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On Feb. 29, 2024, the Viv Ansanm (Live Together), an alliance of greater Port-au-Prince’s neighborhood armed groups, blocked the capital’s international airport thereby thwarting the return to Haiti of reviled de facto Prime Minister Ariel Henry.
He was returning from Kenya where he had just signed an agreement to allow the deployment of the Multinational Security Support mission (MSS), a proxy “Coalition of the Willing”-like force that then Secretary of State Anthony Blinken cooked up to fight the Viv Ansanm, which a Pentagon spokesman called a “proto-insurgency” this past summer.
The Haitian people almost universally welcomed Henry’s ouster.
But nine days later, Malaysian far-right Elon-Musk-finger-puppet Ian Miles Cheong tweeted out: “Haiti has collapsed. The President [sic] is no longer in the country. The ports are officially closed. Cannibal gangs are besieging the national palace in Port-au-Prince,” to which Musk immediately replied “End of days. This is bleaker than Mad Max.”
But a savior quickly stepped forward. The next day, El Salvador’s hard-right president Nayib Bukele, tweeted back to Cheong: “We can fix it. But we’ll need a UNSC [UN Security Council] resolution, the consent of the host country, and all the mission expenses to be covered.”
Steam rolling international law
Now, two and a half years later, Bukele’s Rambo moment has finally come. At this writing on Oct. 27, some 450 Salvadoran soldiers have already landed in Haiti in the past five days, with another 700 reportedly to arrive soon. The first deployment was 100 “special forces” troops deployed on Oct. 22, the day after Bukele announced his “rescue operation.” (As we go to press, the Salvadoran outlet Tendencias reports that there are now 1,000 Salvadoran soldiers in Haiti.)
But these soon-to-be 1,100-odd Salvadoran troops are not deployed as part of the Gang Suppression Force (GSF), launched in September 2025, which is current Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s enlarged and overhauled version of Blinken’s MSS. The Salvadorans sent this past week are commanded unilaterally by Bukele, a egregious departure from his Mar. 10, 2024 tweet (need “a UNSC resolution”) and a flagrant violation of the UN Charter.
Photo: U.S. State Department
What prompted the unlawful Salvadoran deployment was the Oct. 18 killing of five GSF mercenaries, four of whom were Salvadoran aircraft mechanics that were part of a contingent of some 80 Salvadorans attached to both the MSS and GSF.
Although Haïti Liberté reported last week that the mercenaries had burned to death in their armored car, the U.S. and El Salvador continued to insist, without any evidence, that they were alive. So the troops that Bukele is sending are a supposed “rescue mission.”
But this ruse appeared to be foiled on Oct. 24 when the Chen Mechan (Mean Dog) armed group, a Viv Ansanm affiliate, returned the bodies of the mercenaries, whom they said were killed in the armored car ambush and burning.
However, Bukele rejects that the bodies are those of his GSF-attached soldiers, even though the GSF command itself contradicts him, saying that it does not know.
Fils-Aimé missing in action
Meanwhile, the second of Bukele’s 2024 “fix it” conditions was also not met. There was absolutely no “consent from the host country.” First, this consent is impossible to obtain because Haiti only has a U.S.-protected, increasingly unpopular, de facto Prime Minister, Alix Didier Fils-Aimé, who rules by decree. But the second reason was that Fils-Aimé was not even present in Haiti when Bukele started to land his troops there. Fils-Aimé had left the country on Oct. 22 on a private jet to attend a wedding in Mexico, not returning until Oct. 27.
To add insult to injury, the newsroom of Corvington Matin reports that “the private jet chartered by the de facto Prime Minister to attend a wedding in Mexico last week cost the public treasury more than $100,000 USD, based on the rental rates listed for this aircraft, which logged 16 hours of flight time to transport Alix Didier Fils-Aimé and his family… The plane departed from Port-au-Prince and made a stopover in Miami both outbound and on its return. Even after this trip, the population had still not been informed of the Prime Minister’s absence from the national territory.”
That leaves the third condition as the only question mark: “all the mission expenses [need] to be covered.” As Bukele’s unilateral deployment does not fall under the purview of the GSF, one has to wonder: who is going to cover its costs? The only logical answer: the U.S. taxpayer.
Haïti Liberté asked the U.S. State Department if it had any foreknowledge or gave any approval to Bukele for his deployment. It seems very unlikely that he would have sent his troops to Haiti without a nod from Washington, specifically Marco Rubio.
Bukele’s El Salvador is one of the Trump administration’s “closest Central American allies,” reports The Latin Times. “Bukele has long positioned the United States as El Salvador’s most vital international partner, and his government has shown little interest in concealing its alignment with the Trump administration’s broader agenda,” which includes “push back against Chinese Communist Party activity” in the hemisphere and “Washington’s ongoing effort to press allied governments to withhold engagement from Havana,” particularly before the Oct. 28 vote on the General Assembly resolution calling for an end to the U.S. embargo against Cuba. Both of those subjects were alluded to in the State Department’s readout of the Oct. 13 call between Rubio and Bukele. It is reasonable to suspect that Haiti was also discussed.
So was Bukele given any assurances that he would be reimbursed for this deployment? Are he and Rubio going to try to get the money, after the fact, from the United Nations Support Office in Haiti (UNSOH), a mechanism Rubio devised to siphon off funds from the UN peace-keeping budget to support the GSF’s logistics?
“Viewed strictly as invaders”
Whatever Rubio did or didn’t promise, Bukele’s troops have landed on a battlefield that his “Bukele model” was never built for. Salvadoran soldiers rounding up tattooed youths in San Salvador’s barrios is one thing. Fighting the Viv Ansanm in the warrens of Croix-des-Missions and the open plain of Croix-des-Bouquets is something else.
That is the judgment of Chris Martin, who should know. A former U.S. Special Forces adviser with three combat rotations in Afghanistan’s Regional Command-South, Martin also served as the U.S. Contingent Commander in Haiti under the UN’s MINUSTAH mission, and was personally tasked with training the Haitian National Police (PNH) SWAT team. In an Oct. 25 assessment on his Linkedin site entitled “The Bukele Escalation: Parallel Operations and the Kinetic Limits of the Salvadoran Model in Haiti,” Martin argues that Bukele “bypassed the slow-moving GSF oversight frameworks to launch a parallel, unilateral rescue operation,” which “entirely fractures the unified command structure” of the UN-authorized mission.
Martin’s critique starts with the uniforms. By sending aviation technicians and then hundreds of special forces onto the streets of Port-au-Prince in full combat gear, Martin writes, the Salvadoran command “committed a baseline tactical error.” On an asymmetric battlefield, he explains, “your visual profile dictates how you are targeted.” Entering a theater “completely blind to the local language, culture, and human terrain,” the foreigner’s “uniform ceases to be a symbol of state power – it becomes a high-visibility target marker.” The neighborhood fighters, Martin notes, don’t need to match the invaders’ technology. They “simply wait for predictable armored columns to enter their pre-planned kill zones.”
But Martin’s most important point is political, not tactical. Planners in Washington and San Salvador call their targets “gangs,” “criminals,” and “terrorists.” But they don’t know how people in Haiti’s popular neighborhoods where the Viv Ansanm was born see those fighters, nor, more importantly, how they see the GSF and now Salvadoran special forces flooding in. “To the population on the ground, these external units are viewed strictly as invaders,” Martin writes.
The foreign offensive, he argues, is propping up “an unrepresentative proxy government that contains zero elected officials and governs strictly by executive decree” – the government of the jet-setting Fils-Aimé. In doing so, it “forces a nationalist consolidation.” Rivalries among armed groups are “instantly erased by the presence of a foreign boot,” and the armed groups can now present their fight “as an indigenous defense of national sovereignty,” with the community becoming their “intelligence and logistical shield.”
Martin, in assessing what advantage the Viv Ansanm coalition might have, examines what he calls “the Spirit of 1804.” Haiti was “forged in the fire of the first successful slave revolution in human history,” he reminds the “armchair strategists.” When foreign troops arrive on foreign planes, “it does not matter what color uniform the external forces wear, or whether they travel north from San Salvador or south from Washington.” In Haiti’s collective memory, they are “instantly mapped onto the historical archetype of the oppressor,” and the local fighters are transformed “in the eyes of the community from regional actors into Warriors.”
His bottom line is blunt: “conventional forces only control what they can physically sit on, while local networks govern the terrain.” Far from saving Haiti’s de facto regime, “Bukele’s unilateral escalation has inadvertently accelerated the collapse of the proxy state’s legitimacy.” With elections indefinitely postponed, Martin concludes, “Bukele is attempting to enforce security from the top down to protect a hollow political framework that has completely run out of road.”
“We are not afraid”
Martin’s prediction is already playing out. In a video released on Oct. 25, Joseph Wilson, better known as Lanmò San Jou (“Death doesn’t know what day it is coming”), the leader of the 400 Mawozo armed group which controls much of Croix-des-Bouquets, addressed Bukele directly. He invoked the name of Jean-Jacques Dessalines, the founding father who led Haiti’s revolutionary army to victory over Napoleon’s troops in 1803 and declared independence on Jan. 1, 1804.
Wilson said the four Salvadorans were already dead, killed by “an error” when they strayed into a neighboring group’s territory in an unknown vehicle, and denied that his men were involved. Had he captured them, he told Bukele, “you would have left El Salvador and come sit at the table with me. I would have taken them alive.” And his price would have been political: “I would have told you to remove all foreigners from Haiti,” he said. “Having foreigners here is not in our interest; they aren’t going to change anything for us here.”
Wilson also displayed three men he said were PNH officers held captive. All three criticized the de facto government for the attention it is lavishing on the Salvadorans while neglecting their own release. And Wilson made clear that his men would not run from the Salvadorans but would stand and fight, because, he said, they “are not afraid.”
Washington and the Haitian bourgeois press will dismiss such language as gangster bravado. But it is exactly the “nationalist consolidation” that Martin warns about. By sending in a foreign army under his personal command, Bukele has handed leaders like Wilson the mantle of Dessalines. Whatever one thinks of the Viv Ansanm, its leaders are now able to cast themselves, with growing credibility in the popular neighborhoods, as defenders of the nation against an invader, much as the Cacos did when they took up arms against the U.S. Marine occupation that began in 1915.
Enter the Dominicans
That patriotic reaction is likely to grow sharper still with the appearance of Dominican soldiers alongside the Salvadorans.
At about 3:30 p.m. on Oct. 26, a correspondent for Live Tanbou Verite was at the Carrefour Marin in Croix-des-Missions, in the Chen Mechan neighborhood, just as a large firefight between the Salvadoran forces and Viv Ansanm fighters was getting underway. The correspondent saw a soldier in a Dominican military uniform step out of an armored vehicle. As the shooting became intense, the soldier climbed back into the tank.
This sighting flatly contradicts Dominican President Luis Abinader, who said on Oct. 26 that “the participation of Dominican personnel was never contemplated” in the international mission’s operations in Haiti.
But Abinader has made no secret of his political backing for Bukele’s adventure. “I identify with the position of President Nayib Bukele, which we must support: to defend the dignity and the life of those four Salvadorans who went to work for peace in the Republic of Haiti,” Abinader tweeted on Oct. 26. The day before, he had announced that he and Bukele had discussed “logistical and intelligence collaboration for operations against criminal gangs in Haiti.” He has also offered the GSF medical care for its wounded. “The relationship with President Bukele is very good,” he said on Oct. 26. And if Bukele wishes to visit the Haitian-Dominican border, Abinader told Diario Libre, “we would obviously receive him and give him all our support.”
Few things could inflame Haitian popular sentiment more than Dominican troops on Haitian soil. Haitians have not forgotten the 1937 Parsley Massacre, when dictator Rafael Trujillo’s troops slaughtered as many as 20,000 Haitians and Dominicans of Haitian descent, nor the 2013 court ruling that stripped tens of thousands of Dominicans of Haitian descent of their citizenship. And they live today with Abinader’s mass deportations of hundreds of thousands of Haitians, pregnant women and children included. A Dominican soldier stepping out of an armored car in Croix-des-Missions is the fulfilment of a long-standing nightmare, and a gift to Viv Ansanm recruiters.
“No one is permitted to leave”
The scale and ferocity of the offensive is documented in a GSF Situation Report dated Oct. 26 and obtained by Haïti Liberté.
“The deployment of elite Salvadoran troops to rescue their kidnapped technicians has triggered fierce fighting, prompting the Haitian government to declare the situation an ‘absolute priority’ and leading to the immediate establishment of an international security cordon,” the report states.
“A contingent of 100 elite Salvadoran soldiers is conducting a massive sweep, supported by armored vehicles from the Haitian National Police (PNH) and the Salvadoran forces (GSF), throughout the strongholds of Santo, Marassa, Shada, and Croix-des-Bouquets,” the report continues. “NO ONE is permitted to leave without being screened.”
Note the confusion of command, where the “Salvadoran forces” are equated with the GSF. This is exactly what Martin warns about. The “elite” Salvadoran forces are leading the operation, merely getting “support” from the PNH, the only armed force (along with Haiti’s army) that the 1987 Haitian Constitution allows on the soil of the oldest republic in Latin America, and the GSF, the only foreign force recognized (but not directed) by the UN Security Council. Bukele’s troops are operating solely under his own authority. According to the Miami Herald, Bukele is having his troops “operate independently of the [GSF] mission, answering directly to his commander on the ground in Haiti,” while flights of soldiers and equipment, at least a dozen so far, keep landing “without prior notice.”
The report adds that the fighting has caused “the collapse of hospital operations” in the area. “To prevent a mass escape of armed criminals and an incursion into its territory – driven by the ferocity of the offensive – Dominican President Luis Abinader has ordered a total and absolute closure of the borders,” the SITREP (in military parlance) says. “The military has been deployed on high alert, and armed clashes have also been reported along the border.”
In other words, the international “cordon” is a military vise, with the Salvadorans, supported by the GSF and the PNH, squeezing from the west and the Dominican army sealing the east.
The cost of this operation is being paid, as always, by the people who live in these neighborhoods. Dozens of local residents have been killed in the fighting that the Salvadoran, GSF, and PNH assault has unleashed in and around Croix-des-Missions and Croix-des-Bouquets. (Haïti Liberté is unable to publish the videos and photographs of four innocent Haitian civilian victims of the Salvadoran/GSF attack due to their graphic nature, which would cause this article to be censored online, but they can be viewed by clicking Here, Here, Here, and Here.)
The invaders are also taking losses: according to a highly placed source in the Viv Ansanm, 11 Chadian GSF soldiers have been killed, but their deaths have not been announced by the force.
Meanwhile, the drone war being waged on the capital’s popular neighborhoods continues. Five drones were exploded in Belair on Oct. 25, and four soldiers of the Village de Dieu armed group, headed by Johnson “Izo” André, were killed.
Three armies against one
The result is a war without precedent in Haiti’s modern history. The Viv Ansanm is now fighting three different armies at once: a private one, Erik Prince’s Vectus Global, whose mercenaries operate the drones and armored car death-squads that have killed hundreds in the capital’s poor neighborhoods; a multinational one, the GSF, authorized by the UN Security Council but designed in Washington; and now a binational one, the Salvadoran expeditionary force, with Dominican support, at the very least.
None of these three forces answers to the Haitian people. Not one has been authorized by an elected Haitian official, because there are none left.
The “Shield of the Americas”
The Salvadoran-Dominican partnership in Haiti is not happening in a vacuum. On Oct. 26 and 27, Abinader hosted in Santo Domingo a conference of the Americas Counter Cartel Coalition (A3C), co-organized by the Dominican Defense Ministry and the U.S. Southern Command (SOUTHCOM), whose commander, Marine Gen. Francis L. Donovan, opened the gathering alongside Abinader and U.S. Ambassador Leah Francis Campos. Defense and security officials from 19 hemispheric nations attended to finalize “a strategic operational plan” and a “governance charter” for “combined operations” against “criminal networks,” according to the U.S. Embassy. SOUTHCOM itself trumpeted the meeting on X.
The A3C was announced in March by Pete Hegseth, Trump’s “Secretary of War,” and the U.S. Embassy describes it as “independent, but complementary” to the “Shield of the Americas,” the U.S.-led military and political coalition that Trump launched on Mar. 7 in Doral, near Miami. Headquartered at SOUTHCOM, the Shield promises member states “increased access to U.S. military equipment, training, and intelligence.” Among its founding members: El Salvador and the Dominican Republic. Bukele personally attended its launch.
So Bukele’s “rescue mission” and Abinader’s logistical and intelligence support are not improvised acts of neighborly solidarity. They are the first live-fire test of the Shield of the Americas, the vehicle through which Washington aims to militarize the Caribbean and Latin America under the banner of fighting “cartels” and “narco-terrorists.” That banner has already been used to justify lethal U.S. strikes on boats in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific (there was another strike on Oct. 27) and the military campaign against Venezuela.
Haiti, where the Viv Ansanm has been labeled a “foreign terrorist organization” by Rubio’s State Department, is the next laboratory.
Rubio’s Haitian interests?
Which brings us back to Marco Rubio, the architect of both the GSF and the hemispheric crusade against “narco-terrorism.” Does he have more than a policy interest in Haiti?
According to a very reliable Haïti Liberté source in Haiti, Rubio’s longtime friend and former roommate, ex-Congressman David Rivera, told him that Rubio had 140 businesses in Haiti. Rivera said this in August 2019, during a lengthy meeting with our source in Haiti. Rivera was in the country, the source said, seeking to bribe then-President Jovenel Moïse into opening the Haitian market to a range of Dominican products. It was while pitching this scheme that Rivera spoke about Rubio’s business interests in Haiti.
Haïti Liberté has not been able to independently verify Rivera’s claim. But if Rubio, or people close to him, have significant commercial stakes in Haiti, that would give him a powerful incentive to back a military offensive to “clear” the country of the armed groups that the Haitian bourgeoisie and its foreign masters see as a threat to their hegemony, business interests, and power.
Rivera and Rubio go back a long way. Before Rivera served in Congress from 2011 to 2013, the two Florida Republicans shared a home in Tallahassee as they rose together through the state legislature, and they remained close allies afterwards.
On Oct. 2, a federal judge in Miami sentenced Rivera to 10 years in federal prison for concealing a $50 million lobbying campaign on behalf of Venezuela’s government during Trump’s first term. Tapped by Maduro’s Foreign Minister Delcy Rodríguez, now Venezuela’s acting president, to get Washington to normalize relations, Rivera and a co-defendant, Esther Nuhfer, obtained a three-month, $50 million contract from an affiliate of the state oil company PDVSA. The two then “sought to manipulate influential friends, including Rubio,” the Associated Press reported (Rubio testified that Rivera never mentioned the contract). In the conspirators’ encrypted chat group, Maduro was the “bus driver” and Rubio was “Miss Clairol,” a play on rubio, Spanish for “blond.”
Prosecutors said Rivera hid the deal behind backdated documents and sham agreements, including one covering a $3.75 million payment to maintain his Venezuelan go-between’s luxury yacht. “He used his position of trust – and betrayed it consistently and repeatedly,” said Assistant U.S. Attorney Roger Cruz.
It was not Rivera’s first brush with scandal. He was accused of secretly funding a Democratic spoiler candidate in a 2012 congressional race (the case was eventually dropped) and was investigated, though never charged, over a $1 million contract with a gambling company while a Florida legislator. In other words, the man our source describes as trying to buy access to Haiti’s National Palace in 2019 had a long track record of exactly that kind of dealing.
Rivera, a stalwart of Miami’s Cuban-American anti-communist establishment, did not work for Caracas out of any sympathy for the government of Nicolás Maduro. He kept the lobbying secret, prosecutors argued, precisely because it “would ruin Rivera’s reputation as an anti-communist stalwart.” Judge Melissa Damian denounced him for betraying his life’s mission. “There’s no dispute this money came from the Maduro regime,” she said. Or, as U.S. Attorney Jason Reding Quiñones put it after the sentencing, “He sold his anti-communism to communists to fill his greed.” His lawyers have now applied for a presidential pardon from Trump.
The question for Haitians is whether the same greed that drove Rivera to Caracas, and to the Haitian National Palace in 2019, also lies behind the enthusiasm in Washington for the Salvadoran invasion of Haiti. Haïti Liberté’s questions to the State Department about what Rubio knew of Bukele’s deployment, and when, remain unanswered.
What is clear is that the Haitian people, once again, find foreign armies on their soil, in violation of their Constitution, fighting a war that they did not choose, to protect a government that they did not elect. As Chris Martin warns, history suggests how that might end.
