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Haiti has been engulfed in crisis since 2018, with protests, a presidential assassination and widespread gang violence bringing the country to its knees.
But earlier this week, Haiti’s Prime Minister Alix Didier Fils-Aime hailed a major win in the battle against the violence, thanks to “the commitment of the Salvadorean forces in the fight against gangs.”
El Salvador’s President, Nayib Bukele had earlier said a joint task force between the countries had “destroyed” what he called “the house of Lanmo San Jou and the 400 Mawozo gang’s headquarters.” He also tweeted out an as-yet unverified video of helicopters firing on a sprawling property.
Why are troops from El Salvador in Haiti?
A number of Salvadoran troops have been stationed in Haiti, nearly 2,000 kilometers from their homeland, since the beginning of 2025, mostly in an attempt to curb gang influence.
Last month, Bukele dispatched more than 2,000 troops and special forces to Haiti, ostensibly to rescue four Salvadorans who were ambushed on October 18 and have not yet been found.
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Writing on social media platform X, Fils-Aime thanked the Salvadorean military for helping “the fight against gangs.” The two nations are, he added, working alongside the UN-backed Gang Suppression Force (GSF), in an attempt to “regain control of the territory and restore state authority.”
The GSF has been operating in Haiti since 2016. But there are doubts to the legitimacy of El Salvador’s presence.
“Where the lines are and where the coordination begins and ends between a bunch of distinct entities and security forces is a huge concern about how this actually plays out, and El Salvador are trying to frame it as their choice, their action,” Jake Johnston, a Haiti expert and director of international research at the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) in Washington, told non-profit news agency The New Humanitarian this week.
What is the current situation in Haiti?
A UN report about Haiti released on Thursday described “bloody turf wars, sexual violence and other horrors, noting that serious violations and abuses continue to be committed across the Port-au-Prince metropolitan area and in the Artibonite and South-East departments.”
It further found that between July and September 2026, at least 1,167 people were killed and 459 injured, with more than half of that violence stemming from “ground or aerial operations carried out by security forces against gangs, sometimes with the support of a private military company using drones.”
For many observers, this chaos is a major part of the appeal for Bukele, who appears to wish to export his mano dura (iron fist) policy on to foreign soil. The policy saw gang members jailed on a huge scale and a significant drop in the murder rate of a country once notorious for homicide. But Romain Le Cour Grandmaison, a Haiti expert from the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime, told DW earlier this month that Haiti’s gang problem is more entrenched. He says using the same tactics as in El Salvador may not have the same result.
“Haiti does not currently have the conditions to replicate the Salvadoran model: Its prisons were emptied in 2024, its justice system is largely paralyzed and criminal groups resemble militias more than gangs, with territory, taxes, weapons of war and political networks that protect them,” Le Cour Grandmaison said.
Does El Salvador have US support?
Despite El Salvador being on Donald Trump’s list of “shithole countries” that the US president disparaged in 2018 in notorious remarks which he later partially denied, relations between the US and El Salvador have improved markedly during Trump’s second term.
The number of migrants deported to El Salvador from the US rose by 98% at the start of 2026 and Le Cour Grandmaison said the US plays “a central, albeit very discreet, role in public life” in El Salvador.
Bukele’s move to position himself as an ally of Trump has seen the US president offer him a level of endorsement and autonomy to do what Bukele deems necessary to protect El Salvador’s security and that of its troops.
“He said that he has a big problem with Haiti. I said: ‘Look, you’re running your country. You have to do what you have to do,’” Trump said in November.
