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FEATURE : Volunteers for the Peace Corps quit to remain in Bolivia

It took Ellen Arnstein the better part of two years to win the trust of the people of Camargo, a farming town of 5,000 in southeastern Bolivia.

The mayor agreed to partially fund the Peace Corps volunteer’s proposal to have children plant fruit trees on main avenues.

Arnstein, 27, was about to be interviewed by a local TV crew when she got the call: The Peace Corps was pulling all 113 of its volunteers out of Bolivia.

“I just started crying. I was like, I don’t want to go!” recalled Arnstein, a native of Monroe, New York, as she sat in a cafe in Lima, Peru.

She is among more than 70 volunteers who quit the Corps rather than start over in a different country.

The hasty pullout came directly on the heels of Bolivian President Evo Morales’ Sept. 10 expulsion of the US ambassador for allegedly inciting opposition protests. Arnstein was among disappointed volunteers who believe their government overreacted, hurting US interests with the blanket withdrawal. True, some parts of Bolivia were dangerously unstable, but most volunteers felt no security threat, several told reporters.

“Peace Corps, unfortunately, has become another weapon in the US diplomatic arsenal,” said Sarah Nourse, 27, of Mechanicsville, Maryland, another volunteer who opted out.

Nourse had been developing trash management projects in a small town in the eastern state of Santa Cruz, the center of opposition to the leftist Morales. She questioned the wisdom of depriving Bolivians of a rare firsthand opportunity to weigh Morales’ anti-US rhetoric against real US citizens.

The top US diplomat for Latin America, Thomas Shannon, said that security was the only reason behind the “saddening” pullout.

“We don’t politicize the Peace Corps,” he said.

“Remember, the Bolivians on at least two occasions that I’m aware of said that they thought the Peace Corps was part of a larger intelligence network that they thought we had constructed in Bolivia. Those kind of statements we find very worrisome,” Shannon said.

In fact, a US embassy security officer suggested to a group of Peace Corps volunteers during a briefing last year that they report any sightings of Venezuelan or Cuban activists. After the incident was publicized, the embassy said the officer had not been authorized to make such a request and he left the country.

Currently, 2,174 of the Peace Corps’ 8,079 worldwide volunteers work in Latin America and the Caribbean. They are based in 21 countries in the region.

Honduras and Nicaragua have the largest presence with 194 volunteers each. They are followed by: The Dominican Republic with 193; Paraguay with 187; Guatemala with 184: El Salvador with 175; Panama with 174; Peru with 168 and Ecuador with 155.
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