New data on the U.S. presence in Colombia
Since the U.S. Congress first passed the “Plan Colombia” aid package in Colombia, it has required limits on the number of U.S. personnel who could be in Colombia at any given time. The resulting “troop cap” in U.S. law was seen as a safeguard or “tripwire” to prevent an unnoticed escalation in U.S. military involvement in one of the world’s longest-running internal conflicts.
The size of the “cap” has changed over the years. The original July 2000 “Plan Colombia” appropriation stated that a maximum of 500 U.S. military and 300 U.S. citizen contractor personnel could be in Colombia at any given time. This was changed in January 2002 to 400 military and 400 contractors, and increased again in October 2004 to 800 military personnel and 600 contractors. That is where the cap has since stayed.
The law also required the White House and State Department to notify Congress on a quarterly basis about the troop and contractor presence. Cover letters for these submissions appeared in the Federal Register between early 2002 and mid-2003, when regulations changed and responsibility devolved from the White House to the State Department. Since then, estimates of U.S. personnel have been difficult to obtain.
Last week, though, the State Department responded usefully to an information request from the Just the Facts project. In lieu of the mostly classified quarterly reports, State provided us with a brief document reporting the highest and lowest numbers of troops and contractors present in Colombia each year, from 2002 to the present. This document is available here as a PDF file.
According to this document:
- Between 2002 and 2009, the numbers on any one day have varied from 91 to 563(military) and 114 to 454 (civilian).
- During the three-month period January 1 to March 31, 2010, the numbers were 137 to 227 (military) and 104 to 257 (civilian).
- There has been an appreciable downward trend in both military and civilian presence since the high points of 2005-2007.
The following charts, taken from the State Department’s document, depict the high and low troop and contractor presence numbers in Colombia.
Keep in mind that they do not include military personnel deployed to Colombia for search and rescue missions (as was the case with operations to locate three U.S. citizen contractors held hostage by the FARC guerrillas until July 2008). Nor do these numbers include U.S. contractors who are not U.S. citizens.
