Bodies believed to be the four missing Salvadoran airmen are recovered in Haiti and handed to a Salvadoran team at the airport

El Salvador sent its own special forces into gang held ground to bring four of its men home, and on Saturday the search reached the answer no one in San Salvador wanted. The New York Times reported that four bodies believed to be the missing Salvadoran soldiers were found outside Port-au-Prince, citing two people close to the security mission. Reuters carried the Times report on Saturday.

Picture is an illustration of a Salvadoran military transport aircraft on the tarmac at the international airport in Port-au-Prince at dusk, with Salvadoran soldiers standing at attention in the distance.

The Times said search teams recovered the remains on Saturday and that the bodies were badly burned, so autopsies will have to confirm the names before any family gets a final answer. The Times said the bodies were handed over at the international airport to a Salvadoran military team that had flown into Haiti on Friday. The Gang Suppression Force declined to comment. Reuters said it could not immediately confirm the report. No Salvadoran government statement on the recovery appears in the Reuters report, and the men's identities remain unconfirmed, as of October 24.

The four men were aviation technicians with El Salvador's air force, serving with the Gang Suppression Force, the United Nations authorized mission fighting Haiti's gangs. On Sunday, October 18, gangs ambushed their armored vehicle in Santo, in Croix-des-Bouquets, while the men were returning from a market to their base. The attackers hit the vehicle with explosives and gunfire and the vehicle burned. Salvadoran officials said the men got out of the burning vehicle and contact was then lost. Reuters called the ambush the first major attack on the Gang Suppression Force since the force began operations in Haiti this year.

President Nayib Bukele refused to leave his men in gang hands. On Wednesday, October 21, he said gangs were holding the four men and announced that El Salvador had launched a military operation to bring them back unharmed. He warned the gangs that the attack was nothing compared with what would come if the men were not returned alive. He also told the country what the four men did in Haiti. They were not combat troops. They were pilots and technical personnel whose main job was medical evacuation, flying the wounded out and saving lives. A Salvadoran special forces contingent of about 100 soldiers reached Haiti on Thursday, October 22, to search in the Plaine du Cul-de-Sac with Haitian police, and reporting by the Wall Street Journal put about 200 Salvadoran troops in the country by Friday, October 23. In the fighting around the search, at least seven suspected gang members were killed and four members of the force were wounded, CNN reported earlier in the week.

No group has publicly claimed the ambush. Local media have linked the attack to gangs that operate in the area, including Chen Mechan and 400 Mawozo, Reuters reported. Haiti's gangs have grown since gunmen assassinated President Jovenel Moise in 2021, and gangs now control large parts of Port-au-Prince. Gang violence has displaced 1.4 million to 1.5 million people, Reuters reported. The Gang Suppression Force has about 2,000 troops on the ground a year into its mandate, well below its authorized strength of 5,550, Reuters reported. The UN Security Council has renewed the force mandate for six months to March 31, 2027.

El Salvador now waits for the autopsies. Bukele built his name at home by breaking the gangs that once ruled Salvadoran streets, and he sent that same resolve to Haiti when his men went missing. His government moved within days, put special forces on the ground beside Haitian police, and kept the search going under fire. If the autopsies confirm the four names, El Salvador will bring home four airmen who went to Haiti to save lives and were killed by the gangs they were helping Haiti defeat. As of October 24, that confirmation has not come, and Bukele has made no public statement on the recovery in the reporting available so far.