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By Sarah Morland
Oct 29 (Reuters) - El Salvador's deployment of thousands of troops to Haiti, days after four Salvadoran members of a UN-backed force went missing in a gang ambush, is the first major overseas test of President Nayib Bukele's anti-gang tactics.
Around 2,000 Salvadoran soldiers were in Haiti as of Wednesday night, a security official told Reuters. Two sources with knowledge of the matter said these would for now be capped at 2,500.
Yet authorities have not clarified the troops' command, or rules of engagement, fueling concerns of more risks to civilians in a country with a long history of harmful foreign interventions.
Bukele billed the deployments as a rescue mission for four aircraft technicians who were part of the UN-backed Gang Suppression Force in Haiti. They have been missing since they jumped from a burning vehicle during the ambush in a gang-controlled area on the outskirts of the capital Port-au-Prince.
Haitian and Salvadoran authorities have said the troops' main mission is to rescue the missing technicians. But the deployment's size - matching in 10 days what the UN-backed force struggled to deploy over more than a year - has prompted questions over whether the soldiers could be part of a broader and longer-term operation.
On Thursday, Bukele said the deployments were nearly finished and his government was covering 90% of the costs.
Bukele, in office since 2019, won huge popularity at home with tough-on-crime policies, including a gang crackdown that relied heavily on mass incarceration. Other governments have sought to replicate his approach, despite rights activists' warnings over due process and innocent deaths.
Bukele would, however, likely encounter a profoundly different security environment in Haiti, analysts warned, as institutions have been whittled down by corruption and faltering funds, prisons are vastly overcrowded, the judiciary paralyzed and many gang recruits are underage.
"This could help increase support for Bukele if this helps his narrative of being an anti-gang force in the region and delivering results," said Maria Fernanda Arocha, an analyst at conflict monitoring group ACLED.
"We don't know if this will bring the results he is expecting."
A CID Gallup poll on Wednesday showed 86% of Salvadorans approved of the Haiti mission, though 82% also expressed concern for their countrymen.
In El Salvador, security analysts said they were cautious of a risky mission without a formal agreement, UN backing, or support from the Shield of the Americas - a US-led anti-crime coalition the Trump administration launched earlier this year.
POINTS TO ESCALATION
Haiti's unelected leaders have since 2022 called for international forces to help fight heavily-armed gangs that have expanded their influence beyond the capital and are responsible for massacres, gang rapes and widespread extortion.
But successive UN-backed missions were slow to deploy, leaving a fractured security response. Haiti hired a private military company run by Blackwater founder Erik Prince to fight the gangs, which nonetheless continued to make gains.
Sam Vigersky, a policy expert at the Council on Foreign Relations, said he believed the UN-backed mission - renewed for just six months in September - was under pressure to produce results but the Salvadorans' arrival signaled more chaos.
"The overall security picture is not pointing towards one of stabilization, it's pointing towards one of escalation," he said.
Since the October 18 ambush, the area has been the site of continuous armed clashes. A security official said operations there were largely run by Haitian police.
Romain Le Cour Grandmaison, a security expert at the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime, said residents were skeptical of yet another foreign intervention and had reported heavy gunfire, drone strikes and possible civilian deaths.
He said he was not aware of humanitarian corridors to help people escape: "The gang leaders do not want people to leave the area because they probably want to use them as shields and make sure the population actually slows operations against them."
Washington has not publicly supported the mission but a US military official said Pentagon C-130s helped it deploy.
Irwin Stotzky, a rights expert at the University of Miami, said the US administration, which ended immigration protections for about 350,000 Haitians, has reasons to be invested.
"We've got to make it appear as if it's safe to send 350,000 people back to Haiti, when they actually are in great fear of their lives," he said.
(Reporting by Sarah Morland in Mexico City, Harold Isaac in Port-au-Prince, Gerardo Arbaiza in San Salvador; Additional reporting by Simon Lewis in Washington; editing by Cassandra Garrison and Sanjeev Miglani)
