There is a war being fought in Haiti right now by a foreign army, with attack helicopters, and it has been going on for three weeks. Unless you went looking for it, you have probably not heard about it. The army is El Salvador’s.
It started on October 18, when four Salvadoran aviation technicians serving with the UN-backed Gang Suppression Force were ambushed on the outskirts of Port-au-Prince. Their armored vehicle was set on fire; the men got out and disappeared. Haiti’s government says they were abducted. El Salvador’s president, Nayib Bukele, calls them hostages and has pledged to bring them home unharmed. Three weeks on, there has been no proof of life and no ransom demand, and Bukele has publicly rejected a claim that burned remains handed over by a local organization were his men. Whether the four are alive is, honestly, not known.
What is known is what Bukele did next. On October 21 he announced a rescue operation. A hundred special forces soldiers arrived the next day. Then the deployment kept growing: Reuters reported about 2,000 Salvadoran soldiers in Haiti by October 29, with the number for now capped at 2,500; the Wall Street Journal counts more than 2,500 and calls them the largest armed contingent in the country after Haiti’s own police. Most of them are not serving under the UN-backed force at all. They operate under Salvadoran commanders, through a bilateral agreement with Haiti’s government, and Bukele says his country is paying 90 percent of the cost. The Times reports that President Trump blessed the operation in a phone call — “Do what you have to do” — and the Journal reports the United States and Colombia have helped ferry troops and supplies in.
Somewhere along the way, a rescue mission became a war. Salvadoran troops are patrolling the capital. On Sunday, two Salvadoran helicopters struck the villa of Wilson Joseph, the 400 Mawozo gang leader known as Lanmò Sanjou — “Death Any Day” — who is suspected of ordering the technicians’ capture. Bukele posted the video of the strike himself. Reports say as many as 20 people were killed; Joseph is understood to have escaped. The gangs hold most of the capital — the Associated Press estimates about 70 percent of Port-au-Prince, the Wall Street Journal roughly 90 percent — and UN figures put the year’s gang-violence death toll above 5,700.
The other side of the story deserves its sentence too. Joseph has written to the UN Secretary-General asking for dialogue, presenting himself as a man ready to negotiate; the UN confirmed receiving the letter and endorsed none of it. Reuters noted at the outset that the Salvadorans’ command structure and rules of engagement were unclear, in a country with a long and unhappy history of foreign interventions doing harm. Both things can be true at once: the gangs are a horror, and an unaccountable foreign army is a risk. That is the part of the story that will decide how this ends.
So why keep an eye on a gang war in Haiti? Because it is the largest foreign military operation in this hemisphere right now, it is happening a few hundred miles from Florida with Washington’s blessing, and it is a live test of whether Bukele’s model — the mass-arrest anti-gang crusade that made him famous at home — can be exported to the hardest case in the Americas. American television gave France’s protest numbers two minutes this week. It has given this almost nothing. We will keep an eye on it.
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