By Sarah Morland
Oct 27 (Reuters) – Around 1,000 soldiers from El Salvador have been sent to Haiti after four Salvadoran members of a UN-backed force went missing during a gang ambush on the outskirts of the capital Port-au-Prince, a security official in Haiti told Reuters on Tuesday.
It remains unclear who will command the new Salvadoran contingent, which arrived in a series of flights following the October 18 ambush, how long it will operate in the Caribbean country and how many more soldiers could still be deployed.
The Haitian and Salvadoran governments did not immediately respond to requests for comment. The security official in Haiti spoke on condition of anonymity due to the sensitive security situation.
The surge in deployments comes as the UN-backed Gang Suppression Force has reached about 2,000 troops — just over a third of the planned size a year into its mandate — with limited impacts on Haitian security.
GSF did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Armed gangs in Haiti have for years expanded their influence over the capital and surrounding regions through extortion and brutal attacks that have displaced nearly 1.5 million people and battered its economy and institutions.
Haiti’s leadership has since 2022 requested international security support, despite a difficult history of foreign interventions, after the assassination of President Jovenel Moise a year before led to a sharp rise in gang violence and left a power vacuum.
Successive transitional leaders have since postponed elections due to the violence, and lawmakers’ terms were left to expire.
El Salvador President Nayib Bukele last week announced a military operation to recover the missing Salvadorans, who have been unaccounted for since leaping from a burning vehicle during an ambush, but did not disclose how many troops he would send.
A US military official said the US Southern Command had provided C-130 military transport jets to partially help bring the Salvadoran troops to Haiti.
Other flights between San Salvador and Port-au-Prince, both commercial and military, have appeared on tracking website Flightradar24 and some were reported by the Miami Herald.
NO CLAIM OF RESPONSIBILITY
Bukele has won broad support at home through tough-on-crime policies that several other right-wing governments in the Americas have sought to emulate. Human rights groups say this has come at the expense of due process and hundreds of deaths in custody.
Bukele said the missing Salvadorans were GSF air force technicians returning to base from a market and that he believed they were being held hostage by criminal groups.
No Haitian gang leader has taken responsibility for the attack. Gang leader Wilson Joseph of 400 Mawozo has released videos in which he denies holding the Salvadorans hostage and rejects responsibility for what happened to them.
Prior to the ambush, El Salvador had deployed at least 124 troops as part of the UN-backed force, according to a United Nations report. Bukele later said they were pilots and technicians sent to evacuate injured soldiers, not fight.
While Haitian authorities awaited more deployments for the Gang Suppression Force, the government also contracted a private military company run by Blackwater founder and ally of US President Donald Trump, Erik Prince, that has since 2025 run anti-gang drone operations.
President Luis Abinader of the Dominican Republic, the only country to share a land border with Haiti, said at a press conference on Monday that he was prepared to provide logistical support to the Salvadoran arrivals.
(Reporting by Sarah Morland in Mexico City, Gerardo Arbaiza in San Salvador and Harold Isaac in Port-au-Prince; Editing by Daina Beth Solomon and Bill Berkrot)
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