Bukele says Haiti gangs hold four Salvadoran airmen hostage and launches a rescue operation

The four men were coming back from buying food. On Sunday, October 18, four Salvadoran air force technicians with Task Force Libertad II were returning to camp in an armored vehicle when heavily armed gang members hit them with gunfire and explosives in Santo, in the commune of Croix-des-Bouquets, about seven miles from Port-au-Prince. The vehicle caught fire. The men got out alive, and then contact with them was lost. Salvadoran helicopters sent to reach them forced the attackers back and took gunfire themselves. Attempts to reach the men by land and air over the next four days were blocked by the intensity of the fighting, El Salvador's armed forces said.

The search has cost the force more men. The Gang Suppression Force said on Wednesday that its units have run ground searches with live fire and helicopter cover in Santo since Sunday, that several suspected gang members have been killed, and that four of its own members were wounded and are being treated. The force thanked El Salvador's government for close coordination and additional support, and told residents of Santo and nearby areas to stay inside while operations continue. Guatemala has sent a second military police contingent to reinforce the force. At the UN Security Council on Monday, US Ambassador Mike Waltz condemned the attack and spoke to the four men directly: "To our four Salvadoran brothers in arms. You are not forgotten. We will bring you home." El Salvador's ambassador, Egriselda López, condemned the attack beside him. The United Nations has called the episode a kidnapping and demanded the men's immediate and safe release.

On Wednesday, President Nayib Bukele said the word out loud: hostage. In a post on X, he said the four men are not combatants. They are aviation technicians in an international mission, pilots and technical staff whose main job is medical evacuation, saving lives, not waging war. He said they were taken while returning from buying food at a local market. He announced that El Salvador has launched a military operation with one goal, to bring the four men home alive and unharmed, and he addressed the gang leaders directly. Today's attack, he wrote, is nothing compared with what awaits them if the four are not returned alive. A version of the message was published in Haitian Creole: El Salvador finished its gangs, and it can finish yours. Return our four countrymen alive and well, he wrote, and everything goes back to how it was before the kidnapping. The decision, he said, is in the gang leaders' hands. Bukele posted video of military vehicles and audible gunfire with the message. He gave no details of the operation and did not name the gang holding the men.

No gang has claimed the attack, and no government has officially named the captors. Haitian sources point to Chen Mechan, the gang led by Claudy Célestin that controls Santo, the ground where the ambush happened, backed by 400 Mawozo, led by Joseph Wilson, who is wanted by the FBI. 400 Mawozo kidnapped 17 American missionaries in Croix-des-Bouquets in 2021. Chen Mechan and 400 Mawozo fought a war against each other in this same plain in 2022 and have since drawn closer. None of this has been confirmed by the Gang Suppression Force, and the men's condition and exact location are unknown. Claims that several dozen gang members were killed in the search, and a report that the men had followed a phone map into gang territory by mistake, come from unnamed sources and are unconfirmed. Early reports that five men were missing were wrong: El Salvador's military, its UN ambassador, and Bukele all say four.

The Salvadorans are in Haiti because Bukele offered to go. El Salvador's contingent is an air force unit of about 78 men flying medical and casualty evacuation for the international force, with helicopters the United States transferred for that work. The first eight airmen landed on January 3, 2025, under the earlier Kenyan led mission. In March 2024, Bukele had posted that El Salvador could fix Haiti's gang crisis, on three conditions: a UN Security Council resolution, the consent of Haiti's government, and the mission's costs covered. The Security Council created the Gang Suppression Force on September 30, 2025, with power to arrest gang members and an authorized strength of 5,550. It fields roughly a third of that today, with troops from El Salvador, Guatemala, Jamaica, Mongolia, Sri Lanka, and Chad. Haiti's prime minister, Alix Didier Fils-Aimé, launched the force's operational phase on October 8 at the Vertières base in Tabarre and said the state must regain control of its territory. On September 29, El Salvador's assembly broadened its own mission in law, effective October 2 through October 2027. The ambush is the first major attack on the force since it began operations. Gang violence in Haiti has killed more than 21,000 people in four years and driven nearly 1.5 million from their homes. In El Salvador, one voice has answered Bukele with a call to pull the troops out: Rafael Aguirre, the FMLN candidate for the February 2027 election. As of October 21, the four men are still held, the rescue operation is under way, and no gang has said a word in public.

The picture with this story is a file photo of the Salvadoran contingent arriving in Haiti in February 2025.