Central American troops arrive in Haiti to fight gangs

A contingent of security forces from Guatemala and El Salvador arrived in Haiti's capital on Friday to reinforce a long-delayed United Nations-backed mission tasked with restoring security amid a bloody conflict with armed gangs.

The new arrivals were made up of 75 Guatemalans and eight Salvadorans, a communications officer for the mission said.

The president of Haiti's transitional presidential council, Leslie Voltaire, alongside Prime Minister Alix Didier Fils-Aime and U.S. Ambassador Dennis Hankins, welcomed the troops at Port-au-Prince's airport, Haiti's interim government said in a post on social media.

"They have come to reinforce the Multinational Force in the fight against gangsters and guns in the country," the government said.

Guatemalan President Bernardo Arevalo had in September pledged to send 150 military police, three months after initially pledging in a letter to the U.N. an unnumbered contingent alongside personal equipment.

El Salvador had in August promised 78 soldiers for medical evacuation operations as well as three helicopters - much needed by Haitian security forces contending with mountainous terrain and highways scattered with gang-controlled checkpoints.

Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele, who has garnered broad popularity over a harsh crackdown on organized crime in his home country including the use of mass trials and construction of a "mega-jail", has stated that he would be able to "fix" Haiti and that its gangs must be "obliterated."

The mission is being led by Kenya, which deployed nearly 400 police in the middle of last year, far short of the 1,000 it had promised. The police were later joined by 24 Jamaican personnel and two senior officers from Belize.

However, the mission has failed to prevent gangs from taking new territories and committing several massacres as violence dramatically escalated in the last months of 2024, causing thousands more people to flee their homes.

Haiti's national police have meanwhile shed thousands of officers in recent years.

Some 10 countries have together pledged over 3,100 troops for Haiti, but few have so far deployed.