El Salvador’s Bukele is trying to fix what the UN couldn’t in 30 Years

Introduction

For more than 30 years, the UN has tried to fix Haiti. The United Nations has sent mission after mission there since 1993: peacekeepers, police trainers, election monitors and more. Billions of dollars have been spent. And yet, in 2026, armed gangs control an estimated 70% of the capital, Port-au-Prince, and nearly 1.5 million Haitians have been forced out of their homes.

Now a small Central American country is trying to do something different. In October 2026, gangs ambushed four Salvadoran air force technicians outside Port-au-Prince. El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele, who is famous for crushing criminal gangs in his own country, responded with an ultimatum to Haiti’s gang bosses and sent in more than 2000 soldiers. In simple terms, a hostage case turned into a full-fledged war against the gangs in Haiti.

But Haiti did reach this level by accident. Its collapse began long before the gangs emerged, with the French colonisation, a crushing debt France forced on it right after independence, an American occupation, dictators, and a UN that kept coming and going. In this article, we will discuss how Haiti became a failed state, what the UN tried and failed to do, and what Bukele is attempting. Behind it all is one simple question: for 200 years, foreign powers have made Haiti’s problems worse; can an outsider fix a country that so many outsiders helped break?

The ambush, October 18, 2026

Before we talk about Bukele’s actions against the gangs, first, we need to understand how it all started. On Sunday, October 18, 2026, four men from El Salvador’s air force were returning to their base on the eastern edge of Port-au-Prince. They were not combat soldiers. They were aviation technicians in a small Salvadoran unit whose job was medical evacuation. When soldiers were wounded during operations against the gangs, this team flew them to the hospital. According to Bukele, they had gone to a local market to buy food.

They were travelling in an armoured vehicle through Santo, a neighbourhood of Croix-des-Bouquets. On the map, it is a short drive from the airport, but in reality, it is gang territory. Armed men attacked the vehicle with gunfire and explosives, and it caught fire. The four men jumped out and ran. Helicopters were sent to help and rescue them, but they were also shot, and fighting was so intense that rescuers could not reach them by road or by air. By nightfall, the four had vanished. Nobody claimed responsibility or demanded a ransom. Early reports could not agree on whether four or five men were missing. Haiti’s government called it an abduction and said freeing the men was an “absolute priority”.

The kidnapping isn’t unusual in Haiti. The UN counted more than 230 people who were kidnapped between January and mid-September 2026. So, why does this one matter so much? Basically, there were two reasons: First, it was the first major attack on Haiti’s new international anti-gang force, which the four men belonged to. Second, they came from a country with a very particular kind of president. The one who is known for an aggressive crackdown on these armed gangs in his country. In other words, the gang had not just kidnapped four foreigners, but they had picked a fight with Nayib Bukele.

But what is the International Anti-Gang Force? In simple terms, Haiti’s international anti-gang force is a United Nations-authorised security mission sent to help the Haitian police fight powerful armed gangs and restore peace in the country. It is officially known as the Gang Suppression Force (GSF), and it replaced an earlier Kenyan-led police mission, the Multinational Security Support (MSS), which arrived in 2024 but had too few officers and too little money. The UN approved the GSF in 2025 with up to 5,550 personnel. It is made up of international police and military personnel from countries including Chad, Jamaica, Guatemala and El Salvador, with more than 2,000 troops on the ground. Its mandate has been extended until at least March 2027.

Who is Bukele, and why should Haiti’s gangs care?

In 2015, El Salvador had the highest murder rate in the world, with about 100 killings for every 100,000 people, around 18 murders every day. El Salvador was one of the most dangerous countries in the world. In 2018, the year before Bukele took power, the rate had already fallen to about 50. In 2019, Nayib Bukele became president of El Salvador. Under his government, the crackdown collapsed further. In 2025, the government reported just 82 murders in the whole year, with a rate of 1.3 per 100,000. In simple words, a country once known as the murder capital of the world became one of the safest countries in Latin America in about a decade. So, how did that happen?

El Salvador before Bukele

For 30 years, two rival parties ran the country: ARENA, from 1989 to 2009, and the FMLN, formed by former guerrillas, from 2009 to 2019. Neither could control the gangs. The gangs like MS-13 and Barrio 18 ran entire neighbourhoods and extorted shopkeepers and bus drivers. ARENA tried “Mano Dura”, or “Iron Fist”, mass arrests that did little to cut violence. The FMLN tried a secret truce with the gangs in 2012, which collapsed within two years. Both parties were also hit by corruption scandals, and people lost faith in both. So what did Bukele do differently? Bukele was the former mayor of San Salvador, ran as an outsider against both parties and won the presidency in 2019. In 2022, after a wave of gang killings, he declared a “state of execution.” Under this, the government suspended key legal protections. The army and police arrested tens of thousands of people suspected of gang links. He built a giant prison, CECOT, and shared videos of hundreds of gang members sitting on the floor in tight rows, heads shaved and their tattoos on show. Murders collapsed, and people in neighbourhoods once ruled by gangs say they now feel safe on their own streets. This made him one of the world’s most popular leaders. And it was one of the biggest crackdowns against crime in the world. But human rights groups also criticised him, saying many innocent people were swept up in the arrests and that democracy has been weakened. But many Salvadorans ask a simple question: where was this outrage when gangs were killing 18 people a day? In simple words, when ordinary people were dying, nobody made much noise. But when the gang members were locked up, the whole world started talking about human rights.

Let’s get back to Haiti. Just a few days after the ambush on the El Salvador technicians on October 22, Bukele posted on X, addressing Haiti’s gang leaders directly. Part of it was written in Haitian Creole, their own language. He announced that El Salvador had launched a military operation with one goal: to bring the four men home “alive, without any harm”. Then came the warning: “We have already finished with the gangs in El Salvador, and we can finish with you too.” He told them not to take his words as empty threats. He also offered them a way out. If the four men were returned unharmed, he said, everything would go back to the way it was before the kidnapping. In simple words, the choice was theirs: release the hostages, or face El Salvador’s army. Haiti was not a new idea for him, either. In March 2024, Bukele wrote on X that he could fix Haiti, as long as there was a UN Security Council resolution, the consent of the Haitian government, and someone to cover the costs. Later that year, El Salvador’s Congress approved sending a small contingent to Haiti under the UN-backed mission.

So Bukele had been waiting for a chance to test his model in Haiti, and the ambush gave him one. But to understand what he was walking into, we first have to understand how Haiti fell this far. And for that, we have to go back more than 300 years.

French colonisation, 1697–1804

Haiti didn’t get here by itself. Before independence, it was Saint-Domingue, a French colony on the western third of the island of Hispaniola. France formally took control of it in 1697. France didn’t settle to build a society; it built a money machine. It ran the colony as a factory for sugar and coffee, which it later sold to European markets. The whole profit went to France. By the 1780s, it produced about 40% of the sugar and 60% of the coffee consumed in Europe, and nearly two-thirds of France’s foreign investments were tied to it.

And who did the work? France used enslaved Africans who were shipped across the Atlantic in enormous numbers. By 1789, roughly half a million were in the colony, far outnumbering the white planters who owned them. The work on the sugar plantations was brutal, and conditions were so harsh that enslaved people died faster than children were born. The solution that planters adopted was not to treat them better, but to buy more people off the slave ships. In simple words, the system ran on death, and it was designed that way. The worse part: none of the wealth stayed in the colony. The profits went to France: to port cities like Bordeaux and Nantes, to merchants, and to planters who often lived in Paris. Saint-Domingue received no schools for most of its people, no institutions to govern itself, and no economy beyond the plantation. France took everything and built nothing. In 1791, the enslaved population rose up against the French exploitation. In the next 13 years, the war began, first against the planters and then against the armies France sent to take the colony back.

On January 1, 1804, the revolutionaries declared independence and named their country Haiti. It became the first nation in the world founded by formerly enslaved people. It also became the first independent nation in Latin America. However, Freedom came at a high cost. Before the independence struggle, plantations had burned, a large number of people were killed, and the economy of the country was destroyed. Haiti began its life poor, isolated and surrounded by powers that still practised slavery and saw a free Black republic as a threat. You might think these problems would fade with time as Haiti became independent and France’s role ended. But that’s far from the reality. The next section explains why.

After Independence: France’s debt, 1825–1947

Haiti got its independence in 1804, but for 21 years, France refused to recognise Haiti as a country, and other countries followed its lead. In those years, Haiti lived in constant fear of a French invasion and spent heavily on forts and weapons to defend itself. Then, on April 17, 1825, King Charles X signed a decree. France would recognise Haiti’s independence only if Haiti paid 150 million gold francs to compensate the former colonists for the “property” they had lost. And what was that property? Land, plantations, and the enslaved people who had freed themselves. In simple words, France imposed a ransom on Haiti’s independence: it asked the formerly enslaved to pay their former owners for their own freedom. In July, 14 French warships carrying more than 500 cannons arrived off the Haitian coast to deliver the demand. With the guns pointed at it, Haiti agreed on July 11, 1825. That ransom would damage the country for more than a century.

Now let’s look at the numbers. The first payment alone was six times Haiti’s yearly revenues. France also demanded a 50% cut in duties on French goods, which reduced the very income Haiti needed to pay the debt. So, Haiti was left with only one option: it borrowed money from a French Bank to pay the debt to France. It is also known as “double debt.” Haiti owed France the indemnity, and it also owed French bankers the loan, with interest, that it had taken to pay that indemnity.

In 1838, France reduced the total to 90 million francs. It made little difference. According to an investigation by The New York Times, Haiti paid about 112 million francs over seven decades. In today’s money, that is roughly $ 560 million. And that counts only what was paid. The bigger loss was everything that money could have built if it had stayed in Haiti. The debt hung over every Haitian government. By 1914, more than three-quarters of Haiti’s national budget was still going to repay French banks. Money that should have built schools, roads, courts, and institutions went to Paris instead. The final payments were not made until 1947, more than 140 years after independence. By then, UN officials reported that Haitian farmers were living on a diet often close to starvation level, and as few as one in six children went to school.

So has France ever paid it back? No. In 2016, the French Parliament repealed Charles X’s 1825 order, but no reparations followed. In April 2025, two centuries after the demand, Haitians at a UN forum were still calling for the return of the ransom, which they paid to France for decades. In other words, France didn’t just exploit Haiti as a colony. It kept draining the country for more than a century after it had lost it. But France was not the only power that treated Haiti as a source of money.

After France: occupation, dictators and collapse

In the early 1900s, American banks led by the National City Bank of New York (now known as Citigroup) wanted to control Haiti’s finances. They pushed the US State Department to help, and they got what they wanted. In December 1914, US Marines walked into Haiti’s national bank and walked out with $500,000 in gold. Within days, it was sitting in New York. In 1915, the US invaded and occupied Haiti. It remained occupied for 19 years, until 1934. In 1922, despite fierce Haitian objections, Haiti was forced to take a loan from Wall Street that moved its remaining French debt into American hands. American financial control lasted until 1947. That was the same year Haiti finally paid off its old debt. In simple words, for more than 140 years after independence, the creditor changed, but Haiti kept paying.

After decades of exploitation, one might think Haiti would finally put the money toward schools and institutions, but unfortunately it didn’t. Then came the Duvaliers. François “Papa Doc” Duvalier took power in 1957, and his son Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” ruled until 1986. They governed through fear, backed by a private militia called the Tonton Macoutes that terrorised anyone who opposed them. During their dictatorship, tens of thousands of Haitians were killed or fled the country. The years after the dictatorship brought little stability. In 1990, Haiti elected its first free president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, but a military coup overthrew him in 1991. He returned to power, then was pushed out again in 2004. In January 2010, an earthquake flattened much of Port-au-Prince. Estimates of the dead range from about 100,000 to more than 300,000. Government buildings, hospitals and schools collapsed. The state was already weak; after the earthquake, it never really recovered.

Then, in July 2021, President Jovenel Moïse was assassinated inside his own home. Haiti has not had an elected president since. If you notice the pattern, you will realise that every collapse left an empty space, and armed gangs moved into it. Many of them began as groups paid by politicians and businessmen to control neighbourhoods and deliver votes. But over time, these gangs no longer needed the politicians. In 2023, rival gangs joined forces in a coalition called Viv Ansanm, which means “Living Together”. Today, the gangs control an estimated 70% of Port-au-Prince. Gang violence has displaced nearly 1.5 million people. Between January and mid-September 2026 alone, more than 5,700 people were killed or injured. This raises an obvious question. Where was the rest of the world while all this was happening?

The UN in Haiti, 1993–2026

So, was the UN doing nothing at all while Haiti suffered? Not exactly. If anything, it has been in Haiti almost continuously for three decades. The problem is not that it stayed away. The problem is what it did while it was there.

In September 1993, the first UN peacekeeping operation arrived two years after the coup against Aristide. For the next eight years, a series of UN missions came and went. They focused on supporting elections and training the Haitian National Police. But when they left, the stability left with them. We’ll come back to what went wrong. In 2004, after Aristide was pushed out a second time, the UN launched its biggest effort: the Stabilisation Mission in Haiti, known by its French initials, MINUSTAH. It began with about 6,700 troops and 1,600 police and stayed for 13 years. It did well because it rebuilt and trained the police force, which is still Haiti’s main provider of security. But its record is badly stained. The 2010 earthquake killed 102 of the mission’s own staff, including its head. It was the single deadliest event in the history of UN peacekeeping. Months later came something far worse. In October 2010, a new group of UN peacekeepers from Nepal arrived in Haiti, some of them unknowingly carrying cholera. Sewage from their base leaked into a nearby river that local people used for drinking and washing. Haiti had not seen cholera in about a century, so the disease spread fast across the country. It killed about 10,000 people and infected more than 800,000. The UN took six years to admit its role, and the fund it set up to help victims never received the money it needed. On top of that, UN troops were repeatedly accused of sexually abusing Haitian women and children.

In simple words, the force sent to protect Haitians ended up bringing them a deadly disease and abuse. MINUSTAH’s peacekeepers left in 2017, and in 2019 the UN ended its peacekeeping role in Haiti altogether. Within a few years, the country slid back into crisis; the president was murdered, and the gangs took over the capital. And all of this came at a huge cost. MINUSTAH alone cost more than $7 billion over 13 years. In its final years, its annual budget was about $350 million, while the entire Haitian government ran on just over $1 billion. After the 2010 earthquake, the world pledged around $13.5 billion more in aid. But most of that money went to UN agencies, foreign NGOs and contractors, not to Haiti’s own government. In simple words, billions were spent in Haiti, but very little was spent on building Haiti itself.

The next attempt was not even a UN force. In 2024, a Kenyan-led international police mission arrived with UN approval, but with too few officers and too little money. In 2025, the UN Security Council approved a replacement, the Gang Suppression Force (GSF), with up to 5,550 personnel. By October 2026, it had only a little over 2,000 troops on the ground, from countries including Chad, Jamaica, Guatemala and El Salvador.

So, what did the UN do wrong? Let’s take it point by point. First, it sent the wrong kind of mission. UN peacekeepers are trained to keep the peace between sides that have agreed to stop fighting. Haiti needed something else: a force that could take on armed gangs controlling whole neighbourhoods. Instead, it got election monitors and police trainers. Second, it treated the symptoms, not the disease. The missions ran elections and trained police, but never fixed the bigger problems: broken courts, corrupt politics, and politicians who used gangs for their own ends. Haiti’s own leaders kept fighting each other, so reforms never took hold. Third, it kept leaving too early. Every mission packed up before Haiti could stand on its own, and every time, the country slid back into crisis. MINUSTAH left in 2017. Within four years, the president was dead, and the gangs ruled the capital. Fourth, it lost the trust of the people it came to protect. After the cholera, the years of denial and the abuse scandals, many Haitians stopped seeing the UN as a protector. They started seeing it as a foreign force that could do harm and never face the consequences.

In other words, the UN kept coming to Haiti with the wrong tools, left before the job was done, and often left new wounds behind. This brings us back to Bukele, who says he can do what the UN could not.

Bukele goes all in

In just two weeks, El Salvador’s soldier count went from 124 to more than 2000. Before the ambush, El Salvador’s role in Haiti was small. In the GSF, it had about 124 people, mostly pilots and technicians. Bukele himself said the mission consisted “only of pilots and technical personnel” whose main job was medical evacuations, “not to wage war”. That changed almost overnight. Let’s go through it day by day. On October 22, a day after Bukele’s ultimatum 100 Salvadoran special forces soldiers landed in Haiti. According to officials, they were working on the assumption that the four men were still alive. On October 23, around 350 more soldiers arrived, taking the total to about 450. Then on October 24, a local humanitarian group handed over four bodies that gang members claimed were the missing men. The force said it could not confirm who they were, and the search continued. On October 27, a security official in Haiti told Reuters that about 1,000 Salvadoran soldiers had arrived in a string of deployments. By the end of October, the number crossed 2,000 and kept rising. El Salvador never announced official figures. Planes landed, often without prior notice.

The soldiers did not come with rifles alone. Israeli-made Plasan Yagu tactical armoured vehicles arrived in Port-au-Prince, followed by military helicopters. The troops set up camp in Tabarre, a neighbourhood near the airport. And Bukele was not acting alone. US Southern Command provided C-130 military transport planes to help fly the troops in. The Dominican Republic, Haiti’s only land neighbour, offered logistical support. In other words, Washington was quietly backing the operation. Now, if we look back at the scale, in little over a week, El Salvador effectively doubled the number of foreign soldiers in Haiti. And this was never meant to be a quick rescue. Weeks before the ambush, El Salvador’s legislature had already extended its role in Haiti through October 2027, and widened what its personnel were allowed to do beyond medical evacuations. In simple words, a rescue mission had turned into an army. The next question was what that army would do.

Into gang country

Northeast of Port-au-Prince lies the Plaine du Cul-de-Sac, a flat stretch of farmland and settlements. It was the same place where four technicians disappeared, and three gangs control that area. The first gang is known as Chèn Méchan; the second one is Kraze Barye, and its leader is Vitelhomme Innocent. The third is 400 Mawozo, led by Lanmo Sanjou. Both of these leaders are on the UN and US sanctions lists.

On November 2, the Salvadorans went in. In El Salvador’s first significant ground combat operation in Haiti, armoured units advanced well into the plain. The main targets were two gangs deeply rooted: 400 Mawazo and Chèn Méchan, and at least a dozen of their fighters were reported killed. The helicopters joined too. The next day, Bukele posted a video on X that he said showed Salvadoran military helicopters opening fire on gangs that were attacking GSF soldiers from Chad. He also wrote that “The gangs no longer have the upper hand.” A day later, he taunted directly: “Gather your gangs so we can go fight with them.” He also shared videos of heavily armed Salvadoran soldiers patrolling Haitian streets, with residents coming out to greet them.

Why does that image matter? For years, Haitians have lived under gang rule; armed men who actually fight back against them are a rare thing. Earlier mission-trained police guarded bases and ran elections. This one went straight at the gangs.

On November 5, a user on X posted a photo of what they said was the headquarters of the 400 Mawozo gang and asked Bukele to destroy it. In response, Bukele tweeted, “Where is this house? Give us the exact address and we will destroy it. In just 3 days, he fulfilled the promise. On November 8, Haitian police, backed by Salvadoran troops and helicopters, attacked the site in Croix-des-Bouquets. Twenty people were reportedly killed. The gang’s leader, Lanmo Sanjou, whose real name is Wilson Joseph, was not there.

On November 10, Bukele announced it on X, again in Haitian Creole: “We kept our promise…We destroyed the house of Lanmò San Jou and the 400 Mawozo gang’s headquarters. Most of them ran away without even trying to fight.” This is not a small gang. 400 Mawozo is known for kidnappings and extortion, and in 2021 it abducted 16 US missionaries and a Canadian. Haiti’s Prime Minister, Alix Didier Fils-Aimé, praised Bukele after the attack: “Haiti, El Salvador, GSF: same fight, same determination!” The same day, the gangs were hit elsewhere too. A separate drone strike in Cité Soleil killed Mathias Saintil, leader of the Nan Boston gang and a senior figure in the Viv Ansanm coalition. That operation reportedly involved Vectus Global, a private security firm founded by Erik Prince.

In simple words, it was the Bukele playbook: overwhelming force, made very public, with the president himself telling the story. It had worked in El Salvador. But would it work in Haiti?

The questions nobody can answer yet.

So far, Bukele’s troops have hit the gangs hard, but that doesn’t mean everything is fine. The current situation raises some questions. First, who is in charge? According to the UN, only about 200 of 2,000-plus Salvadoran troops are part of a UN-backed force. The rest operate on their own, and El Salvador had no formal agreement with the UN before the ambush. Haiti’s prime minister says all foreign forces work under Haitian authority, but Bukele has not confirmed it. In simple words, if something goes wrong, nobody knows who is responsible. Second, can Bukele’s method work here? El Salvador still had a working government, courts and prisons. Haiti barely has a state, and its gangs carry military-grade weapons and control large areas. There is also a risk that a common enemy pushes the gangs back together. Third, is this still a rescue? The deployment is authorised until October 2027, and Bukele has begun hinting at wiping out Haiti’s gangs altogether. For now, these questions have no clear answers. What is clear is that the four technicians are still missing, and the operation has already gone far beyond a rescue.

Conclusion: Haiti has heard promises before

In early November, Haitian police, Salvadoran soldiers and the GSF pushed into Santo, the neighbourhood where the ambush happened. They found the vehicle, a charred and burned-out shell deep inside gang territory. There was no sign of the four men. Three weeks after the attack, they are still missing. No gang has claimed responsibility, and no one has said publicly whether they are alive.

Haiti’s politics are stuck too. Its first general election in more than a decade was supposed to begin in December 2026. It has now been pushed back to July 18, 2027. Fewer than one million of roughly 6.5 million eligible Haitians have registered to vote, partly because gangs control the roads.

So, who broke Haiti? The honest answer is: many hands, over a very long time. France ran it as a slave colony for profit, and then made it pay for its own Freedom for more freedom. The United States took its gold and occupied it for 19 years. The Duvaliers ruled it through terror. And the UN came for three decades with peacekeepers and police trainers, left behind cholera, and went home. Each time, Haitians were left to deal with the damage on their own.

Now a small Central American country has arrived, led by a president who has made beating gangs his signature. Maybe he will succeed where the UN failed. Or maybe he will become the next chapter in the same old story: an outsider who arrives with big promises and leaves Haiti to pick up the pieces.

For 200 years, Haiti’s fate has been decided by outsiders. The real test of Bukele’s mission is not just whether it brings four men home or kills gang leaders. It is whether, this time, Haiti is left stronger when the outsiders leave, and whether anyone will still be there when the smoke clears.