Peace Corps volunteers forced to go it alone in Bolivia

“I have lots of ambitious goals,” Swanson said.

The Peace Corps’ evacuation of all its volunteers in Bolivia last month forced Swanson, 24, to consider these goals and make a choice: stay with the Peace Corps and finish his term in another country, or leave the organization and return to Mizque. He would not have the salary, health insurance, support network or protection that come with the Peace Corps, at a time of sporadic political violence in Bolivia and just after the government had thrown out the U.S. ambassador.

“It wasn’t even really much of a decision,” he said. In an e-mail to friends and family, he wrote soon after the evacuation: “I am no longer a Peace Corps volunteer.”

The Peace Corps flew all 113 of its volunteers out of Bolivia on cargo planes, and 78 of them later decided to leave the organization. But several of those — more than 15, by some of their estimates — have since returned to the cities and villages of Bolivia to keep working on their own. In the aftermath of the evacuation, a sense of distaste lingers for some. Why, when so many of them felt so safe, were they forced to leave?

“Peace Corps, unfortunately, has become another weapon in the U.S. diplomatic arsenal,” volunteer Sarah Nourse, of Mechanicsville, Md., wrote in a widely circulated e-mail. The Peace Corps withdrawal “is one more chance for the U.S. to maintain its tough image and hit back, harder.

Swanson, the son of musicians from Raleigh, N.C., and a graduate of North Carolina State University, had been in Bolivia since August 2006. About 8 p.m. Thursday, Sept. 11, he received a text message on his cellphone. It was the Emergency Action Plan, again. Usually, it involved staying put and calling in to headquarters regularly. But twice, Swanson had been “consolidated” with other volunteers in another city to wait out an intense period. And this week had been particularly intense.

That Tuesday, in the lowland region of Santa Cruz, the heart of the fierce opposition to President Evo Morales, protesters had clashed with police and sacked government offices, including the national telephone company, Entel. The next day, Morales declared U.S. Ambassador Philip Goldberg a persona non grata, only the sixth such declaration in U.S. diplomatic history, and accused him of conspiring with the opposition, a charge Goldberg and the U.S. government denied. On Thursday, two days later, supporters of Morales marching in the far northern region of Pando came under attack, and as many as 18 of them were killed, according to the Bolivian government.

Still, Swanson did not want to leave. His small town, in a central mountain valley, was quiet, as always. He had work to do, and the best weekend of the year lay ahead: the town’s biggest festival, with bullfights and parades around the tree-shaded central plaza. “I obviously had no plans of going anywhere,” he said.

But the Peace Corps instructed him to leave as soon as possible for Cochabamba, the regional capital and home of Bolivia’s Peace Corps headquarters.

When the Peace Corps’ Bolivia director, Kathleen Sifer, spoke to the worried group Sunday morning at a hotel, she was already speaking in the past tense, Swanson said: “You were all great volunteers.” They would be leaving for Lima, Peru, she said. In an hour. Some volunteers, Nourse recalled, “just started bawling.”

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