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This blog was written by Joy Olson, the Executive Director of the Washington Office on Latin America, who founded Just the Facts with WOLA's Adam Isacson.

Please note that this is the last day we will be updating Justf.org! We are excited to announce that starting tomorrow, Just the Facts will become the Latin America section of Security Assistance Monitor, a website that expands the scope of the project to include data on U.S. military and police aid worldwide. See here for more information.

As the Just the Facts project goes global in the form of the Security Assistance Monitor, it seems like a good time to reflect on how this all started and what we have achieved.

We started this project in 1997 because we wanted the Latin America Working Group (LAWG) coalition to have informed opinions about U.S. security policy and programs in Latin America.

To build this picture, we gathered all of the publicly available information we could find on US military programs with the region. As we researched, it became clear that security programs were funded out of many different parts of the budget. For political reasons, State Department-funded programs had to justify their existence to Congress and had congressionally-mandated reporting requirements, so there was information with which we could work. Defense Department-funded programs had no such reporting requirements. We held numerous interviews with military officials, congressional staffers, and Defense and State officials.

While this was all public information, some of it was incredibly hard to find, and even harder to put together to create a full picture. We did not submit Freedom of Information Act requests, but asked congressional offices to submit requests for information. In the early years, this was a remarkably effective technique for acquiring information.

When our first book, Just the Facts: A civilian’s guide to US defense and security assistance to Latin America and the Caribbean, was published in 1998, we knew that we had made something useful. It was being used, not just by our target audience – the NGO sector – but by academics, journalists, congressional staffers, and even the Defense Department. The day the book was released, we got an order for 40 copies from the Office of the Secretary of Defense. They told me that they didn’t have this information compiled in one place.

After a couple of years, the annual Just the Facts books were curtailed and replaced by an online tool. Back then, that was a cutting edge move. The government didn’t have any of its congressional presentation documents or other mandated reports accessible online. To get the government’s information, you had to go to www.justf.org. Today, there are about 9,000 visitors a month to this site.

In the policy advocacy realm, there are few times when you can draw a direct line between your work and concrete change. However, I am confident that there are both direct and indirect ways in which Just the Facts has made a difference. Our grousing to congressional staffers about how there wasn’t any information about Defense Department-funded training coincided with House appropriators learning that foreign military training that they had prohibited through State’s budget was being funded through Defense. Out of that intersection, what is now the annual Foreign Military Training Report (FMTR) was born. That report puts together all forms of military training funded through State and Defense. The FTMR is now available online, and it is not just for Latin America--it covers the world.

Just the Facts helped congressional oversight committees do their jobs. These important committees are understaffed, and we shared our research with them and let them know where information was missing and where their attention might be needed.

As new Defense Department counter-drug or counter-terror legal authorities arose, Congress increasingly made sure to include reporting requirements so that at least some information was available to the public. This is in part because we followed these laws closely and advocated for transparency.

Transparency over military training and aid programs is also essential if there are to be any human rights conditions or requirements related to aid. You can’t implement human rights conditions like the Leahy Law if you don’t know who is being trained with U.S. tax dollars.

Prior to Just the Facts, few people outside of the Pentagon understood the extent of the Defense Department’s involvement in counter-drug aid to other countries. For example, we learned that DOD had provided large-scale counter-drug training to the Colombian military prior to the Clinton administration’s request to Congress for hundreds of millions of dollars in helicopters and other “Plan Colombia” aid. The U.S. military trained the Colombians on the quiet and then, when they needed to equip them, went to Congress for approval.

After a few years of research, we realized that we had become experts on what the U.S. military had already done, because data was produced after implementation. But we wanted to have input on current programs and future plans. That required talking with the Southern Command (Southcom).

The first times we requested meetings with Southcom and the Joint Inter-Agency Task Force South, there was skepticism on both sides. Dialogue between our sectors was not at all common. I would say that mutual respect grew over time. We knew how to speak defense language, and could ask informed questions. Over time they began asking us questions as well.

While I have critiqued many a US military program in Latin America, I must say that there has been continual useful dialogue between the Just the Facts project and Southcom. We meet with the Commander at least once a year. I think that this has been a constructive dynamic, especially about the importance of human rights to successful military engagement.

My biggest concern has always been about what I don’t know. This project is about transparency. When we began, less information was restricted, but it was very hard to access. Now, the government puts more information online, but it is harder to get access to new information. More things are classified as “for official use only,” meaning they are not really classified, but congressional staff can’t share them with us. We know from past experience that information from the Special Operations Command is hard to come by. As this Command becomes more active in Latin America, we are likely to know less about what has been done in the region, and the direction that work is headed. That is, unless Congress pushes for more public reporting on Special Operations.

Finally, this is a good moment to say thank you. Adam Isacson and I started this project when he was at the Center for International Policy and I was at the Latin America Working Group. It was my idea, but his capacity and imagination made it happen and sustained it for years. When I came to WOLA, Lisa Haugaard took over this work for the LAWG. George Withers, who brought unprecedented experience and expertise to the project, has been a vital collaborator for almost ten years. Abigail Poe, who was trained by Adam at CIP, has now become the driving force behind the Security Assistance Monitor. This has truly been a group effort.

None of this would have been possible without foundation support. I want to thank Cristina Eguizábal, the Program Officer at the Ford Foundation who first supported Just the Facts, when it was only an idea. Over the years this work has been supported by the Ford and MacArthur Foundations, and by the Open Society Foundation. Open Society, which is dedicated to transparency and accountability in government, is taking this project global. That is a very important and timely choice. Thank you.