/leftypol/ Leftist Politically Incorrect

Bukele sends thousands of Salvadoran troops to Haiti with US, Colombian and Dominican support

Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele has begun sending more than 2,000 troops, along with helicopters and armored vehicles, into Haiti. According to an Axios report published Thursday, he did so after a phone call on Tuesday in which President Donald Trump told him: "Do what you have to do." Sources told Axios that the number could "double or triple."

The pretext is the fate of four Salvadoran aviation technicians in the UN-authorized Gang Suppression Force (GSF). They disappeared on October 18 after gunmen attacked their armored vehicle in Santo, in Croix-des-Bouquets, 12 kilometers from Port-au-Prince. Bukele has threatened that the attack "is nothing compared to what is coming."

On Thursday, writing in Haitian Creole, he declared: "We didn't come to Haiti to make money, because no one is paying us to do it. We came to Haiti to fight against the wicked."

Axios reports that the Salvadoran force "appears to be operating parallel to the GSF" and to Vectus Global, the private army of Blackwater founder Erik Prince. It describes Haiti as "a test case for Bukele and… Prince to act as public-private proxies for U.S. muscle in the hemisphere."

Washington has tried to keep out of sight. Secretary of State Marco Rubio "wants to keep Haiti off the radar," a source told Axios, and Bukele's request for US drones and transport planes was "officially denied." Colombia, the source added, "may act as an unofficial go-between" so there are "no U.S. fingerprints on the mission."

The fingerprints are there all the same. The first Salvadoran reinforcements landed in Port-au-Prince on October 23 aboard a US military C-130 that, according to the Miami Herald, was "provided by the Pentagon at the request of the U.S. State Department."

On October 27, the day of the Trump call, a Colombian Air Force C-130H Hercules, tail number FAC1005, flew Salvadoran troops and equipment from San Salvador to Port-au-Prince, according to flight-tracking data and press reports.

The Dominican Republic has become the operation's rear base. On October 24, two days before he opened the conference of the Coalition of the Americas Against Cartels (A3C), President Luis Abinader said he had spoken with Bukele to coordinate logistical and intelligence support. A Boeing 747 freighter of the US carrier National Airlines delivered Salvadoran helicopters to Santo Domingo on October 28. The next day, seven Salvadoran combat helicopters took off for Haiti from the Dominican Army's El Rodeo fortress in Jimaní, on the border. Brian Mast, the Republican chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, stated the aim bluntly: "I hope the mission is revenge, retribution and destruction of the gangs."

This marks a new stage in the construction of what amounts to Plan Condor 2.0. Washington has given its approval for one Latin American regime to send thousands of soldiers into another country, outside even the formal cover of a UN mandate. The force is being supplied, by all indications, by Washington through the far-right governments of Abelardo de la Espriella in Colombia and Luis Abinader in the Dominican Republic.

Under the banner of fighting "gangs" and "narco-terrorists," a hemispheric force is being assembled, a Gestapo for the Americas, aimed at the working class and at turning the hemisphere into a secure base for US imperialism's war preparations against China.

The surge coincided with the A3C conference in Santo Domingo on October 26 and 27. The coalition was launched in March at a meeting called by Secretary of War Pete Hegseth and now brings together 19 governments. Abinader opened the event alongside the commander of US Southern Command, Gen. Francis L. Donovan. Eric Geressy, Hegseth's senior adviser, summed up the coalition's outlook: "This coalition does not manage threats. We eliminate them."

This week 300 US soldiers also arrived at Colombia's Tolemaida base for the "Southern Vanguard 2027" exercises. As the World Socialist Web Site noted, the A3C recalls the November 1975 Santiago meeting that founded Operation Condor, with one difference: "Pinochet's meeting was held in secret. Trump's is conducted in the open."

Condor's methods of cross-border kidnapping, torture and disappearance were never repudiated by the region's armed forces and remain the lifeblood of every officer corps trained by Washington. The main organizer of Condor was Chile's DINA secret police, itself a Frankenstein monster of the CIA. Declassified documents published by the National Security Archive in 2024 show that in February 1974 Pinochet personally asked CIA deputy director Vernon Walters to help DINA in its "formative period," and that in mid-1975 the CIA put its director, Manuel Contreras, on its payroll. In June 1974, a US Defense Intelligence Agency cable reported that Chilean officers saw DINA's founding decree as "the foundation upon which a Gestapo-type police force will be built." Bukele is offering his military in the same role: a regional strike force that Washington can rely on to act across borders.

Read more:
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2026/10/31/zxxx-o31.html