About 1,000 Salvadoran soldiers have now deployed to Haiti since the ambush, a security official says

The Salvadoran force in Haiti has grown from a rescue party into something close to a battalion, and San Salvador has not announced a limit for it.

Around 1,000 Salvadoran soldiers have arrived in Haiti across a string of deployments in recent days, a security official in Haiti told Reuters on Tuesday. Flights carrying soldiers and equipment kept landing at Toussaint Louverture International Airport through Monday, at least a dozen of them since the first reinforcements arrived last Thursday. A count on Saturday already stood at 450 men and rose from there. Before the ambush, El Salvador had at least 124 troops in Haiti as part of the Gang Suppression Force, the United Nations authorized mission fighting the gangs, and those men were pilots and technicians sent to evacuate injured soldiers rather than combat troops. Reuters reported that it remains unclear who commands the new contingent and how long it will operate in the country. Bukele office did not respond to requests for comment, and he has not said how many soldiers he plans to send.

The four missing men are still missing. They are air force technicians who were returning to base from a market on October 18 when their armored vehicle came under heavy gang fire in Santo, in Croix des Bouquets east of Port au Prince, and an explosive device set the vehicle on fire. Salvadoran officials said the men escaped the burning vehicle, and contact was then lost. Bukele said gangs are holding them hostage. No gang leader has claimed the attack. Wilson Joseph of 400 Mawozo has released videos denying that his group holds the men and denying responsibility for the ambush, and local reporting has linked the area gangs, Chen Mechan among them, to the attack without a claim from any of them. Bukele said on Saturday that remains handed over at the airport were not his men. The four technicians remain unaccounted for, as of October 28.

Haiti government has gone years without elected leaders and has struggled to draw foreign support against gangs that control much of the capital and the roads around it. Gang violence has displaced nearly 1.5 million people. The Gang Suppression Force has about 2,000 troops on the ground a year into its mandate, against an authorized ceiling of 5,500, and the Kenyan led mission before it ran short of money, equipment and men for its whole life.

El Salvador is now the mission largest single new contributor, sent not by the United Nations timetable but by a president hunting his own soldiers. What 1,000 Salvadoran troops do in gang held territory east of the capital, under a command nobody has named, is the open question the deployment leaves behind.