El Salvador Says 2,000 Troops Are in Haiti to Find Four Missing Airmen. Haiti's Statement Stresses Its Own 'Authority'
The four technicians with the UN-backed Gang Suppression Force vanished after an ambush near Port-au-Prince on Oct. 18. Bukele says bodies Haiti handed over were not theirs. The two governments' accounts of the same phone call differ in emphasis.
El Salvador has deployed more than 2,000 soldiers to Haiti to find four Salvadoran air force technicians who disappeared after an ambush outside Port-au-Prince on Oct. 18, the Salvadoran Foreign Ministry said Wednesday.
"El Salvador continuará con el despliegue operativo de más de dos mil soldados para rescatar a los cuatro aerotécnicos salvadoreños," the ministry said in a statement reported by El Mundo of San Salvador: El Salvador will continue the operational deployment of more than 2,000 soldiers to rescue the four airmen. The statement described a phone call between President Nayib Bukele and Haitian Prime Minister Alix Didier Fils-Aimé and called the mission a "large-scale operation supported by various countries and international organizations." Bukele also reaffirmed El Salvador's willingness to keep supporting security efforts against Haiti's gangs.
Haiti's account of the same call reads differently. According to El Mundo, the Haitian government said the two leaders "reaffirmed the commitment to strengthen bilateral coordination and operational cooperation within the framework of the Gang Suppression Force," and that Haiti is committed to "a cooperation that respects the authority of the Haitian state." That phrase does not appear in the Salvadoran statement as reported.
The four technicians were part of the UN-backed Gang Suppression Force and were returning to base in an armored vehicle when they were ambushed in Croix-des-Bouquets, an area controlled by armed groups, the BBC reported. Tensions rose after Haiti handed over four bodies it said were the missing men. Bukele said they did not match, that one was a child and another wore a different country's uniform. Last week he threatened on X to wipe out Haiti's gangs, as he has in El Salvador, if the men were not released.
The scale is significant relative to the existing mission. The Gang Suppression Force is authorized to deploy 5,500 personnel and includes troops from El Salvador, Kenya, Chad, Sri Lanka and Jamaica, El Mundo reported. Reuters reported Tuesday that more than 1,000 Salvadoran soldiers had arrived, with at least three flights from San Salvador.
The UN Security Council expanded the force's powers last October. It has struggled to penetrate gang-held areas. More than 5,700 people have been killed in gang violence in Haiti this year, according to the UN, and gangs control much of the capital. The crisis has worsened since the 2021 assassination of President Jovenel Moïse.
Neither government has said how long the Salvadoran troops will stay, under whose command they operate day to day, or whether the deployment counts toward the force's authorized 5,500.
