By Sarah Morland
Oct 27 (Reuters) – Around 1,000 soldiers from El Salvador have been sent to Haiti in a string of deployments in recent days after four Salvadoran members of the UN-backed force in Haiti went missing, a security official in Haiti told Reuters on Tuesday.
It remains unclear who will command the new Salvadoran contingent, and how long they will operate in the Caribbean country.
The government, which has gone without elected leaders for years, has struggled to rally foreign support to fight armed gangs that have taken control of much of the capital and surrounding regions, triggering violence that has displaced nearly 1.5 million people.
Tensions have ratcheted up in Haiti since Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele announced a military operation to recover the missing Salvadorans, who have been unaccounted for since leaping from a burning vehicle during a gang ambush on the outskirts of the capital Port-au-Prince on October 18.
Bukele said they were air force technicians returning to base from a market and that he believed they were being held hostage by criminal groups.
No Haitian gang leader has taken responsibility for the attack. Gang leader Wilson Joseph of 400 Mawozo has released videos in which he denies holding the Salvadorans hostage and rejects responsibility for what happened to them.
Prior to the ambush, El Salvador had deployed at least 124 troops as part of the UN-backed Gang Suppression Force, according to a UN report. Bukele later said they were pilots and technicians sent to evacuate injured soldiers, not fight.
Bukele has not said how many soldiers he plans to send to Haiti. His office did not respond to requests for comment.
A US military official told Reuters the US Southern Command had provided C-130 military transport jets to partially help bring the Salvadoran troops to Haiti.
An Ecuadorean commercial airline, Aeroregional, has also scheduled further direct flights to Haiti on Tuesday, data from Flightradar24 showed. Aeroregional did not immediately respond to a request for comment and there are usually no direct flights between the two countries.
President Luis Abinader of the Dominican Republic, the only country to share a land border with Haiti, said in a press conference on Monday he was prepared to provide logistical support to the Salvadoran arrivals.
(Reporting by Sarah Morland in Mexico City, Gerardo Arbaiza in San Salvador and Harold Isaac in Port-au-Prince; Editing by Daina Beth Solomon)
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