Photo credit, FBI
“We destroyed the house of Lanmò San Jou and the headquarters of the 400 Mawozo.”
This was announced by the President of El Salvador, Nayib Bukele, on Tuesday on the social network X.
Accompanying the message, written in Haitian Creole, he shared a video showing at least three helicopters flying over a two-story house in a rural area and opening fire on it, while people fled the scene.
“Lanmò San Jou” is Wilson Joseph’s pseudonym, and the “400 Mawozo” is the criminal group he leads — one of the most powerful in Haiti.
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The gang allegedly ambushed and kidnapped four Salvadoran aviation technicians — members of a multilateral anti-gang force — on October 18, leading Bukele to send more than 2,000 military personnel to the Caribbean country to step up search and rescue operations.
"We have put an end to the gangs in El Salvador. We can do the same with you," he warned the leaders of the criminal organizations before sending the contingent.
Bukele was referring to his policy of "iron fist" and mass incarceration, thanks to which he managed to drastically reduce violence in this Central American nation, while attracting criticism for alleged human rights violations.
Photo credit, Nayib Bukele/X
This Tuesday's attack came after a user on X published, on November 5, a photo of what he presented as the headquarters of the 400 Mawozo gang, asking the Salvadoran president to put an end to it.
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“Where is this house? Give us the exact address and we will destroy it,” Bukele replied.
Sharing the video of the operation, he stressed: “We kept our promise.”
However, he clarified that the "majority (of the members) fled without even trying to fight." “What cowards!”, he added.
But what do we know about Lanmò San Jou and how much power does his organization, 400 Mawozo, have?
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At 33 years old, Wilson Joseph (born in Haiti on February 28, 1993) is one of the most powerful gang leaders in this Caribbean nation.
American authorities have formally charged him with kidnapping, and the FBI (Federal Bureau of Investigation) is offering a reward of up to one million US dollars for information leading to his capture.
According to the identification sheet released by the FBI, he has dark skin, hair and eyes; he is approximately 1.70 m tall, has several significant scars as well as tattoos — including a skull, a spider web, a knife and a snake — and suffers from kidney disease.
His name, like that of the group he leads, the “400 Mawozo”, gained sad notoriety in October 2021 during the kidnapping of 17 Western missionaries and their relatives, including five children, who remained captive for 61 days.
That said, the gang had already been carrying out kidnappings targeting ordinary Haitian citizens for years.
Indeed, according to several analysts, kidnappings constitute one of their sources of income, alongside extortion and smuggling on the border with the Dominican Republic.
The group controls Croix-des-Bouquets, a strategic neighborhood and major hotspot located north of Port-au-Prince.
It is precisely at this location that we lost track, on October 18, of Salvadoran soldiers who were members of the Gang Suppression Force (GSF). These are aeronautical technicians who, according to Nayib Bukele, were not present in the country to "wage war", but to provide support for medical evacuations.
The UN Security Council commission also names Joseph as responsible — “either directly or through orders given to members of his gang” — for other crimes and human rights violations.
The list includes deadly attacks "against defenseless people", rape (including of minors), recruitment of children, theft, looting, destruction of public property such as prisons and police stations, attacks and theft of trucks, as well as obstruction of the delivery of humanitarian aid and medical services in the area it controls.
“Thanks to a logic of territorial expansion that it has vigorously developed in recent years, the “400 Mawozo” group has become one of the most powerful in the country,” confirmed to BBC Mundo Romain Le Cour Grandmaison, director of the Haiti Observatory within the *Global Initiative against Transnational Organized Crime* (GI-TOC).
According to this expert, the group went from dominating a vast territory, located in both an urban and rural area on the outskirts of Port-au-Prince, to controlling access and the road linking Haiti to the neighboring Dominican Republic - the country with which Haiti shares the island.
“Thanks to this access, he was able to establish a system of systematic extortion on everything that passes through this axis, which provides him with considerable financial resources,” underlined the expert.
“But above all, he became a middleman in the trafficking of weapons from the Dominican Republic — with accomplices on both sides of the border — both for his own use and for resale to other gangs.”
Photo credit, EPA/Shutterstock
Furthermore, 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 nearly 90% of the capital and its surrounding areas.
According to Le Cour, the groups that compose it retain their sovereignty over the territory they dominate; they are neither required to defend their allies nor to share their resources.
What unites them is a non-aggression pact which allows them to circulate in the territory of another gang, to exchange information and to coordinate to carry out joint offensives.
The analyst points out, however, that the coalition has fragmented in recent months, and that it remains to be seen whether or not the Salvadoran mission sent by Bukele will help to strengthen it.
Call to the UN for mediation
Joseph is active on social networks; he discusses his actions directly with Internet users, showing off weapons, sometimes alongside other members of his group.
It was through this that he affirmed for the first time – thus contradicting the official version – that the four Salvadoran soldiers were dead.
He later reiterated this assertion, without providing proof, during an interview with the AP news agency on November 2.
The gang leader, better known as "Lanmò San Jou", explained that the Salvadorans had died during an ambush in Santo, in the commune of Croix-des-Bouquets - a territory controlled by a rival group, "Chen Mechan".
For its part, the official version maintains that they are missing: on October 24, human remains — not yet identified — were discovered, but Bukele assures that they are not his men.
Furthermore, Joseph expressed his dissatisfaction with drone attacks, which cause the deaths of civilians. He said the clashes had only intensified since the GSF — backed by the UN and operating in collaboration with the Haitian National Police as well as the private company Vectus Global — began fighting armed gangs in the Cul-de-Sac plain, near Port-au-Prince, following the attack targeting the Salvadorans.
In this context, he indicated that he had a message to send to President Bukele.
“Haitian politicians are the fathers of the gangs and the rebels… and they don't want this to stop,” he stressed, while warning that violence was likely to intensify.
Photo credit, EPA
In this regard, he confirmed to the AP that he had requested the UN to send an international delegation responsible for facilitating a process of dialogue and mediation in Haiti, in a letter addressed to the Secretary General, António Guterres.
“Given the vindictive statements, expectations and threats of Mr. Nayib Bukele, I fear that this situation will lead to an intensification of violence and a logic of reprisals, of which the Haitian people would be the first victim,” Joseph wrote in his letter.
United Nations spokesperson Stéphane Dujarric confirmed that the organization had received a letter signed by Joseph, while specifying that this did not mean that it supported its content, nor that it recognized the statements made there.
He also clarified that the vast majority of Salvadoran soldiers are not deployed within the framework of the GSF and that they are, therefore, outside its mandate.
Doubts about the Salvadoran contingent
The question of the command under which the Salvadoran contingent operates remains unresolved.
A bilateral agreement with Haiti was reportedly approved on October 28, although its terms have not been made public. The Haitian government mentions cooperation "within the framework of the GSF", without further details, while Bukele made no mention of this multilateral force.
It was also revealed that Bukele sent this contingent, made up of special forces, after obtaining the approval of US President Donald Trump on October 27.
“You have to do what you have to do,” Trump told him, according to what Bukele himself reported to journalists who questioned him on the subject.
After their deployment on November 3, Salvadoran attack helicopters repelled gangs targeting Chadian GSF soldiers, as Bukele reported in a publication on X.
According to the American media Axios, the next day, the United States charge d'affaires in Haiti, David Howell, expressed his dissatisfaction in a message addressed to the Haitian Prime Minister, Alix Didier Fils-Aimé, accusing El Salvador of not "coordinating" its actions with the GSF.
According to Axios, Howell asked the Prime Minister to transmit to the Salvadoran Ministry of Defense the instruction to suspend operations "as soon as possible... until coordination is established." The outlet also reported that the U.S. Embassy in San Salvador sent an official letter to Bukele's government expressing the same demand.
BBC Mundo requested a reaction from the presidency of El Salvador, but received no response.
For his part, the American Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, confirmed that Bukele had personally called Trump to inform him of the operation and that "the president understood the reasons for this approach", while specifying that Washington is "not necessarily" actively involved in this initiative.
On November 8, during an exchange with journalists at Homestead Air Reserve Base, Florida, one of them asked whether the simultaneous presence of different armed actors risked weakening the GSF; Rubio responded that this risk only exists if the chain of command fails.
“What we absolutely must avoid is that the anti-gang force finds itself facing Salvadoran soldiers and that they clash, taking the other side for gang members,” warned the Secretary of State.
Photo credit, Reuters
“The question is no longer just under what command they (the Salvadoran military) operate, but who will be held responsible if things go wrong,” Le Cour told BBC Mundo.
He also pointed out that the rules they follow, their objectives and the duration of their deployment are also not known to the public.
“If these Salvadoran troops end up being integrated into a common and coordinated public security strategy, they could perhaps make a real difference, because it is true that additional troops are needed. If they act on their own, they unfortunately only add cacophony and chaos to an already dysfunctional strategy,” insisted the expert.
Haiti has been plunged into a serious crisis for years, which worsened after the assassination, in 2021, of then-president Jovenel Moïse.
Armed gang violence has displaced a record 1.5 million people in recent years; it also left more than 5,700 dead and injured between January and mid-September, and led to the kidnapping of more than 230 people, according to the United Nations.
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