PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti (Reuters) – A contingent of security forces from Guatemala and El Salvador arrived in Haiti’s capital on Friday to bolster a long-delayed United Nations-backed mission to restore security amid a bloody conflict with armed gangs.
The new arrivals are made up of 75 Guatemalans and eight Salvadorans, the mission’s communications officer said.
The president of Haiti’s Transitional Presidential Council, Leslie Voltaire, along with Prime Minister Alix Didier Fils-Aime and US Ambassador Dennis Hankins, welcomed the soldiers at Port-au-Prince airport, Haiti’s interim government said in a social media post.
“They have come to reinforce the Multinational Forces in the fight against gangsters and weapons in the country,” the government said.
Guatemalan President Bernardo Arevalo promised to send 150 military police in September, three months after initially promising an unnumbered contingent with personal equipment in a letter to the UN.
In August, El Salvador pledged 78 troops for medical evacuation operations, as well as three helicopters – badly needed by Haitian security forces battling mountainous terrain and highways dotted with gang-controlled checkpoints.
Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele, who has gained wide popularity for a tough crackdown on organized crime in his homeland, including the use of mass trials and the construction of “mega-prisons”, said he could “fix” Haiti and that its gangs must be “wiped out”.
The mission is led by Kenya, which deployed nearly 400 police officers in the middle of last year, far less than the 1,000 it had promised. The police were later joined by 24 Jamaican personnel and two senior officers from Belize.
However, the mission failed to prevent the gangs from seizing new territories and committing several massacres as violence escalated dramatically in the final months of 2024, forcing thousands of people to flee their homes.
The Haitian National Police, meanwhile, has fired thousands of officers over the past few years.
Some 10 countries have collectively pledged more than 3,100 troops to Haiti, but few have been deployed so far.
