It has been nearly five years since El Salvador’s authoritarian leader, Nayib Bukele, launched his controversial “war” on gangs – transforming his country’s fortunes and becoming a hard-right beacon for Latin America’s fight against violent crime.
Now the Salvadoran populist seems intent on exporting his hardline tactics to the region’s most violence-stricken nation, Haiti. He has sent more than 2,000 troops and special forces to the Caribbean country since four citizens of El Salvador were abducted there on 18 October.
“We will help you reclaim your country from the hands of the traitors who betrayed the legacy of Dessalines,” Bukele tweeted in Haitian Creole this week, in reference to one of the leaders of the Haitian Revolution, Jean-Jacques Dessalines.
Bukele’s use of mass incarceration and secret negotiations to tame El Salvador’s gangs has made him a hero among rightwing politicians and violence-weary citizens across the Americas, including in Haiti, where heavily armed groups have commandeered much of the capital, Port-au-Prince, since President Jovenel Moïse was murdered in 2021.
Experts say many Haitians welcome the idea of a Bukele-style crackdown, even if El Salvador and Haiti are dramatically different places.
Vanda Felbab-Brown, a Haiti security expert from the Brookings Institution in Washington, said: “Right now, the conditions in Haiti are so awful that there’s a huge craving for a strongman who [can] deliver Haiti from the gangs. People are desperate and they want whoever will stop the desperation.”
In recent days a large number of pro-Bukele allies and boosters with huge social media followings have gone online to hail his Haiti intervention.
“He’s single-handedly going to clean up the entire Caribbean. I wish more political leaders had balls like this,” claimed one cheerleader, alongside images of rifle-toting Salvadoran soldiers on the streets of Port-au-Prince.
Others posted footage of crowds of Haitians celebrating the troops’ arrival, although there have been reports of protests against the deployment.
There are also widespread concerns over Bukele’s foreign foray – the first the region has seen in many years, outside a UN mission – with mystery shrouding its true objectives. There are fears it could fuel the already devastating levels of bloodshed and aggravate a humanitarian crisis in which more than 1.5 million citizens have been forced to flee their homes.
When the four Salvadorans – who Bukele said were aviation technicians – vanished after going shopping in a gang-run area north-east of Port-au-Prince’s airport, El Salvador’s president initially painted his military operation as a rescue mission.
“We have a single objective: to bring our four compatriots back home alive,” he wrote on X, demanding their release. “We have already destroyed the gangs in El Salvador, and we can finish you off too,” he warned their kidnappers.
But over the following days, Bukele’s tweets began to suggest more ambitious goals. “We came to Haiti to fight against the wicked,” the social media-savvy leader wrote.
In another post, he denied he was stumbling into a Caribbean version of the Battle of Waterloo, when Napoleon Bonaparte’s dreams of imperial glory were finally crushed. “God will grant us victory. The Creator of the Universe is with us,” Bukele insisted.
Felbab-Brown said those posts indicated his objectives were broad and involved “degrading the gangs”, rather than simply rescuing his four citizens – or more likely, given the brutality of Haiti’s gangs, their bodies.
It is unclear how long Bukele’s troops plan to stay, although they are setting up a base near the US embassy, suggesting a quick exit is unlikely.
Adam Isacson, a security specialist from the Washington Office on Latin America, said the nature and scope of Bukele’s security and military strategies were obscure. “But the political strategy is pretty clear,” he added.
Isacson believes the Salvadoran leader’s intervention is partly about burnishing his crime-busting credentials before February’s presidential election in El Salvador and partly an attempt to enhance his reputation as Latin America’s premier rightwing security wizard.
Felbab-Brown agreed. “It’s possible he’s trying to strengthen his hero image in Latin America and show that he can do what he did in El Salvador beyond El Salvador,” she said, noting how the Central American country faced “real economic headwinds” that posed a challenge as Bukele sought to extend his seven-year rule.
Experts do not rule out the possibility of Bukele dealing a blow to the gangs – in the short term at least – but say the risks are immense.
Already, a volatile constellation of armed groups is operating on the ground in Haiti trying to subdue gang fighters – so far with limited success.
It includes vigilante mobs armed with guns and machetes, the Haitian police and army, foreign mercenaries employed by Vectus Global, a firm owned by Erik Prince – who founded the controversial private military contractor Blackwater – and a UN-backed mission called the Gang Suppression Force (GSF), led by a Mongolian army general.
Bukele’s soldiers, who are not operating under the command of the GSF, have now entered that messy fray.
“It is an orchestra without a conductor,” warned Romain Le Cour, who runs the Haiti Observatory at the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime and is a regular visitor to Port-au-Prince.
One major risk is escalation. “With drones, attack helicopters and heavy weapons, the confrontation has changed dramatically in a matter of days,” Le Cour said. “Civilians are paying the price. This is urban guerrilla-type combat, where residents are trapped between criminal groups and intensive operations. Thousands have already been displaced.”
Felbab-Brown said that, depending on their approach, Salvadoran forces could become embroiled in ferocious man-to-man fighting in sprawling slums.
“Maybe there will be luck and you will have ‘big bang’ initial operations that will scare the gangs into negotiations … but one can also imagine really, really, really tough urban fighting,” she said.
Civilian losses are a major concern, particularly given the indiscriminate nature of Bukele’s incarceration campaign in El Salvador, where tens of thousands of people have been jailed since he declared a state of emergency in March 2022, many without any proven links to gangs.
“Will the Salvadoran force operate with great effectiveness and great precision and be highly discriminating between civilians and gangs in a way that Bukele has not been in El Salvador?” Felbab-Brown asked.
Le Cour said another risk was that Haiti could become a deadly quagmire for Salvadoran troops who lacked reliable intelligence and were unfamiliar with the terrain.
Bill O’Neill, the UN’s expert on human rights in Haiti, said: “It’s all very opaque and unpredictable … it potentially [could get] very ugly and very dangerous. I hope it doesn’t turn out that way – but I just don’t know.”
Donald Trump this week offered support for Bukele’s mission, telling reporters he had spoken to his ally about the deployment of troops, some of whom flew to Port-au-Prince on a US military plane.
“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,’” the American president said, claiming US help was not necessary because Bukele was “in pretty good shape”.
Le Cour suspected Haiti “might be a laboratory … for a new way of intervening in different places in the hemisphere, with a proxy country doing it with the green light of Washington”.
He noted how Brazilian-led UN peacekeepers had tried to bring the gangs to heel in 2005 when they arrived in Haiti after the fall of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. After fierce clashes, those troops had some success in controlling the situation in Cité Soleil, then seen as one of Port-au-Prince’s most violent shantytowns.
But the situation unravelled after those troops withdrew. “If you think that by waging war against the gangs, you will eradicate them, you’re absolutely wrong,” Le Cour said.
“[It will not work if] there is no political plan, no development plan, no demobilisation plan, no reintegration plan, no actual social contract being built – and of course zero dismantling of organised crime networks.
“Deploying soldiers to fight criminal groups [is] basically Latin American war on drugs 101,” Le Cour added. “It has been done for 60 years [and] it doesn’t work.”
