Theme: El Salvador

According to Opera Mundi, the Haitian civil society group Association of the United Nations-Haiti (UNA-Haiti) reported to the United Nations bombardments and attacks with heavy weapons on civilian neighborhoods by Salvadoran troops sent to Haiti by President Nayib Bukele, and asked for an investigation into possible civilian deaths, including children, in operations in Croix-des-Bouquets, Canaan and Plaine du Cul-de-Sac. Bukele denied the accusations: in a post on X on Saturday, October 31, 2026, he said his country's troops have no bombs and that the attack helicopters reached Haiti only on Thursday, October 29, after the period cited in the complaint.

The government of Nayib Bukele announced it is sending more than 2,000 soldiers to Haiti, in a statement issued after a phone call with Haitian Prime Minister Alix Didier Fils-Aimé, CNN en Español reported. The reinforcement follows the disappearance of four Salvadoran soldiers serving in the UN gang-repression force, according to DW. Bukele said the four may be held hostage by criminal groups and announced a military operation to locate them, according to RT Brasil.

Bukele called US President Trump on Tuesday to make sure Trump had no problem with a major military escalation in Haiti, to which the Haitian government has agreed, and was told, “Do what you have to do,” according to sources briefed on the call. El Salvador announced Wednesday it was deploying as many as 2,000 troops to Haiti, a number that could double or triple, according to the same sources.

Former El Salvador president Elias Antonio Saca has been released after serving a 10-year sentence for corruption, according to Al Jazeera. Saca, 61, governed from 2004 to 2009 and was sentenced in 2018 for embezzlement and money laundering over the diversion of state funds, according to AP.

Peru’s president, Keiko Fujimori, arrived on Wednesday night in El Salvador for a four-day official visit, with a meeting with President Nayib Bukele and a tour of the Terrorism Confinement Center (Cecot). Fujimori, who took office on July 28 and had said during the campaign that she wanted to build a Salvadoran-style prison, is visiting the Cecot just over a week after the Costa Rican president’s tour of the megaprison.

El Salvador sent about 1,000 troops to Haiti after four Salvadorean members of a UN-backed security mission went missing in a gang ambush on the outskirts of the capital on October 18, according to the South China Morning Post.

Four Salvadoran soldiers with the Gang Repression Force (FRG), the UN mission that has operated in Haiti since April, have been missing since Sunday night (18), after the vehicle they were in was ambushed in the Santo neighbourhood of Croix-des-Bouquets, in greater Port-au-Prince. Four days into the operation, the soldiers have not been found. The FRG said that “several gang members were killed and others wounded during the clashes” and that four of its personnel were wounded. El Salvador’s president, Nayib Bukele, said on Wednesday (21) that the four are aviation technicians and that the Salvadoran mission in Haiti has “only pilots and technicians”, working on medical evacuation.

El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele initiated a military operation to rescue four Salvadoran soldiers abducted by gangs in Haiti, without elaborating, according to Al Jazeera. The four, aviation technicians with the UN-backed Gang Suppression Force (GSF), have been missing since they fled a burning vehicle in the Santo area of Croix-des-Bouquets.

Haiti’s government said the release of the Salvadorans kidnapped by gangs is “an absolute priority” and that all necessary resources are being mobilized, in a statement that calls the hostages “abducted soldiers”, according to AP News. El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele said on Wednesday he had launched a military operation to rescue the four Salvadoran aviation technicians kidnapped in Haiti, according to the same report.

El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele announced on Wednesday that he had launched a military operation to rescue four Salvadoran aviation technicians kidnapped by gangs in Haiti, according to the Associated Press (AP). The four disappeared after an ambush by armed gangs on the outskirts of Port-au-Prince, according to security officials. AP reported that after fleeing a burning vehicle in the Santo area of Croix-des-Bouquets the four were left unaccounted for; Bukele demanded the hostages be returned alive and unharmed and said the Salvadoran mission involves only pilots and technicians for medical evacuations.

More than a year after they were deported from the United States and sent to El Salvador under an agreement neither government ever made public, 11 Salvadoran men are still unaccounted for, and their families are demanding to know where they are being held, according to an investigation by the consortium The Deportation Project, coordinated by Forbidden Stories, which includes RFI and G1. The men arrived in San Salvador on military flights chartered by Donald Trump’s administration between March and April 2025, on the same aircraft that carried 252 Venezuelans, all of them presented by both governments as dangerous criminals. They were taken to the Terrorism Confinement Center (Cecot), the maximum-security prison built during Nayib Bukele’s crackdown on the country’s gangs, and held incommunicado, without a lawyer and without a legal process. The Venezuelans were sent home four months later; the Salvadorans remained in detention. Rights groups later established that 36 Salvadorans had been on those flights, and families have identified 11 of them. The terms of the deal emerged in September 2025, when documents from the Trump administration surfaced in a class-action lawsuit brought by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and Democracy Forward: Washington had agreed to pay El Salvador $4.76 million to hold Venezuelan and Salvadoran deportees at Cecot. Human Rights Watch (HRW) found that only 10 percent of the Salvadorans had records in the United States for violent or potentially violent crimes. In June 2026, El Salvador confirmed to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) that Elmer Concepcion Romero Janes, one of the 11, was being held incommunicado at Santa Ana prison, without saying what he was accused of, and prosecutors gave his family a certificate stating that he has no criminal record in El Salvador. Lawyers representing nine of the 11 identified families filed a complaint against the Salvadoran state for enforced disappearance. “The crime starts in the United States and continues in El Salvador,” said Kelvi Zambrano, one of those lawyers. El Salvador’s government did not respond to requests for access to the prisons or to the consortium’s questions.