El Salvador's troop surge tests the limits of foreign intervention in Haiti

More than 2,000 Salvadoran soldiers are now operating inside Haiti's capital, patrolling streets alongside Haitian police and United Nations-backed security forces in an operation that has grown far larger than the rescue mission it started as. On Wednesday, El Salvador's President Nayib Bukele posted videos on social media showing heavily armed troops moving through Port-au-Prince neighbourhoods as residents looked on, writing in one post, "Gather your gangs so we can go fight with them." A day earlier he had shared footage he said showed Salvadoran helicopters firing on gang members who were attacking Chadian soldiers serving with the UN-backed Gang Suppression Force, declaring that "the gangs no longer have the upper hand."

The show of force has not resolved the case that triggered it. The four missing men are Salvadoran aviation technicians attached to the Gang Suppression Force, assigned to medical evacuation support rather than combat, according to Bukele. They were ambushed on October 18 while returning in an armoured vehicle from buying food at a market in Santo, a neighbourhood of Croix-des-Bouquets just outside the capital; the vehicle was set alight during the attack. Haitian police said this week they had found the burned remains of that truck, but the men themselves have not been located and officials have not said whether they are alive. Bukele has publicly rejected claims, raised by a Haitian outlet, that human remains handed over at the Port-au-Prince airport belong to the missing technicians. The search, involving Haitian police, the Gang Suppression Force and Salvadoran troops, has continued for more than two weeks without a confirmed outcome.

A force that has outgrown its mandate

The scale of El Salvador's deployment is now out of step with the legal structure meant to govern foreign forces in Haiti. The Gang Suppression Force was authorised by the UN Security Council in 2025 and its mandate was extended for another six months in resolution 2829, adopted in September by a vote of 12 in favour with China, Pakistan and Russia abstaining. That force was supposed to grow to roughly 5,500 personnel; according to diplomats cited by Reuters, it remains below 30 percent of that target. Yet of the more than 2,000 Salvadoran soldiers now in Haiti, only about 200 formally fall under the Gang Suppression Force's command, UN spokesman Stephane Dujarric said this week in New York. The rest are operating under a separate bilateral arrangement between San Salvador and Port-au-Prince, a structure that has drawn scrutiny over who is legally responsible for their conduct.

Haiti has had no elected government since President Jovenel Moise was assassinated in 2021, and successive transitional administrations have failed to restore enough order to hold a vote. Bukele, in office since 2019, has built his own international profile on a domestic anti-gang crackdown that has jailed tens of thousands of Salvadorans under a state of emergency rights groups say has suspended ordinary legal protections. He has offered that same approach to Haiti before, telling reporters earlier this year he could "fix" the country's gang crisis. The October 18 ambush gave him an opening to act on it.

El Salvador's deployment also dwarfs the contributions of the Gang Suppression Force's other partners. Guatemala has kept roughly 150 to 300 military police in Haiti since early last year, while the Dominican Republic has refused to send troops at all, limiting itself to medical, logistical and border support; President Luis Abinader's government has instead pressed the Security Council to strengthen the force rather than rely on bilateral deployments like El Salvador's. Haitian gang violence against the force is not new either: the October 18 ambush came days after what the Associated Press described as the largest attack yet on the multinational mission, when gunmen opened fire on an armoured convoy carrying Chadian and Salvadoran personnel.

Civilians caught between the gangs and the soldiers

The intensified fighting has fallen hardest on residents of Port-au-Prince's gang-controlled neighbourhoods. Medecins Sans Frontieres said its hospitals treated 30 people, including women and children, for injuries in the eight days after the ambush, and warned that gunfire and drone strikes had made roads and bridges too dangerous to travel safely for care. The disruption comes against a backdrop of acute hunger across the country: roughly 5.94 million Haitians face acute food insecurity, according to a food security assessment released last month.

The violence is also complicating preparations for Haiti's first national election in a decade. The Provisional Electoral Council has pushed the first round of voting from December 13 to July 18, 2027, with a runoff set for October 4, 2027. Fewer than one million Haitians have registered to vote so far, out of roughly 6.5 million who hold eligible identification cards. Part of the problem is territorial: gangs including 400 Mawozo, which researchers at InsightCrime say controls Croix-des-Bouquets and dozens of polling sites in the area, have enough sway over local infrastructure to disrupt registration and voting outright. The US State Department has kept its advisory for Haiti at Level 4, Do Not Travel, since July, citing kidnapping, crime and a national state of emergency that has been in place since March 2024.

Divided reactions, no unified command

Haitian officials have tried to frame the Salvadoran presence as auxiliary rather than directive. Prime Minister Alix Didier Fils-Aime said this week that foreign troops remain subordinate to Haitian authority.

"The international forces did not come to replace the state. They came to support it, to reinforce our capacity."

Dujarric, the UN spokesman, struck a more cautious note, saying that "what is important is that any security operation be done within the framework of international human rights law" — a pointed reminder given that most of the Salvadoran troops operate outside the UN chain of command altogether. According to reporting by Axios, Bukele called President Trump before escalating the deployment to make sure Washington had no objection, and was told, "Do what you have to do." The US has not sent its own equipment or personnel to join the operation. At home, the deployment has split opinion: El Salvador's Nuevas Ideas-controlled legislature has not blocked it, but polling and commentary cited by regional broadcasters describe Salvadorans themselves as divided over sending thousands of troops, and the resources that come with them, into another country's gang war.

Even the gangs have weighed in. Wilson Joseph, who leads the 400 Mawozo gang under the alias Lanmo Sanjou and whose territory includes the neighbourhood where the technicians disappeared, told the Associated Press he had written to the UN secretary-general asking for an opening for dialogue, saying he was troubled by the rising civilian death toll. Haitian authorities have not established that his gang, rather than one of several others active in the area, carried out the October 18 ambush. Al Jazeera, which has covered the deployment since its start, reported on Thursday that Bukele has continued to post videos from the operation daily, telling Haitians in one, "We are right there beside you."

What happens next

The immediate question is the fate of the four missing technicians, whose families have had no confirmation of their condition since the truck believed to be theirs was found burned. Beyond that, the mismatch between the scale of El Salvador's deployment and the much smaller UN-mandated force it operates alongside leaves open questions about accountability for any use of force outside the Gang Suppression Force's own rules of engagement — questions the UN has raised but not resolved.

Humanitarian officials expect conditions to deteriorate before they improve. MSF has said it fears the fighting will displace more people and produce more casualties in the weeks ahead, even as the Gang Suppression Force continues trying to reach its authorised strength before its mandate again comes up for renewal in March. Haiti's electoral council, meanwhile, has made clear that its newly delayed timetable for mid-2027 elections still depends on a security climate that, eighteen days into the Salvadoran operation, has not yet materialised.