He asked for the address on Friday. By Sunday the house was rubble — and on Tuesday, El Salvador's President Nayib Bukele posted the video himself. "We kept our promise," he wrote in Haitian Creole. "We destroyed the house of Lanmò San Jou and the 400 Mawozo gang's headquarters. Most of them ran away without even trying to fight. What cowards!"
The promise was made in public, to the whole internet. Last Friday, replying to a post showing the gang leader's house, Bukele wrote in Haitian Creole: "Where is this house? Give us the exact address, and we'll destroy it." The post has been viewed nearly nine million times. The address evidently arrived: two days later, Haitian police and Salvadoran soldiers destroyed one of the homes of Wilson Joseph — "Lanmò San Jou," leader of the 400 Mawozo gang — in Croix-des-Bouquets, in an operation Haitian reports describe as explosive-drone strikes backed by helicopters. The destruction was confirmed by a lobbyist for the Salvadoran government. Joseph himself was not there; Haiti's gang leaders move between several houses, and he remains at large.
The gang saw it coming and reached for lawyers' language. Before the strike, 400 Mawozo had written to Haiti's disarmament commission and to the United Nations asking for dialogue, describing Joseph's home as "a symbol of peace" and citing the Geneva Conventions. Joseph had already told reporters the four missing Salvadoran military technicians are dead — killed, he says, in an ambush on a rival gang's territory — and he now calls for peace negotiations. This is the same gang that kidnapped 17 missionaries from an Ohio-based charity in 2021 and demanded a million dollars for each of them; Joseph is charged in the United States in connection with that kidnapping, charges he has not been convicted of.
The operation is part of a campaign with no real precedent: some 2,500 Salvadoran troops are now on the ground in Haiti — a larger force than the UN-backed Gang Suppression Force — operating under an agreement between the two governments since October, after the four Salvadoran technicians went missing. Haiti's Prime Minister Alix Didier Fils-Aimé is expected in El Salvador next week to discuss the future of that force. For Haiti's ordinary families, who have lived for years under gangs that tax, kidnap and kill with impunity, the sight of a gang palace actually falling is something the United Nations never delivered. For the United States, a Haiti run by gangs is a migration crisis in the making ninety minutes from Florida — which is why a Salvadoran president is now fighting America's nearest failed state, one promised address at a time.
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