Honduran Cobras Don't Want to Bite

The Honduran special forces group Cobras, which is often cited as "US funded forces attacking people" will not in fact attack anyone. They say they are "not machines or robots" and "before police, we are human beings," and they don't want to be part of killing people (or to be killed) for the sake of this election controversy.

They also make clear they are not taking sides. Instead, they just do not want to be part of domestic repression. They call on the police to do the same. Some police had already been on strike because of not getting paid.

This is groundbreaking stuff. My first thought is that they are indeed taking sides because the government is (presumably, since the president is Commander-in-Chief in Honduras) ordering them and they are saying no. On top of that Salvador Nasralla had called on the army to rebel. But at the same time, they are not calling for one or the other candidate to win, or telling Juan Orlando Hernández that they no longer serve him. Update: I hadn't seen the letter itself, which is actually much more directly aimed at the government.

Where does that go? The Venezuelan armed forces became increasingly resentful at being used to repress their own people, which then politicized them. What starts as "we don't repress" can eventually become "we don't support this government because it represses." Yet the contexts are different--JOH had solid approval ratings earlier this year and is not drastically changing economic policy. In short, we should not jump to too many conclusions. For the armed forces as a whole to shift course would be unprecedented.

It is also a reminder that using "US backed" or "US funded" as an automatic indication of brutality is simplistic because it robs groups of their agency. They are not simple puppets with no brains, which is generally the implication. Puppets tend to be puppets until they're not (remember all the analyses when Juan Manuel Santos became president in Colombia) and US funding alone does not tell us enough.