Bukele sends thousands of Salvadoran troops to Haiti with US, Colombian and Dominican support

30 October 2026facebook iconSalvadoran troops arrive in Haiti [Photo: Presidencia de El Salvador]Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele has begun sending more than 2,000 troops, along with helicopters and armored vehicles, into Haiti. According to an Axios report published Thursday, he did so after a phone call on Tuesday in which President Donald Trump told him: “Do what you have to do.” Sources told Axios that the number could “double or triple.”

The pretext is the fate of four Salvadoran aviation technicians in the UN-authorized Gang Suppression Force (GSF). They disappeared on October 18 after gunmen attacked their armored vehicle in Santo, in Croix-des-Bouquets, 12 kilometers from Port-au-Prince. Bukele has threatened that the attack “is nothing compared to what is coming.”

On Thursday, writing in Haitian Creole, he declared: “We didn’t come to Haiti to make money, because no one is paying us to do it. We came to Haiti to fight against the wicked.”

Axios reports that the Salvadoran force “appears to be operating parallel to the GSF” and to Vectus Global, the private army of Blackwater founder Erik Prince. It describes Haiti as “a test case for Bukele and... Prince to act as public-private proxies for U.S. muscle in the hemisphere.”

Washington has tried to keep out of sight. Secretary of State Marco Rubio “wants to keep Haiti off the radar,” a source told Axios, and Bukele’s request for US drones and transport planes was “officially denied.” Colombia, the source added, “may act as an unofficial go-between” so there are “no U.S. fingerprints on the mission.”

The fingerprints are there all the same. The first Salvadoran reinforcements landed in Port-au-Prince on October 23 aboard a US military C-130 that, according to the Miami Herald, was “provided by the Pentagon at the request of the U.S. State Department.”

On October 27, the day of the Trump call, a Colombian Air Force C-130H Hercules, tail number FAC1005, flew Salvadoran troops and equipment from San Salvador to Port-au-Prince, according to flight-tracking data and press reports.

The Dominican Republic has become the operation’s rear base. On October 24, two days before he opened the conference of the Coalition of the Americas Against Cartels (A3C), President Luis Abinader said he had spoken with Bukele to coordinate logistical and intelligence support. A Boeing 747 freighter of the US carrier National Airlines delivered Salvadoran helicopters to Santo Domingo on October 28. The next day, seven Salvadoran combat helicopters took off for Haiti from the Dominican Army’s El Rodeo fortress in Jimaní, on the border. Brian Mast, the Republican chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, stated the aim bluntly: “I hope the mission is revenge, retribution and destruction of the gangs.”

This marks a new stage in the construction of what amounts to Plan Condor 2.0. Washington has given its approval for one Latin American regime to send thousands of soldiers into another country, outside even the formal cover of a UN mandate. The force is being supplied, by all indications, by Washington through the far-right governments of Abelardo de la Espriella in Colombia and Luis Abinader in the Dominican Republic.

Under the banner of fighting “gangs” and “narco-terrorists,” a hemispheric force is being assembled, a Gestapo for the Americas, aimed at the working class and at turning the hemisphere into a secure base for US imperialism’s war preparations against China.

The surge coincided with the A3C conference in Santo Domingo on October 26 and 27. The coalition was launched in March at a meeting called by Secretary of War Pete Hegseth and now brings together 19 governments. Abinader opened the event alongside the commander of US Southern Command, Gen. Francis L. Donovan. Eric Geressy, Hegseth’s senior adviser, summed up the coalition’s outlook: “This coalition does not manage threats. We eliminate them.”

This week 300 US soldiers also arrived at Colombia’s Tolemaida base for the “Southern Vanguard 2027” exercises. As the World Socialist Web Site noted, the A3C recalls the November 1975 Santiago meeting that founded Operation Condor, with one difference: “Pinochet’s meeting was held in secret. Trump’s is conducted in the open.”

Condor’s methods of cross-border kidnapping, torture and disappearance were never repudiated by the region’s armed forces and remain the lifeblood of every officer corps trained by Washington. The main organizer of Condor was Chile’s DINA secret police, itself a Frankenstein monster of the CIA. Declassified documents published by the National Security Archive in 2024 show that in February 1974 Pinochet personally asked CIA deputy director Vernon Walters to help DINA in its “formative period,” and that in mid-1975 the CIA put its director, Manuel Contreras, on its payroll. In June 1974, a US Defense Intelligence Agency cable reported that Chilean officers saw DINA’s founding decree as “the foundation upon which a Gestapo-type police force will be built.” Bukele is offering his military in the same role: a regional strike force that Washington can rely on to act across borders.

Haiti was repeatedly occupied by US Marines in the last century, beginning in 1915 to secure payments to American banks. Washington then backed the Duvalier dictatorship and helped organize the 2004 overthrow of the elected president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide. In 2011 it installed Michel Martelly, whom the US Treasury sanctioned in 2024 for drug trafficking. The gangs that now control most of Port-au-Prince are not an external evil. They grew up as the armed instruments of rival factions of the Haitian bourgeoisie, many of them Washington’s clients. Since the 2021 assassination of Jovenel Moïse, the country has been ruled by unelected bodies chosen by the US and its allies. On Wednesday, the electoral authorities postponed elections again, to July 2027.

A Kenyan-led mission reached only about 40 percent of its 2,500-member target before it withdrew earlier this year. The GSF that replaced it, authorized in September 2025 for 5,550 personnel, had just over 2,000 by mid-October. Meanwhile, more than 5,700 people have been killed this year, 1.5 million are displaced, and nearly 6 million face acute hunger.

Erik Prince’s mercenary company Vectus Global filled the gap. In 2025 it signed a 10-year agreement with the Haitian authorities to fight gangs and then to collect taxes on goods crossing the Dominican border, with plans to field fighters recruited in the US, Europe and El Salvador. Human Rights Watch counted 1,243 people killed by drone strikes between March 2025 and January 2026, including 17 children.

Can you explain how the 2004 US-backed removal of Aristide in Haiti set the stage for the gang violence and state collapse we see today?Why does the article say the answer to this militarization can't come from 'left' bourgeois nationalism, and what would an internationalist working-class response actually look like in practice?Ask more questions at SocialismAI.comIn July, a Pentagon adviser told Congress that US forces already coordinate with Vectus “informally, at all levels of command” and that “that partnership will get closer.”

The Dominican Republic, host of the A3C, completes the vise. The government of multimillionaire Abinader deported more than 250,000 people to Haiti in the first seven months of this year, roughly 1,000 a day, under his October 2024 order to expel all undocumented Haitians, behind the border wall it began building in 2022. It is the heir of a ruling class that stripped some 200,000 Dominicans of Haitian descent of their citizenship in 2013 and whose dictator, Rafael Trujillo, massacred thousands of Haitians in 1937.

Bukele claims El Salvador is paying for 90 percent of the offensive, while workers pay for an IMF program. Under a $1.4 billion loan agreement, his government has laid off some 15,000 public employees since 2024. In mid-October he announced that 10,629 prisoners, now called “casual collaborators” of the gangs, could be released early.

His 2027 budget cuts more than $25 million from the National Civil Police and freezes spending on the overcrowded prisons.

This is the crisis of the “Bukele model.” Under a state of exception in force since March 2022, more than 90,000 people have been jailed, and human rights groups have documented between 458 and 570 deaths in custody. Bukele then rented out the CECOT mega-prison to the Trump administration as a dumping ground for deported immigrants, where they were tortured. With the mass incarceration machine now unaffordable, he is turning the army itself into an export.

El Salvador’s own history shows what such forces are trained to do. The US-trained Atlacatl Battalion murdered nearly 1,000 peasants at El Mozote in 1981. Last week Bukele urged France to adopt his methods against its student and worker protests, boasting that it “could do it in a week.” The target of this apparatus is clear. It is not the gangs but the growing mass opposition to social inequality, war and dictatorship.

This is not a peculiarity of the far right. Mexico’s Claudia Sheinbaum sent 10,000 National Guard troops to the US border to head off Trump’s tariffs. Governments of every label offer their security forces to Washington to secure a favorable relationship with US imperialism.

The answer to Plan Condor 2.0 cannot come from a refurbished “left” bourgeois nationalism. It requires the unification of the workers of Haiti, El Salvador, the Dominican Republic, Colombia and the United States in a common struggle against imperialism and the capitalist system that produces social inequality, dictatorship and war.