A convoy of El Salvadoran military armored vehicles has been spotted entering the Haitian capital of Port-au-Prince, marking the launch of an unprecedented large-scale overseas deployment announced by the Central American nation’s government this week. The operation, which mobilizes more than 2,000 active-duty Salvadoran troops, was formally communicated to Haitian Prime Minister Alix Didier Fils-Aime by El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele earlier this week, the Salvadoran Ministry of Foreign Affairs confirmed in an official public statement released Wednesday.
The core immediate objective of the mission is to locate four Salvadoran air force technicians who vanished nearly two weeks prior while on active duty in Haiti as members of the UN-backed multinational Gang Suppression Force (GSF). The four service members were traveling back to their operational base in a fortified armored vehicle when their convoy was ambushed in Croix-des-Bouquets, a sprawling district on the outskirts of Port-au-Prince that is entirely dominated by heavily armed criminal gangs. No armed group has publicly claimed responsibility for the ambush or the subsequent disappearance of the four men as of press time.
Tensions between the two nations have surged dramatically in the days following the incident, after Haitian authorities turned over four unmarked corpses to Salvadoran special forces units earlier this week, asserting that the remains were those of the missing servicemen. President Bukele publicly rejected that claim, revealing that forensic and visual checks confirmed one of the recovered bodies belonged to a minor, while another corpse was clad in a military uniform belonging to a third, unidentified nation. Last week, Bukele issued a stark warning in a post on social media platform X, threatening to dismantle Haiti’s sprawling gang networks entirely by replicating the sweeping, controversial anti-gang security campaign he implemented in El Salvador over recent years, if the missing Salvadoran personnel were not safely returned.
The Salvadoran Foreign Ministry emphasized in its statement that the robust cross-border operation has received explicit backing from multiple partner nations and leading international organizations. Beyond the search for the missing nationals, the deployed 2,000 troops will also provide direct operational support to ongoing Haitian domestic and multinational anti-gang security efforts across the country.
The deployment comes against the backdrop of a years-long, spiraling security collapse in Haiti, which descended into a full-blown political and public safety vacuum following the 2021 assassination of sitting Haitian President Jovenel Moïse. In October of 2023, the United Nations Security Council voted to grant expanded operational powers to the UN-backed GSF multinational task force, which has faced persistent, widespread challenges penetrating gang-held territories across the country. Latest UN data shows that more than 5,700 people have been killed in gang-linked violent incidents in Haiti in the current calendar year alone, with armed criminal groups now exercising de facto control over the majority of Port-au-Prince’s urban territory.
El Salvador sends 2,000 troops to Haiti to rescue four missing soldiers
