Bukele sends his soldiers to Haiti: who is in command, and for whom?

According to Al Jazeera, Salvadoran president Nayib Bukele is championing a military intervention in Haiti. Salvadoran soldiers are in the process of being deployed there. At the same time, the Haitian police have found a vehicle used by four missing Salvadoran technicians. The fate of these four men is not known at this stage. We will say no more: while their families and the authorities have no answers, any speculation would be indecent.

The rest is our reading, and it comes down to one question the dispatch does not settle: who requested this intervention, under what mandate, and before whom will its perpetrators be held to account? Al Jazeera's report, as we know it, gives no detail on the legal framework or the timetable. It is precisely this vagueness that deserves attention.

Haiti knows this script. Since its independence, won in 1804, the country has paid dearly for having existed: indemnities imposed on its former colonial master, occupations, trusteeships, successive missions sent to "stabilise" without ever rebuilding. Each time, security is decided elsewhere, and Haitians are spectators. Nothing says this time will be different, and nothing says it won't: it is for those deploying troops to prove it.

Then there is the figure of the deployer. Bukele has cultivated an image as the iron-fisted prince of his own country; exporting it turns a security model into a loss leader. A small country playing regional policeman gains visibility and credit with the capitals that matter, Washington foremost among them. We do not claim to establish an American order here: the dispatch does not say so. But the alignment of an intermediate power with the priorities of the centre is a well-known mechanism. The Gazette's conceptual notes on dependency remind us that in such configurations, a local elite can take charge of the machinery of order without touching the structure: you change the flag on the uniform, not the hierarchy.

There is also the price paid by the soldiers and technicians sent there. They too are ordinary Salvadorans, whose safety depends on decisions taken in a palace. The disappearance of the four technicians is a cruel reminder of this: an intervention is measured by its risks, not by its communiqués.

Haitian sovereignty will not be decided by the number of armoured vehicles. It will be decided by Haitians' capacity to determine their own security, their budget and their reconstruction, without order becoming a commodity delivered by an overeager neighbour. A foreign force can contain violence for a few months; it cannot replace a legitimate state or an economy that feeds its people. As long as these two questions remain unanswered, talk of a "solution" is little more than communication.

We will follow the fate of the four technicians and the exact conditions of the deployment. Facts first, stories of greatness afterwards.