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Late last week the State Department posted its latest report on U.S. training of foreign militaries, covering 2006. The Foreign Military Training Report is a very important resource for understanding the current state of the U.S. military relationship with the Western Hemisphere.
It tells us that last year the United States gave 13,426 training courses to 12,833 Latin American military and police personnel (including a handful of civilians with defense responsibilities). As in the past several years, well over half of those courses – 7,729 of them – were taught to Colombians. This is the lowest number of Colombian trainees since 2002.
Here’s a breakdown.
To see all countries, visit our “under construction” military aid database at http://justf.org/all_trainees_country.php. To see who was trained according to funding source, see http://justf.org/all_trainees_program.php.
We’ve added data from this year’s report to our online military-aid database, which represents a top-to-bottom overhaul of the joint “Just the Facts” military-aid monitoring effort, a project of CIP, the Latin America Working Group Education Fund and the Washington Office on Latin America. The “old” Just the Facts site is here; the new site – still an “alpha” version, very much under construction – is here.
To this new site, we have added all training course data from the Foreign Military Training Reports covering 1998, 1999, 2003 and 2006. (More years are coming.) Using the search form on the new site, we find that:
The following Colombian military units received the most training in 2006: Continue reading »
