To answer the article title, no. Gift link: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/10/30/world/americas/el-salvador-haiti-soldiers-bukele.html?unlocked_article_code=1.OFE.ZZHl.19VLwo6wxYDp&smid=url-share I...
In March 2024, when Haiti’s gangs had joined forces and parts of its capital were literally in flames, El Salvador’s president Nayib Bukele took to X and defiantly boasted: “We can fix it.”
Now, more than two and half years later, following the Oct. 18 abduction of four Salvadoran soldiers who were members of a United Nations-backed international force, Mr. Bukele is making his move.
In a step backed by the Trump administration, El Salvador sent more than 2,000 soldiers to Haiti this week, in what experts say is one of the largest bilateral military deployments to the island, one that threatens to escalate an already precarious security situation on the ground.
The extraordinary military operation in the Caribbean, outside the framework of a U.N.-backed mission, is highly unusual, raising questions about whether it represents a new, more aggressive form of intervention.
If successful, the move could raise Mr. Bukele’s international standing even further, as the leader who pulled Haiti out of crisis when other nations either refused to help or were incapable.
Experts, however, fear that Mr. Bukele’s reputation for a no-holds-barred approach to fighting illegal armed groups could result in large numbers of civilian casualties, escalating violence in a country that already has seen more than 5,000 killings this year.
“The risks and the stakes are incredibly high,” said Romain Le Cour, the director of the Haiti Observatory at the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime. “Are Bukele and his troops becoming the vehicle for a new form of intervention, more direct and less constrained by multilateral rules, that allies of Washington carry out on its behalf?”
I really don't think El Salvador has the money, logistics, or manpower to make any real difference, other than blowing money and getting their own guys killed.
Mr. Bukele has gained worldwide renown because of his campaign to dismantle Salvadoran gangs, though critics say that has come at the cost of civil liberties.
With that, I think they will also take a lot of Haitian civilians down with them too.
The Salvadoran leader, in his post, suggested that he can now transfer his strategy to Haiti and help wrest the country back from gangs, succeeding, as Mr. Bukele noted, where the international community has failed.
“We went through the same suffering that Haiti is going through today,” Mr. Bukele wrote. “But we managed to escape it.”
The quick deployment of thousands of Salvadoran soldiers follows a United Nations-backed mission called the Gang Suppression Force that has struggled for a year to reach a similar troop level.
Haiti now has not one, but two, international forces battling thousands of gang members who have seized control of much of the nation’s capital of Port-au-Prince — in addition to private military contractors from abroad armed with drones who work with the Haitian National Police.
The United Nations on Friday confirmed that the Salvadoran forces will not be part of the Gang Suppression Force already on the ground. But it remained unclear how long they would stay or whose command the Salvadoran troops would be under. Mr. Bukele’s office did not respond to a request for more details on his plans for Haiti.
That last sentence sounds familiar.
Mr. Bukele said El Salvador was paying for up to 90 percent of the mission, though a spokesman for U.S. Southern Command said the Trump administration provided at least one flight to transport Salvadoran troops, but declined to provide more details.
The U.S. State Department did not respond to a request for more information. The Department of Defense declined to comment.
President Trump spoke to Mr. Bukele on Tuesday and expressed support for his efforts to find and save the four abducted Salvadoran military personnel in Haiti, according to a U.S. official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to detail the conversation between the two leaders.
Mr. Bukele is resting his credibility to assist Haiti on his history of cleaning up his small Central American country, which was once among the world’s most dangerous, and is now among its safest. A decade ago, El Salvador had a staggering homicide rate, but Mr. Bukele incarcerated more than 80,000 gang members, many of them after mass criminal trials.
In 2022, he sent 10,000 troops to seal off a town and hunt for gang members. A year later, he sent 5,000 soldiers to a city where a police officer had been killed.
On Wednesday, Prime Minister Alix Didier Fils-Aimé of Haiti released a statement welcoming the deployment.
The Salvadoran deployment, experts said, is a blow to the U.N.-backed force, which has strict rules of engagement but has widely been viewed as too slow and timid.
In 2024, competing gangs teamed up in a coordinated effort to attack government institutions, such as police stations and prisons. Entire neighborhoods emptied out as people fled.
After an international police mission led by Kenya failed to quell the violence, the U.N. Security Council last year authorized the current force. Billed as an aggressive crime-fighting mission five times the size of the Kenyan-led mission and with arrest powers, it arrived in April.
But six months in, it has about 2,000 of its promised 5,500 soldiers, from Chad, Mongolia and several other nations. Its helicopter unit is staffed by Salvadorans.
The four abducted Salvadorans came under fire while driving through a gang stronghold and have not been seen since. Remains were found last week, but have not been confirmed to belong to the men.
Mr. Bukele initially sent several hundred special forces to help the Gang Suppression Force look for the men, who were aviation technicians. But it is unclear whether the U.N.-backed force has continued the search, which could explain Mr. Bukele’s frustration.
“All we want is for our four aviation technicians to return home,” Mr. Bukele wrote.
That also sounds very familiar.
Robert Fatton Jr., a Haiti-born political scientist at the University of Virginia, said the new Salvadoran mission shows that the force managed by the U.N. has so far been “incapable” of neutralizing the gangs.
“The question is whether these troops can do what Bukele thinks they can do, and whether the Trump administration is outsourcing the Salvadorans to bring a modicum of order in Haiti,” Mr. Fatton said. “It seems clear that the Haitian government is not in charge of what is taking place in its own territory.”
My prediction is that this just ends up bringing Bukele's own political downfall. I think his troops have captured a lot of innocent people to boost his numbers in the effort to make El Salvador safe, but that type of sacrificing of lambs worked in his own country. Trying to export that to another country that doesn't want you will inevitably backfire, and the human and financial cost will drive opposition in El Salvador. A tale as old as time.
I don't trust Bukele and the issues of his system are obvious - CECOT can be and likely is abused, corruption still surely happens, there's evidence of him collaborating with some of the gangs,...
I don't trust Bukele and the issues of his system are obvious - CECOT can be and likely is abused, corruption still surely happens, there's evidence of him collaborating with some of the gangs, the question of when if ever the restrictions to freedom are going to be lifted...
...But at the same time I think some of his ideas are brilliant and are currently the best and possibly only practically tested ways to deal with a failed state like El Salvador. I don't know enough about El Salvador and Haiti to tell if it could translate, but it was designed specifically for situations like these.
Everybody heard about CECOT, whose purpose is to separate the most dangerous gang leaders from society so that they cannot escape or run their organizations from the prison as they usually do, and to minimize the probability of corruption within the prison to ensure those things. This is understandable and logical, but it comes at the cost of borderline inhumane conditions and possibly serving as a way to just hide politically inconvenient people from society.
But the other half is prisons for the rest of the population. In a failed state with extreme criminality the issue is that nearly everyone is a criminal, you have to punish them in some way if you want to send a society-wide signal that crime is no longer acceptable and things are going to change from now on, but also you need to actually rehabilitate them and give them a way to integrate into society.
So the "normal people prisons" are completely different and are based on the "zero leisure" concept - do not give the prisoners any time for normal prison shit and instead fill all of their time with mandatory education and labor that iirc is not technically mandatory, but every day worked reduces your sentence by another day, cutting your sentence in half if you work every day.
This can only work in a failed state like El Salvador where the prison population does not consist of criminals as we see them in the western world, but to a large degree normal people - all of the education, job organizing and training are done by other inmates because enough of them are qualified in various fields. The labor is used to rebuild the state: maintaining vehicles for the emergency services and the army, building furniture for schools, sewing uniforms, inmates with good behavior and low escape risk can even work outside in agriculture etc. They get trained in jobs that they can generally do after they get out.
The problems here are also obvious when you think about it - the absolutely massive numbers of criminals mean the due process is questionable, some of these experimental prisons work worse than others, so there are issues with overcrowding, bad conditions, and the whole "not technically forced labor" is ethically questionable at best.
But I think many of these criticisms are also written from a narrow minded view of people living in the comfort of reasonably safe and functional societies. Even with their issues the prisons generally offer much better conditions than before. And more importantly, I just don't see a better way to transform the country and rebuild its society from such an extreme state it was in than this.
And so if any recipe was going to work in Haiti, it would be something similar. The issue is that it would be expensive and it would require active participation from the inside, not just force from the outside. Coming from an ex-failed state in central America could help here, as Haitians understandably have a dislike and distrust towards foreign interventions, but it's aimed primarily towards the west. However, even if they decided to implement a similar plan, Haiti seems a level more screwed than El Salvador and I'm not sure if they have enough competent people to do it.
So I guess I too am skeptical, but for different reasons. I dislike Bukele and his methods should be scrutinized, but many of the arguments against him don't hold up if you consider how unimaginably terrible the situation was before him and for how long, how everyone else failed.
To answer the article title, no.
Gift link: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/10/30/world/americas/el-salvador-haiti-soldiers-bukele.html?unlocked_article_code=1.OFE.ZZHl.19VLwo6wxYDp&smid=url-share
I really don't think El Salvador has the money, logistics, or manpower to make any real difference, other than blowing money and getting their own guys killed.
With that, I think they will also take a lot of Haitian civilians down with them too.
That last sentence sounds familiar.
That also sounds very familiar.
My prediction is that this just ends up bringing Bukele's own political downfall. I think his troops have captured a lot of innocent people to boost his numbers in the effort to make El Salvador safe, but that type of sacrificing of lambs worked in his own country. Trying to export that to another country that doesn't want you will inevitably backfire, and the human and financial cost will drive opposition in El Salvador. A tale as old as time.
I don't trust Bukele and the issues of his system are obvious - CECOT can be and likely is abused, corruption still surely happens, there's evidence of him collaborating with some of the gangs, the question of when if ever the restrictions to freedom are going to be lifted...
...But at the same time I think some of his ideas are brilliant and are currently the best and possibly only practically tested ways to deal with a failed state like El Salvador. I don't know enough about El Salvador and Haiti to tell if it could translate, but it was designed specifically for situations like these.
Everybody heard about CECOT, whose purpose is to separate the most dangerous gang leaders from society so that they cannot escape or run their organizations from the prison as they usually do, and to minimize the probability of corruption within the prison to ensure those things. This is understandable and logical, but it comes at the cost of borderline inhumane conditions and possibly serving as a way to just hide politically inconvenient people from society.
But the other half is prisons for the rest of the population. In a failed state with extreme criminality the issue is that nearly everyone is a criminal, you have to punish them in some way if you want to send a society-wide signal that crime is no longer acceptable and things are going to change from now on, but also you need to actually rehabilitate them and give them a way to integrate into society.
So the "normal people prisons" are completely different and are based on the "zero leisure" concept - do not give the prisoners any time for normal prison shit and instead fill all of their time with mandatory education and labor that iirc is not technically mandatory, but every day worked reduces your sentence by another day, cutting your sentence in half if you work every day.
This can only work in a failed state like El Salvador where the prison population does not consist of criminals as we see them in the western world, but to a large degree normal people - all of the education, job organizing and training are done by other inmates because enough of them are qualified in various fields. The labor is used to rebuild the state: maintaining vehicles for the emergency services and the army, building furniture for schools, sewing uniforms, inmates with good behavior and low escape risk can even work outside in agriculture etc. They get trained in jobs that they can generally do after they get out.
The problems here are also obvious when you think about it - the absolutely massive numbers of criminals mean the due process is questionable, some of these experimental prisons work worse than others, so there are issues with overcrowding, bad conditions, and the whole "not technically forced labor" is ethically questionable at best.
But I think many of these criticisms are also written from a narrow minded view of people living in the comfort of reasonably safe and functional societies. Even with their issues the prisons generally offer much better conditions than before. And more importantly, I just don't see a better way to transform the country and rebuild its society from such an extreme state it was in than this.
And so if any recipe was going to work in Haiti, it would be something similar. The issue is that it would be expensive and it would require active participation from the inside, not just force from the outside. Coming from an ex-failed state in central America could help here, as Haitians understandably have a dislike and distrust towards foreign interventions, but it's aimed primarily towards the west. However, even if they decided to implement a similar plan, Haiti seems a level more screwed than El Salvador and I'm not sure if they have enough competent people to do it.
So I guess I too am skeptical, but for different reasons. I dislike Bukele and his methods should be scrutinized, but many of the arguments against him don't hold up if you consider how unimaginably terrible the situation was before him and for how long, how everyone else failed.