image copyrightFBI
"We have destroyed the house of Lanmò San Jou and the headquarters of 400 Mawozo."
This was the announcement by the president of El Salvador, Nayib Bukele, this Tuesday on the social network X.
Along with the message, written in Haitian Creole, he shared a video that showed at least three helicopters flying over and opening fire on a two-story home in a rural area and people fleeing the area.
"Lanmò San Jou" is the alias of Wilson Joseph and 400 Mawozo, the criminal group he heads, one of the most powerful in Haiti.
The gang allegedly ambushed and kidnapped four Salvadoran aviation technicians, members of a multilateral anti-gang force, on October 18, prompting Bukele to send more than 2,000 soldiers to the Caribbean country to reinforce search and rescue operations.
"We are ending the gangs in El Salvador. We can also do it with you," he warned the leaders of the criminal organizations before sending the contingent.
With this, Bukele reminded them of the heavy-handed and incarceration policy with which he managed to drastically reduce violence in the Central American nation, while at the same time garnering accusations of alleged human rights violations.
image copyrightNayib Bukele/X
This Tuesday's attack occurred after a user on
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"Where is this house? Give us the exact address and we will destroy it," Bukele then responded.
Now, when sharing the video of the operation, he stressed: "We kept our promise."
Although he clarified that the "majority (of the members) fled without even trying to fight." "What cowards!" he added.
But what is known about Lanmò San Jou and how much power does his organization, 400 Mawozo, have?
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At 33 years old, Wilson Joseph (Haiti, February 28, 1993) is one of the most powerful gang leaders in the Caribbean nation.
US authorities have formally charged him with kidnapping and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is offering a reward of up to US$1 million for information leading to his capture.
With dark skin, hair and eyes - according to the file shared by the FBI - he is about 1.70 m tall, sports several large scars and tattoos that include a skull, a spider web, a knife and a snake, and has a disease that affects his kidneys.
His name and that of the group he leads, 400 Mawozo, gained notoriety in October 2021 for the abduction of 17 Western missionaries and their families, including five children, who were held captive for 61 days.
Although the gang had been kidnapping ordinary Haitians for years.
In fact, according to several analysts, kidnapping is one of their sources of income, in addition to extortion and smuggling across the border with the Dominican Republic.
The gang controls Croix-des-Bouquets, a strategic neighborhood and major hot spot north of Port-au-Prince.
It was precisely there where the Salvadoran military members of the Gang Suppression Force (GSF) lost track of them on October 18. These are aviation technicians who, Bukele argues, were not in the country to "wage war" and supported medical evacuations.
The United Nations Security Council Commission also points to Joseph as responsible, "either directly or through orders given to members of his gang" for other crimes and human rights abuses.
The list includes deadly attacks "against defenseless people", rapes, including minors, recruitment of children, robberies, looting, destruction of public property such as prisons and police stations, assault and theft of trucks, as well as having prevented the arrival of humanitarian aid and medical services to the area it controls.
"Thanks to a logic of territorial expansion that it developed strongly in recent years, 400 Mawozo is one of the most powerful groups in the country," Romain Le Cour Grandmaison, director of the Haiti Observatory of the Global Initiative against Transnational Organized Crime (GI-TOC), confirmed to BBC Mundo.
According to the expert, from dominating a large territory in the area between urban and rural on the outskirts of Port-au-Prince, it went on to control access and the highway axis that connects Haiti with the neighboring Dominican Republic, a nation with which it shares an island.
"With this access he managed to collect systematic extortion from everything that enters and leaves through that axis, which gives him considerable financial resources," said the expert.
"But above all, he became an intermediary in arms trafficking from the Dominican Republic, with accomplices on both sides of the border, for himself and to sell them to other gangs."
image copyrightEPA/Shutterstock
In turn, 400 Mawozo is part of the Viv Ansanm gang coalition, which means "Living together" in Haitian Creole, whose creation was officially announced in February 2024 and which has come to control almost 90% of the capital and surrounding areas.
According to Le Cour, the groups that make it up maintain sovereignty over the territory they dominate and have no obligation to defend their allies or share resources.
What unites them is a non-aggression pact that allows them to move through another gang's territory, share information and coordinate to launch joint offensives.
Although the analyst warns that in recent months the coalition has been fragmenting and that it remains to be seen whether or not the Salvadoran mission sent by Bukele will strengthen it.
Call on the UN to mediate
Joseph is active on his social networks, where he talks about his actions directly to users, showing weapons, sometimes together with other members of his group.
Through them he assured for the first time, and contradicting the official story, that the four Salvadoran soldiers are dead.
He would later insist on this, although without presenting evidence, in an interview offered to the AP news agency on November 2.
In it, the gang member better known as Lanmò San Jou explained that the Salvadorans died during the ambush in Santo, in Croix-des-Bouquets, a territory controlled by another group, Chen Mechan.
Meanwhile, the official version continues to be that they are missing: on October 24, human remains were found that have not yet been identified, and Bukele affirms that they are not those of his men.
Likewise, Joseph said he was upset that drone attacks are killing civilians and assured that the clashes have only intensified since the GSF – backed by the UN and working alongside the Haitian National Police and the private company Vectus Global – began fighting armed gangs on the Cul-de-Sac plains, near Port-au-Prince, after the attack against the Salvadorans.
Along those lines, he said he had a message for President Bukele.
"Haitian politicians are the fathers of the gangs and the rebels... and they do not want this to stop," he stressed, while warning that violence could worsen.
image copyrightEPA
For this reason, he confirmed to AP that he had requested the UN to send an international delegation to facilitate a process of dialogue and mediation in Haiti, in a letter addressed to its secretary general, António Guterres.
"Given the vengeful statements, expectations and threats of Mr. Nayib Bukele, I fear that this situation will lead to an intensification of violence and a logic of retaliation, of which the Haitian people would be the first victim," Joseph wrote in his letter.
United Nations spokesman Stéphane Dujarric confirmed that the organization received a letter signed by Joseph, but clarified that this does not imply that it endorses its content nor does it imply recognition of his statements.
Likewise, he clarified that the vast majority of the Salvadoran military is not deployed under the GSF and, therefore, they are outside its mandate.
Doubts about the Salvadoran contingent
Under whose command it acts is one of the questions that continues to surround the Salvadoran contingent.
A bilateral agreement with Haiti would have been approved on October 28, although its terms have not been made public. The Haitian government speaks of cooperation "within the framework of the GSF", without further detail, while Bukele has not mentioned said multilateral force.
It also came to light that Bukele sent the contingent, made up of special forces, after receiving approval from US President Donald Trump on October 27.
"You have to do what you have to do," Trump told him, as he himself told journalists who asked him about it.
After being deployed, on November 3, the Salvadoran attack helicopters repelled gangs that were attacking Chadian GSF soldiers, according to a publication in Bukele's X.
According to the American media Axios, the next day, the US charge d'affaires in Haiti, David Howell, complained in a message to the Haitian Prime Minister, Alix Didier Fils-Aimé, that El Salvador was not "coordinating" its actions with the GSF.
According to Axios, Howell would have asked the prime minister to inform the Salvadoran Ministry of Defense to stop operations "as soon as possible... until there is coordination." The media also pointed out that the US Embassy in San Salvador had sent a formal letter to the Bukele government expressing that same idea.
BBC Mundo requested comments on the matter from the Presidency of El Salvador, but we have not received a response.
For his part, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio confirmed that Bukele personally called Trump to inform him of the operation and that "the president understood why he was doing it," although he clarified that Washington "is not necessarily" actively involved in that effort.
When in an exchange with journalists at the Homestead Air Reserve Base in Florida on November 8, one of them questioned whether the simultaneous presence of different armed actors could weaken the GSF, Rubio responded that the risk exists only if the chain of command fails.
"What you can't have is the gang suppression force meeting Salvadoran soldiers and shooting each other because they believe the other side are gang members," the Secretary of State warned.
image source, Reuters
"The question is no longer just under which command (the Salvadoran military) acts, but who responds if something goes wrong," Le Cour told BBC Mundo.
And he pointed out that it is not publicly known what rules they follow, what their objectives are or what the duration of the deployment is.
"If these Salvadoran elements end up integrated into a joint and coordinated public security strategy, perhaps they can make a certain difference, because more troops are needed. If they go their own way, what they unfortunately do is add cacophony and chaos to a strategy that is already dysfunctional," the expert stressed.
Haiti has been mired in a serious crisis for years that deepened after the assassination in 2021 of its then president, Jovenel Moïse.
Violence by armed gangs has displaced a record 1.5 million people in recent years, in addition to leaving more than 5,700 dead and injured from January to mid-September, and more than 230 people kidnapped, according to the United Nations.
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