More than 80 soldiers from Guatemala and El Salvador arrived in Haiti on Friday as part of the Kenyan-led multinational mission to bolster the national police force in the face of spiralling gang violence, a police official told AFP.
The contingent of 75 Guatemalan and eight Salvadoran soldiers will be joined by additional troops in the coming days, deputy police spokesman Lionel Lazarre told AFP.
The personnel are part of the Kenyan-led force that began deploying in June last year. So far, there are 400 officers — most of them Kenyan, but also some from Jamaica and Belize — on site out of an expected 2,500.
But the force is under-equipped as it attempts to stamp out Haiti’s powerful, well-armed gangs, who have been accused of murder, rape, and kidnappings for ransom.
The United Nations estimates that the gangs control about 85 percent of the capital Port-au-Prince, and gang violence…
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