With total disregard for Haitian sovereignty, by Wednesday, Oct. 28, El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele announced he had deployed at least 2,000 of his country’s troops, including a contingent of special forces, into Haiti, to rescue four Salvadoran aviation technicians who had been attacked and presumed kidnapped on Oct. 18 in the notoriously gang-controlled Croix-des-Bouquets district of Port-au-Prince. Right after the incident, Bukele had announced he was sending in special forces and an additional 300-400 soldiers, but this quickly ballooned to 2,000, done with the blessing of President Donald Trump, with whom Bukele spoke by phone Oct. 26, during which Trump told Bukele “do what you have to do.” Bukele made clear he intended to teach the Haitian gangs “a lesson,” warning that he had successfully subdued El Salvador’s gangs and he could do the same with Haiti’s. If the Salvadorans were returned unharmed, he said he’d return home right away. If they didn’t, there would be hell to pay. But, he was quick to explain, “this is not an invasion.”

There is no disguising the outrageousness of the Salvadoran move or the attempt to portray it as something independent of the Shield of the Americas or War Secretary Pete Hegseth’s “Americas Counter Cartel Coalition” (A3C) which was meeting in Santo Domingo on Oct. 26-27, the exact timeframe in which Bukele’s operation was being put in place. While the Trump administration is trying unconvincingly to portray itself as uninvolved in what Bukele is doing, the stage is now set for “vigilante diplomacy” to take over—where the U.S. allows other countries to move in to police the Haitian “concentration camp”— a situation of total ungovernability and lawlessness in which savage gangs control large swaths of national territory, including 80-90% of the capital of Port-au-Prince.

There is no government to speak of. Prime Minister Alix Didier Fils-Aime, a figurehead who was imposed on the country by Secretary of State Marco Rubio earlier this year and answers to Washington, wasn’t even in the country when Bukele sent his first troops in and only spoke with him by phone on Oct. 26. So the “host country” approval for the Salvadoran deployment was only granted after it had begun. Bukele claims his troops will operate “in the framework” of the UN Security Council-mandated Gang Suppression Force (GSF), which has been in the country for six months, but is underfunded, underequipped and so far has only 2,000 of an intended 5,500 troops that should have been in place by now. It has no ability to control or subdue the gangs or restore any stability or safe environment for the Haitian people. El Salvador had a small contingent of 800 people as part of the GSF.

The nature of Bukele’s intervention is revealed in the fact that an international “air bridge” has been created to facilitate it, involving Dominican, Colombian, and Ecuadorian aircraft which are transporting Salvadoran troops, military equipment, vehicles, and medical supplies to Haiti. Because it borders Haiti, sharing the island of Hispaniola, the Dominican Republic is functioning as the key logistic base for this operation, and Dominican President Luis Abinader is providing Bukele with logistics and intelligence support while tightening security on the border with Haiti. [As reported by Axios Oct. 31,]( https://www.axios.com/2026/10/30/trump-bukele-haiti-troop-surge) Bukele had asked the U.S. to let El Salvador pacify Haiti as a U.S. proxy force, but Marco Rubio, who is Bukele’s close friend, “wanted to stay away from that,” said one source who spoke with Axios. “He wants to keep Haiti off the radar.” The U.S. also officially denied a Salvadoran request for U.S. military equipment, including drones and transport planes, but another Axios source suggested that Colombia might act as an unofficial go-between to supply Bukele’s forces “with no U.S. fingerprints on the mission.”