{"id":9967,"date":"2017-01-06T13:10:42","date_gmt":"2017-01-06T18:10:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/?p=9967"},"modified":"2017-01-06T19:59:13","modified_gmt":"2017-01-07T00:59:13","slug":"peace-corps-vets-riled-at-my-expose","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/2017\/01\/06\/peace-corps-vets-riled-at-my-expose\/","title":{"rendered":"Peace Corps Vets Riled at My Expose"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/a>PeaceCorpsWorldWide\u00a0 <\/a>reposted a 2011 Future of Freedom Foundation<\/a> article I wrote,\u00a0\u00a0“The Forgotten Failures of the Peace Corps.”\u00a0 Several former Peace Corps recruits denounced the piece:<\/p>\n

Andy Martin<\/strong> characterized the piece as “a one-sided hatchet job.”<\/p>\n

Leo Cecchini<\/strong> complained that my article was “a totally fatuous report devoid of any import. And this guy is a successful writer?”<\/p>\n

Edward Mycue<\/strong> harrumphed: “Speculations proffered like onions and stinky armpits, belittling good intentions, blown into the wind, are petty.”<\/p>\n

Most painful of all, I find myself accused of being an undercover agent for the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID).\u00a0 These folks are apparently not aware that AID despises my work almost as much as TSA does.<\/p>\n

Bob Arias<\/strong> groused: “John, who in the world is James Bovard, he is either someone that was deselected in Training, or a USAID plant. He is way off base\u2026needs to do his homework, and he writes for a living? I was told by Daniel Ortega the Marxist President of Nicaragua that the Peace Corps is the best of the US, he is a strong believer in the Volunteers. He even argued with Fidel about Peace Corps Volunteers, Fidel said they were all CIA agents. Ortega was joined by Venezuela President Chavez, who told Fidel that Peace Corps was very important during his youth. Chavez even invited Crisis Corps to help in a disaster relief project in Venezuela. And former Presiden of Peru, Alejandro Toledo credits Peace Corps Volunteers for his achievements. Bovard will more than likely be ready to help USAID take over.”<\/p>\n

If I was trying to vindicate the Peace Corps, I’m not sure I would be whooping up quotes from Hugo Chavez<\/strong> (who destroyed Venezuela) and Daniel Ortega<\/strong> (who is destroying Nicaragua).<\/p>\n

Another commenter, John Turnbull<\/strong>, defended\u00a0the agency:\u00a0“I\u2019m always proud to read statements by African leaders today, who affectionately remember their Peace Corps\u00a0teachers from school days.”<\/p>\n

Most of the current crop of African dictators deserve to be overthrown, and many of them should be indicted from crimes against humanity.\u00a0 Very few African leaders have been selected in bona fide elections.\u00a0 It would be unfair to blame the Peace Corps for the failure of democratization in Africa. But I would be\u00a0leery of relying on tyrants to burnish my reputation.<\/p>\n

I wrote this article before the Peace Corps rape coverup scandal<\/a> erupted.\u00a0\u00a0 Gushing over the Peace Corps’ record ignores its betrayal of many Peace Corps volunteers who were brutally raped — in some cases, because the Peace Corps had utterly failed to take prudent precautions to avoid sending them in harm’s way.\u00a0 The agency’s mistreatment of its victims is a blotch <\/a>on its permanent record.<\/p>\n

As I mentioned in my article, I have met some former Peace Corps volunteers who seemed very sharp and competent and who actually helped the residents in the nations where they were sent.\u00a0 But I have met plenty of others who made me shake my head ruefully.\u00a0 And the audit reports stretching back decades expose many pratfalls by the agency.<\/p>\n

Here’s the article that riled up folks:<\/p>\n

THE FORGOTTEN FAILURES OF THE PEACE CORPS<\/strong><\/a>
\nby James Bovard
\nApril 1, 2011<\/p>\n

This article originally appeared in the April 2011 edition of\u00a0Freedom Daily<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

This is the fiftieth anniversary year for the Peace Corps. Prior to the creation of AmeriCorps, the Peace Corps took the cake as the most arrogant and overrated government program in Washington. At a time when the agency is being hailed for idealism and almost saving the world, it is worthwhile to consider its early record of debacles and defaults.<\/p>\n

A 1980s Peace Corps recruiting brochure proclaimed, \u201cMost people talk about world problems. The Peace Corps solves them.\u201d The Peace Corps\u2019s world-saving pretensions were a joke on American taxpayers and Third World folks who expected real help.<\/p>\n

From its inception, the Peace Corps represented the epitome of emotionalism in American politics. Sargent Shriver, the Corps\u2019s first director, claimed it would \u201cpermit America to participate, personally and effectively, in this struggle for human dignity.\u201d Jack Vaughn, Shriver\u2019s successor, declared, \u201cLove \u2014 that\u2019s what the Peace Corps is all about.\u201d But the Peace Corps has rarely gotten beyond its loudly trumpeted good intentions.<\/p>\n

The Peace Corps\u2019s founders deliberately emphasized amateurism in volunteers as a virtue, which turned out to be a prescription for disasters. Frustrated by the widely perceived ineffectiveness of U.S. foreign aid to developing countries, they thought that personalizing the aid would somehow make it effective.<\/p>\n

Robert E. White, Peace Corps regional director for Latin America, told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 1970, \u201cIn the early days \u2026 it was like a parachute drop. A Volunteer would be told, \u2018Here\u2019s the bus that you take. Go and look around and get off where you think you can do some good.\u2019\u201d An official report by the government of Honduras concluded in 1968, \u201cThe Volunteer appears to be someone with nothing to do; his skills are not utilized and the community doesn\u2019t know what he has to offer in the way of help.\u201d<\/p>\n

Indeed, throughout Latin America, volunteers were sometimes referred to as \u201cvagos\u201d \u2014 Spanish for \u201cvagabonds.\u201d A Brazilian development expert concluded in a Peace Corps-commissioned study in 1968, \u201cAs economic developers, Volunteers have not had any lasting impact on any community. They are more efficient spokesmen for their interests than \u2026 for the poor.\u201d One Latin American government official complained to a Peace Corps auditor in 1968, \u201cThe Volunteers I have known recently \u2014 with one exception \u2014 are not helping us at all. They created problems for us.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Peace Corps sought to uplift foreign countries with \u201ccommunity-development programs.\u201d \u201cThe political and social development of the country can only come through the infusion of a kind of revolutionary spirit such as the Peace Corps represents,\u201d declared Frank Mankiewicz, Peace Corps Latin American regional director during the 1960s. But again, reality did not coincide with the flowery rhetoric. For example, a 1965 Corps report focusing on community-development programs concluded of the experience in Togo, \u201cAfter four years, the Peace Corps record in Togo is one of waste, illusion, and irrelevance that far outweighs what little good may have been done.\u201d<\/p>\n

Competence has often been a Peace Corps stumbling block. In the Peace Corps\u2019s first quarter-century, 21 governments kicked it out of their countries, often because volunteers had little or nothing to offer. The inability of the volunteers to speak the local language has been a perennial problem. Bonehead planning sometimes worsened the situation: in the early 1960s, up to a third of all volunteers for Ethiopia were taught the wrong local language.<\/p>\n

Many volunteers have worked as teachers abroad, but often with little success. Two studies of volunteers\u2019 effectiveness in Korea found that they did little or no good for their students. The Cameroon Foreign Ministry once complained that volunteers\u2019 \u201cwork showed a complete lack of worthwhile teaching method\u201d and suggested that they confine their efforts to physical education and sports. A young Ceylonese observed, \u201cIt was because of their complete unsuitability as teachers that these Volunteers became the laughingstock among our teachers and students.\u201d<\/p>\n

Working with \u201csnake oil salesmen\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

After teaching, agriculture was the Peace Corps\u2019s most frequent focus. However, as with teaching, incompetence inhibited Peace Corps benevolence. As one Chilean agronomist complained to an evaluator in 1968, \u201cThe trouble with most of the Volunteers is that they can\u2019t do the job. Most of them are good people, filled with good faith, and they like to live and get their hands dirty with the peasants. But they know nothing about agriculture.\u201d<\/p>\n

Some Peace Corps agricultural efforts directly hurt Third World poor. An internal evaluation of the program in Togo, for instance, concluded,<\/p>\n

In some cases the Peace Corps Volunteers may actually have harmed the cause of development and taxed the patience and good will of the Togolese villagers by the lack of realism in their approach\u2026. Most of the chicken and rabbit projects (which were built primarily because lumber and wire were available) proved disasters.<\/p>\n

Volunteers encouraged Togolese to raise rabbits \u2014 even though eating rabbits is taboo among many Togo tribes. Similar rabbit results occurred in Guatemala. Volunteers got grants from the Agency for International Development (AID) to set up their own rabbit-raising businesses and then encouraged local villagers to borrow money to do the same. But while the volunteers\u2019 heavy subsidies produced the appearance of success, a Peace Corps evaluation of the project revealed that peasants who \u201cindebted themselves for breeding stock, cages, and feed found themselves saddled with debt when the projects failed.\u201d<\/p>\n

Other Peace Corps evaluations tell stories of volunteers who urged farmers to use fertilizer that cost the farmers more than the value of the increased crop output. Indeed, volunteers\u2019 lack of economic realism often bushwhacked the recipients of their benevolence. In Niger, for example, volunteers worked as extension agents for the government\u2019s Union Nigerien de Credit et Cooperation. But as a Peace Corps audit concluded, \u201cIn its agricultural operations, UNCC looks like a bunch of snake oil salesmen\u2026. The sad truth is that, in all likelihood, more farmers have lost than gained by buying from UNCC.\u201d<\/p>\n

The agricultural program in Nigeria \u2014 one of the Peace Corps\u2019s stars \u2014 was racked with problems in the 1960s. A General Accounting Office (GAO) examination concluded that \u201conly a limited number of these volunteers possessed the background, either by virtue of education or experience, required for the jobs to which they have been assigned; and that the technical training provided these volunteers by the Peace Corps was not adequate or appropriate for the jobs they were requested to perform.\u201d The Peace Corps bureaucracy<\/p>\n

The Peace Corps had become far more bureaucratic by the 1980s. In the beginning, it portrayed itself as a grass-roots organization working person-to-person with the foreign poor. During the Reagan era, the great majority of volunteers worked either for host-government bureaucracies or with AID projects. In Malawi, volunteers are used as \u201cslot-fillers\u201d in government bureaus. Volunteers often busy themselves trying to get government grants for local organizations. A mid-1980s Peace Corps Briefing Book for Africa bragged, \u201cVolunteers figure predominantly in Bot swana\u2019s civil service.\u201d The same briefing book declared, \u201cSince its beginning, Peace Corps\/Burundi has worked closely with the Government of Burundi to establish programs responsive to the needs and priorities of the government.\u201d In Mali and Togo, the Peace Corps worked closely with the governments to help carry out their \u201cfive-year plans.\u201d<\/p>\n

Moreover, throughout Africa in the 1980s, governments butchered their people, scuttled their economies, and devastated living standards. Bad government policies starved far more Africans than did bad weather.<\/p>\n

Throughout much of Africa, governments monopolized the buying and selling of crops, and to boost revenue, most governments paid farmers far less than the market value of their harvests. As a consequence, per-capita food production fell 20 percent in Africa between 1960 and 1982.<\/p>\n

Far from protesting those destructive policies, the Peace Corps enthusiastically poured in more volunteers to staff government agricultural bureaucracies. In some countries, Peace Corps volunteers toiled on state farms and cooperatives that have been unmitigated disasters across the continent, with production falling by 30, 40, 50 percent, or more over previous levels.<\/p>\n

The Peace Corps often relied on a \u201cbody count\u201d approach to prove its benevolence. From the beginning, Congress, auditors, and critics questioned the Corps\u2019s excessive reliance on numbers as the ultimate measure of success. A 1966 evaluation of the Cameroon program, for exam ple, concluded, \u201cThe Peace Corps is hurt by its mammoth presence.\u201d Flooding a country with volunteers discouraged the achievement of self-reliance \u2014 supposedly the Corps\u2019s ultimate objective. \u201cBy taking over the town in force,\u201d a report on Togo noted, \u201cwe weaken the Togolese sense of responsibility \u2014 lack of which is the chief complaint we then make against the Togolese.\u201d<\/p>\n

Loret Ruppe, Reagan\u2019s Peace Corps director, declared, \u201cThe number of people whose lives have been touched by the Peace Corps was estimated at one million every month.\u201d This is one more reflection of the \u201cPope\u2019s robe\u201d mentality \u2014 the idea that foreigners are benefited simply by seeing idealistic young Americans. The Corps\u2019s obsession with measuring its success not by what is achieved but by what can most easily be counted often ventures into the absurd.<\/p>\n

Faced with 20 years of such grim evaluations, the Reagan administration got rid of the Inspector General. Instead of an IG that evaluated what volunteers did abroad, the Peace Corps got a new \u201cOffice of Compliance,\u201d which mainly worried about whether the country\u2019s programs were following regulations. Charles Peters, chief of Peace Corps evaluation in the 1960s and now editor of\u00a0The Washington Monthly,<\/em>\u00a0observes, \u201cThat means the guy in charge doesn\u2019t want to find out what\u2019s wrong.\u201d A former top Peace Corps official under Reagan confirms this charge: \u201cYou\u2019re talking about Alice in Wonderland management. It\u2019s not important what\u2019s happening \u2014 it\u2019s only important what people think is happening.\u201d The Peace Corps under Reagan even stopped taking annual surveys of volunteers\u2019 assessment of the Corps\u2019s strengths and weaknesses.<\/p>\n

As early as 1969, a Peace Corps official complained that the Peace Corps had become an organization \u201cof the volunteers, by the volunteers, and for the volunteers.\u201d Chilean sociologist Ricardo Zuniga, in his Harvard doctoral dissertation on the Peace Corps, observed, \u201cThere is a pervasive focusing on the giver rather than the host.\u201d After surveying thousands of pages of Peace Corps literature, Zuniga concluded that it gives \u201calmost no attention to \u2018goal attainment\u2019 (effectiveness).\u201d<\/p>\n

Most of the former Peace Corps volunteers I have met conceded that their time abroad did little good for the foreigners but was a wonderful growing experience for them personally. It\u2019s nice to have growing experiences \u2014 but we don\u2019t morally canonize people for going to graduate school, and we shouldn\u2019t do it for those who join the Peace Corps.<\/p>\n

Some Peace Corps volunteers, like some Americans who volunteer for religion missions abroad, have truly helped foreigners. But that cannot redeem either the Peace Corps or U.S. foreign policy. Insofar as the Peace Corps makes Americans believe that the U.S. government\u2019s actions abroad are a fount of benevolence, they prevent citizens from recognizing the harm inflicted on many nations in their name.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

PeaceCorpsWorldWide\u00a0 reposted a 2011 Future of Freedom Foundation article I wrote,\u00a0\u00a0“The Forgotten Failures of the Peace Corps.”\u00a0 Several former Peace Corps recruits denounced the piece: Andy Martin characterized the piece as “a one-sided hatchet job.” Leo Cecchini complained that my article was “a totally fatuous report devoid of any import. And this guy is a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":9971,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[966,82,64,92,513,967],"class_list":["post-9967","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-agency-for-international-development","tag-foreign-aid","tag-informant","tag-peace-corps","tag-rape","tag-tyrants"],"yoast_head":"\nPeace Corps Vets Riled at My Expose - James Bovard<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Peace Corps vets denounce an article I wrote on their agency while invoking Hugo Chavez & Daniel Ortega to vindicate their agency's record\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/2017\/01\/06\/peace-corps-vets-riled-at-my-expose\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Peace Corps Vets Riled at My Expose - 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The Wall Street Journal called Bovard \\\"the roving inspector general of the modern state\\\" and Washington Post columnist George Will called him a \\\"one-man truth squad.\\\" His 1994 book, Lost Rights: The Destruction of American Liberty, received the Free Press Association\u2019s Mencken Award as Book of the Year. His Terrorism & Tyranny won the Lysander Spooner \\\"Best Book on Liberty in 2003\\\" award. He received the Thomas Szasz Award for Civil Liberties work, awarded by the Center for Independent Thought and the Freedom Fund Award from the Firearms Civil Rights Defense Fund of the National Rifle Association. 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The Wall Street Journal called Bovard \"the roving inspector general of the modern state\" and Washington Post columnist George Will called him a \"one-man truth squad.\" His 1994 book, Lost Rights: The Destruction of American Liberty, received the Free Press Association\u2019s Mencken Award as Book of the Year. His Terrorism & Tyranny won the Lysander Spooner \"Best Book on Liberty in 2003\" award. He received the Thomas Szasz Award for Civil Liberties work, awarded by the Center for Independent Thought and the Freedom Fund Award from the Firearms Civil Rights Defense Fund of the National Rifle Association. 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