President Nayib Bukele released a video on Thursday showing Salvadoran soldiers in full kit marching across a tarmac toward a military transport plane, helicopters and an armoured vehicle being loaded for the flight — and with it a message written in Haitian Creole, addressed not to any government but to the Haitian people themselves. El Salvador, he told them, has almost finished deploying its soldiers and equipment on Haitian soil, and it has not come to take anything. “This is not an operation against the Haitian people, nor an invasion of Haiti. We are not a great power. We have no interest in dominating the Haitian people, nor in laying a hand on Haiti’s wealth,” Bukele wrote.
The soldiers are flying in to find four of their own. The mission, El Salvador’s Foreign Ministry said on Wednesday, is to rescue four Salvadoran aviation technicians who went missing after a gang ambush on October 18, and to support operations against the gangs — and it is a big one. The ministry said more than 2,000 troops are being deployed after Bukele spoke by phone with Haitian Prime Minister Alix Didier Fils-Aimé, whose office said the two leaders reaffirmed their cooperation within the framework of the UN-backed Gang Suppression Force, “notably to support rescue operations.” A security official said around 2,000 Salvadoran soldiers were already in Haiti by Wednesday night, and two sources with knowledge of the deployment said the number would for now be capped at 2,500. In his video message, Bukele said El Salvador is covering 90 percent of the cost of the operation itself, even with logistical help from other countries, and that his soldiers will come home when the mission ends: “We did not come to Haiti to make money, because nobody is paying us to do it. We came to Haiti to fight the evil ones.”
The four missing men are not combat troops. They are aviation technicians with the Salvadoran contingent that serves in the international force in Haiti, flying medical evacuations and air support — one of at least 124 Salvadoran pilots and technicians already in the country before the ambush, men Bukele himself has described as sent to evacuate the injured, not to fight. On October 18 they were returning to camp from buying food in Santo, in the Croix-des-Bouquets area east of Port-au-Prince, when gunmen opened fire on their armoured vehicle and an explosive set it ablaze. The four escaped the burning vehicle and disappeared in territory controlled by the Chen Mechan gang. No group has claimed the attack. Days later, human remains were handed to the force by a non-governmental organisation, but Bukele said they are not his men — one body was a child, he said, another a far taller man, and a third wore the uniform of a different country. A leader of the 400 Mawozo gang has claimed in a video that the four were killed in the ambush; neither El Salvador nor the force has confirmed that, and both still treat the technicians as missing.
They are entering the hardest fight in the hemisphere. The Gang Suppression Force is the UN Security Council-authorized mission that this year replaced the Kenyan-led Multinational Security Support mission, with authority for 5,550 personnel to carry out anti-gang operations alongside the Haitian National Police — yet before the Salvadorans began arriving, it had only about 2,000 members from six countries on the ground. Gangs grouped in the Viv Ansanm coalition, which the United States has designated a foreign terrorist organization, control roughly 90 percent of Port-au-Prince, and some 1.4 million Haitians have been driven from their homes. Haiti has not voted since 2016, and on Wednesday its electoral council pushed the planned December election back again, setting a first round for July 18, 2027. El Salvador put more men into Haiti in ten days than the international force managed in over a year — the first large overseas test of the anti-gang methods that made Bukele the most popular leader in his country’s modern history.
Washington’s hand is in this too. The Gang Suppression Force was an American initiative at the Security Council, the United States has provided more than $970 million in funding, planning and logistics for Haiti’s security response, and a U.S. military official confirmed that American C-130 transport aircraft helped fly some of the Salvadoran troops in. What is not yet clear is how this surge will be run: El Salvador has not clarified the new troops’ command structure, their rules of engagement, or how long they will stay, and the Haitian prime minister’s office did not say whether the 2,000 will operate inside the UN-backed mission’s chain of command or alongside it. Bukele has stated his objective in one sentence: “We have a single objective: bring our four compatriots home alive, without them suffering any harm.” Whether the four are still alive, no one in authority has been able to say.
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