El Salvador has sent roughly a thousand troops into Haiti after a gang kidnapped four of its soldiers, a major escalation that's bad news for Haiti's gangs and a test case for whether a foreign strongman can succeed where the world has failed.

• Haitian gangs control most of the capital and kidnapped four Salvadoran airmen during an ambush in gang territory on October 18; their fate is still unknown.
• El Salvador's president, known for his harsh crackdown on gangs at home, responded by deploying troops on his own authority, bypassing the slow-moving international peacekeeping mission that has badly underperformed.
• Haiti's government and the international community have stayed silent, and US military flights are helping move the Salvadoran troops, so Washington appears to be backing the operation.
• El Salvador's military is small, inexperienced, and poorly equipped for this kind of urban fight, so success against entrenched, heavily armed gangs is far from guaranteed.
• There's a political upside for El Salvador's president too: a win in Haiti would boost his influence across Latin America, where other leaders are already copying his anti-gang playbook.

Outlook: The standoff hinges on whether the hostages are found alive — if they're killed or stay missing, expect the Salvadoran deployment to grow rather than withdraw.