Who is Wilson "Lanmò San Jou" Joseph, the powerful gang leader whose house in Haiti Bukele says he has destroyed

Source of the image, Photo caption, US authorities have formally accused Wilson Lanmò San Jou of kidnapping. Author, Leire Ventas, Title of author, BBC News Mundo Correspondent in Los Angeles, Publication date 35 minutes ago, Reading time: 10 min. "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 showing at least three helicopters flying over and opening fire on a two-story house in a rural area and people fleeing the area. "Lanmò San Jou" is the alias of Wilson Joseph and 400 Mawozo is the criminal group he leads, one of the most powerful in Haiti. The gang allegedly ambushed and kidnapped four Salvadoran aviation technicians on October 18, members of a multilateral anti-gang force, which led Bukele to send more than 2,000 military personnel to the Caribbean country to reinforce search and rescue operations. "We are putting an end to gangs in El Salvador. We can do it with you too," he warned the leaders of the criminal organizations before sending the contingent. With this, Bukele was recalling the hardline policy and imprisonment with which he managed to drastically reduce violence in the Central American nation, while simultaneously facing accusations of alleged human rights violations. Source of the image, Nayib Bukele/Photo caption, Bukele shared a video to announce the attack by Salvadoran forces. The attack this Tuesday occurred after a user on X posted a photograph on November 5 of what he claimed was the headquarters of 400 Mawozo and asked the Salvadoran president to end it. "Where is this house? Give us the exact address and we will destroy it," Bukele responded at the time. Now, by sharing the video of the operation, he emphasized: "We fulfilled our promise." Although he clarified that "the majority (of the members) fled without even trying to fight." "How cowardly!" he added. But what is known about Lanmò San Jou and how much power does his organization, 400 Mawozo, have? Wanted by the FBI, Wilson Joseph (Haiti, February 28, 1993), aged 33, is one of the most powerful gang leaders in the Caribbean nation. US authorities have formally accused him of kidnapping, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) offers a reward of up to US$1 million for information leading to his capture. Dark-skinned, dark-haired, and dark-eyed—according to the file shared by the FBI—he is about 1.70 m tall, has several large scars and tattoos including a skull, a spider web, a knife, and a snake, and suffers from a kidney disease. 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, whom they 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 an important hotspot north of Port-au-Prince. It was precisely there that the Salvadoran military personnel, members of the Gang Suppression Force (GSF), went missing on October 18. They are aviation technicians who, Bukele argues, were not in the country to "wage war" and were supporting medical evacuations. Source of the image, FBI/Photo caption, The FBI offers up to US$1 million in exchange for information leading to the location of Wilson Joseph, alias Lanmò San Jou. The United Nations 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 abuses. The list includes deadly attacks "against defenseless people," rape, including of minors, child recruitment, theft, looting, destruction of public property such as prisons and police stations, assault and truck robbery, as well as preventing the arrival of humanitarian aid and medical services in the area under his control." "Thanks to a logic of territorial expansion that he developed strongly in recent years, 400 Mawozo is one of the most powerful groups in the country," confirmed Romain Le Cour Grandmaison, director of the Haitian Observatory of Global Initiative against Transnational Organized Crime (GI-TOC), to BBC Mundo. According to the expert, by dominating a wide territory in the area between urban and rural in the periphery of Port-au-Prince, he came to control access and the road axis connecting Haiti with its neighbor, the Dominican Republic, a nation that shares the island. "With that access, he managed to collect systematic extortion from everything that enters and leaves through that axis, which gives him considerable financial resources," the expert noted. "But, above all, he became an intermediary in the trafficking of weapons from the Dominican Republic, with accomplices on both sides of the border, for himself and to sell them to other gangs." Source of the image, EPA/Shutterstock Photo caption, The gangs control almost 90% of the Haitian capital, Port-au-Prince, and its surroundings. 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 its surroundings. 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 pact of non-aggression that allows them to move through the territory of another gang, share information, and coordinate to launch joint offensives. Although the analyst warns that in recent months the coalition has been fragmenting and it remains to be seen whether the Salvadoran mission sent by Bukele will strengthen it or not. Joseph is active on his social networks, where he speaks about his actions directly to users, showing weapons, sometimes alongside other members of his group. Through them, he asserted for the first time, contradicting the official account, that the four Salvadoran military personnel are dead. He would insist on this later, although without presenting proof, in an interview offered to the AP news agency on November 2. In it, the gangster best 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 remains that they are missing: human remains that have not yet been identified were found on October 24, and Bukele affirms that they are not his men. Furthermore, Joseph said he was upset because drone attacks are killing civilians and asserted that the confrontations 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 the armed gangs in the Cul-de-Sac plains, near Port-au-Prince, after the attack on the Salvadorans. Along these lines, he said he had a message for President Bukele. "Haitian politicians are the parents of the gangs and the rebels... and they don't want this to stop," he stressed, while warning that violence could escalate. Source of the image, EPA/Photo caption, President Nayib Bukele sent a contingent of more than 2,000 military personnel to reinforce the search and rescue operations for the four kidnapped aviation technicians. 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 aggravation of violence and a logic of retaliation, of which the Haitian people would be the first victim," Joseph wrote in his letter. The United Nations spokesperson, Stéphane Dujarric, corroborated that the organization received a letter signed by Joseph, but clarified that this does not imply that it supports its content nor does it imply an acknowledgment of his statements. He also clarified that the vast majority of the Salvadoran military personnel are not deployed under the GSF and, therefore, are outside its mandate. Doubts about the Salvadoran contingent. Under whose command the Salvadoran contingent operates is one of the questions still surrounding the Salvadoran contingent. A bilateral agreement with Haiti was 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 this multilateral force. It also came to light that Bukele sent the contingent, composed of special forces, after receiving approval from the US President, Donald Trump, on October 27. "You have to do what you have to do," Trump told him, according to his own account to journalists who asked him about it. After being deployed, on November 3, Salvadoran attack helicopters repelled gangs attacking Chadian GSF soldiers, according to a post on X by Bukele. According to the US media Axios, the next day, the US chargé d'affaires in Haiti, David Howell, complained in a message addressed to the Haitian Prime Minister, Alix Didier Fils-Aimé, that El Salvador was not "coordinating" its actions with the GSF. According to Axios, Howell allegedly asked the Prime Minister to communicate to the Salvadoran Ministry of Defense that operations should cease "as soon as possible... until coordination exists." The media also pointed out that the US Embassy in San Salvador had sent a formal letter to Bukele's government expressing the same idea. BBC Mundo requested comments on the matter from the Presidency of El Salvador, but we have not received a response. Source of the image, Nayib Bukele/Photo caption, In this fragment of the video shared by Bukele, the attack on one of the supposed 400 Mawozo facilities is observed. 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 qualified that Washington is "not necessarily" involved actively in that effort. When, during an exchange with journalists at the Homestead Air Reserve base in Florida on November 8, one of them questioned him 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 cannot have is the gang suppression force encountering Salvadoran soldiers and shooting at each other because they believe the other side are gangs," the Secretary of State warned. Source of the image, Reuters/Photo caption, Haiti has been immersed in a serious crisis for years. "The question is no longer just under whose command they act (the Salvadoran military), but who answers if something goes wrong," Le Cour told BBC Mundo. He pointed out that their rules, objectives, and the duration of the deployment are not publicly known. "If these Salvadoran elements are integrated into a joint and coordinated public security strategy, perhaps they can make a 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 immersed in a serious crisis for years, which deepened after the assassination of its then president, Jovenel Moïse, in 2021. The violence of armed gangs has displaced a record 1.5 million people in recent years, in addition to leaving more than 5,700 dead and injured since January until mid-September, and more than 230 people kidnapped, according to the United Nations. 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