Nayib Bukele, El Salvador’s president, joins Erik Prince, the US, and the UN to kill more Haitians.
Haiti is the next battle ground for Nayib Bukele, El Salvador’s despotic, right-wing, Christian zionist president. Over the past few days, he has deployed Salvadoran soldiers to Haiti on chartered cargo flights, with more than 1000 of these mercenary vultures expected to descend upon the country. The reason for this foreign military invasion and occupation of a presumably sovereign country? The alleged kidnapping and subsequent killing of four or five Salvadoran mercenaries by so-called Haitian “gangs” is the justification. Because of the deaths of these mercenaries, Bukele has decided El Salvador will go to war in Haiti.
But why were those Salvadoran mercenaries in Haiti in the first place? Under whose authority and what law? How is it that Bukele can just deploy his military to invade Haiti? And what is the recourse for a Haitian population continuously under assault by foreign militaries and armed groups?
Bukele’s dead Salvadoran mercenaries were part of the US-concocted, UN- approved illegal “Gang Suppression Force” (GSF). This Gang Suppression Force was proposed to the UN by the US and its neocolonial lapdog, Panama, as an armed military intervention into Haiti to handle the country’s “gang problem.” The Gang Suppression Force replaced the US-concocted, Kenyan-enforced “Multinational Security Support” (MSS) sent to Haiti from 2023 - 2025. Both of these forces were set up as alternatives to a full UN “peacekeeping” mission, which the US has been seeking in Haiti ever since 2021, when its installed Haitian president, Jovenel Moïse, was assassinated. The US wanted to replicate the MINUSTAH mission, the UN occupation force that consolidated the 2004 US-France-Canada coup d’etat that removed Haiti’s democratically elected government, and which occupied Haiti and terrorized Haitians from 2004 until 2017, and led to the complete dismantling of the Haitian state.
The “Gang Suppression Force” is operating in Haiti under a “chapter 7” deployment, meaning that it has full power to exert deadly force against the population. But it is not part of an official UN mission and merely serves as cover for US terrorist machinations in Haiti. In fact, the UN/US boasts that this new force can work “independently” of the Haitian national police and the Haitian government. Its members have the full power to “neutralize” those it thinks are gang members, and it works outside of any local authority of law.
In reality, the GSF serves to give cover to the ongoing US destruction of the Haitian state. It also allows the US to test out its violent doctrine of control – a doctrine whose practice includes the collapse of the state, the deployment of foreign mercenaries, the obliteration of local communities, and the suppression of all existing laws. Meanwhile, those Haitians citizens – human beings – whose lives have been upended and destroyed have no avenues for restitution, and no recourse for reparation.
When they arrive in Haiti, Bukele’s 1,000 mercenaries will join the hundreds of mercenaries of Erik Prince’s murderous Vectus Global (formerly Blackwater) group already in the country. While many of Prince’s hired killers are from El Salvador, Prince’s mercenaries coordinate with the UN GSF, as his mercenaries make up the “Task Force” working with the Haitian National Police. This “Task Force” focuses exclusively on drone warfare. It is a warfare that has received little attention but has wreaked havoc on the Haitian population.
For more than a year, Erik Prince’s drones have killed thousands of Haitian people, most of them civilians. In March 2026, Human Rights Watch released a report stating that between “March 1, 2025, and January 21, 2026 — a span of about ten and a half months — explosive drone strikes flown by Haitian security forces and the private contractors working with them killed at least 1,243 people across 141 separate operations. Another 738 were injured.” These are documented assassinations. While HRW is not exactly a radical outlet, it did point out with certainty that this count was of the dead, not of the guilty. The report confirmed that at least 60 bodies were confirmed to be civilians, including a large number of children. These murders have barely received a mention in international media.
Family and friends in Haiti tell me that the number of civilians killed by Erik Prince’s drone attacks are grossly undercounted. Any young dead person can be said to be a “gang member.” Meanwhile, in UN reports, the dead are reported not as victims of mercenary drone warfare, but “victims of gang violence.” For the US and for the UN, like for Prince, Haitian people are expendable.
So: in Haiti, there are currently mercenaries from the UN, mercenaries from El Salvador, “gangs” armed with US guns, and mercenaries working Vectus/Blackwater’s drone assasination campaign – all under the cover of the UN. There is an army of foreigners in Haiti, performing the bloody work of the US and the UN, with a license to kill and a mandate to murder.
None of what is happening, and what has happened in Haiti since 2004, is legal. None of it is allowed in Haiti's constitution. None of it is done through the will of the Haitian people. What is going on in Haiti is a continuation of the destruction of the Haitian state that began with the 1991 coup d'état that removed Haiti's first popularly elected president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, and culminated in the 2004 removal of the same president during his second term. What is going on in Haiti is the entrenchment of the full denial of the country's sovereignty. What is going on in Haiti is full-on colonial control, but one that is being lived as a state in perpetual but controlled chaos.
The current predicament of Haiti is a state with no accountability to its people, while armed and controlled by an external force. Haiti is run by an externally imposed executive without a mandate but with the ability to hire mercenaries with lethal technologies. In Haiti, we have the forced collapse of our state by US imperialism, buttressed by the "international community,” and an ongoing violent occupation that has an unending stream of foreigners ready to use our people – our children – as cannon fodder.
And just like Lula’s Brazil used Haiti as a training ground for its police death squads on behalf of the US empire by leading the MINUSTAH occupation, and with support of the UN, Bukele is doing the same, with even more racist arrogance.
Haiti may be a model for what is to come – the laboratory for the next stage of US imperial rule as it is forced back to the Western hemisphere. But Haiti’s history also tells us that Haitians never fully play the role that imperialists expect them to play.
Bukele should take this as a warning.
Jemima Pierre is an editor and contributor to Black Agenda Report, a member of the Black Alliance for Peace, and of the Anti-Imperialist Scholars Collective.
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