush administration, in addition to bringing a premature halt to this year's class of Corps volunteers, has also cancelled plans for any new class as well. The Peace Corps – a rare positive U.S. symbol in a country deeply skeptical of the U.S. – is gone and it isn't coming back. Its vehicles, computers, stoves, lamps, computers and other accessories will be sold Friday to the highest bidder – souvenirs of a valuable program being dismembered.

Using the Peace Corps as a Political Tool

There is really little question about the motive for the Bush administration's withdrawal of the Corps. It isn't safety, it's politics. Shortsighted politics.

Bolivia is a big country of more than 2 million square miles. The September violence, as frightening as it was, was limited to a very small portion of the country. The worst of it, in Pando, took place in a part of Bolivia so remote that one would truly need to go to great lengths looking for trouble in order to find it. The vast majority of the volunteers were nowhere near the violence, nor threatened by it. Those that might have been nearby could easily have been moved to Cochabamba or another region at peace.

The Vermont-based School for International Training's (S.I.T.) semester abroad program for U.S. undergraduates is notoriously more cautious about safety concerns than the Peace Corps. In October 2003, during the political conflicts that led to the ouster of President Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada, the S.I.T. students were whisked off to Buenos Aires while the Peace Corps remained. This time around the S.I.T. students stayed safely put in Cochabamba, and remain here, while the Peace Corps volunteers were ordered, most against their wishes, on a plane to Lima.

And if there was any question remaining about whether safety or politics was behind the U.S. move, the answer to the question became clear when the Bush administration announced that the Corps was not coming back at all.

The administration's withdrawal of the Peace Corps from Bolivia was part of a package of hastily imposed policies aimed at punishing President Morales for declaring the U.S. Ambassador here, Phillip Goldberg, 'persona non grata' and sending him home. It was as if administration officials reached into a drawer and pulled out a list titled, "What We Do if Evo Crosses A Line." It included:

· Kick out Bolivia's Ambassador to the U.S., Gustavo Guzman
· Decertify Bolivia's anti-coca efforts
· Eliminate Bolivia's participation in the ATPDEA trade program

And pull out the Peace Corps, for a long time if not permanently.

Sadly, this was not the first episode of the Bush administration pulling the Peace Corps into U.S./Bolivia diplomatic battles. A year ago a U.S. Embassy security official in La Paz illegally asked a Fulbright scholar and Peace Corps volunteers to pass along any information they came across about Cubans and Venezuelans in the country. Whether those were the rogue actions of one stupid security official or something more conspiratorial can be debated. But it left a shadow of U.S. politics over the Corps that its withdrawal now only reinforces.

The Washington Post's new correspondent for the region, Joshua Partlow, authored a front-page article two weeks ago about the dissatisfaction among Corps volunteers at being used as political pawns, and how some of them have returned back to Bolivia on their own to continue their work here. He quoted a volunteer from Maryland, whose letter to friends and family circulated widely at the time. "The Peace Corps, unfortunately, has become another weapon in the US diplomatic arsenal," wrote volunteer Sarah Nourse. She called the Bush administration's move, "one more chance for the US to maintain its tough image and hit back, harder."

Advice to President-Elect Obama, Send them Back

Here at the Democracy Center we didn't have to look too far to find what the Peace Corps means to those who participate in it, and to those whose lives they touch. Yi-Ching Hwang, a member of our staff, served a two-year stint in the Corps, working in the highland community of Quewiñapampa.

"Living in that community for two years has transformed my way of looking at and interacting with the world. It is a time I will never forget. More than two years after my service, when I returned to visit, surprisingly, from the littlest of kids to aging grandmas, they still remembered my name and warmly greeted me. It is as if I’ve never left."

Just weeks after taking office in 1961, President John F. Kennedy established the U.S. Peace Corps by executive order, with a modest start of trying to put 500 volunteers in the field by the end of the year. He declared at the time:

"Our Peace Corps is not designed as an instrument of diplomacy or propaganda or ideological conflict. It is designed to permit our people to exercise more fully their responsibilities in the great common cause of world development."

The final days of the Clinton administration eight years ago are remembered most for a flurry of last minute executive pardons, some of them highly questionable. The final days of the Bush administration seem likely to be marked by a full scale effort to lock his successor into a set of policies that will be difficult to reverse, from weakening environmental protections to locking in a hard line against governments not to Mr. Bush's liking.

Over the next few months we will be putting forward a set of proposals aimed at rebuilding the torn relationship between the U.S. and Bolivia, including steps that both governments, of Presidents Obama and Morales, will need to take.

Here's the first of those suggestions – President Obama should reverse the Bush administration's error and send the Peace Corps back into Bolivia in full force. And President Morales should make clear that the Corps is warmly welcomed and that its security and that welcome will always be protected and honored.

Young people like Yi-Ching are an asset in Bolivia, both for the work they do and the relationships they build, not government-to-government but people-to-people. The President-elect has already signaled his desire to rebuild the U.S. tarnished image and place in the global fabric. Sending the Yi-Chings of our country back into Bolivia is a very good place to begin.