Someone on X asked Bukele to destroy a Haitian gang’s headquarters. Three days later, helicopters fired on it

On 5 November, a user on X posted a photograph of a building they said was the headquarters of Haiti’s 400 Mawozo gang and asked Nayib Bukele to destroy it. El Salvador’s president replied, asking for the exact address and promising to destroy it.

On Sunday, it was hit. On Tuesday, Mr Bukele posted video of at least three helicopters circling and firing on the building in Croix-des-Bouquets, on the north-eastern edge of Port-au-Prince, with a message saying his forces had destroyed the house of the gang’s leader, known as Lanmo San Jou, and its headquarters. “We fulfilled our promise,” he wrote.

The operation was carried out by a Haitian police task force backed by Salvadoran troops. As many as 20 people were reported killed, a toll based on anonymous accounts that neither Haitian nor Salvadoran authorities have confirmed. The video and the claim that the building was the gang’s headquarters have not been independently verified, and some Haitians have questioned whether the building was destroyed or only damaged.

The gang’s leader, whose real name is Wilson Joseph, was not in the building.

Why are Salvadoran troops in Haiti at all?

Because of a kidnapping. On 18 October, four Salvadoran air force technicians serving with the UN-backed Gang Suppression Force were abducted at gunpoint. They are still missing. Mr Bukele vowed to bring them home alive and warned the gang to release them.

Since then El Salvador has sent more than 2,000 soldiers, roughly doubling the number of foreign troops in the country. Most of them are not part of the UN-backed force, which was initially led by soldiers from Chad. Mr Bukele first said the deployment was about the four technicians; more recently he has hinted at a wider aim of wiping out Haiti’s gangs.

What is 400 Mawozo?

One of Haiti’s most feared gangs, known for kidnapping, extortion, murder and arms trafficking in the plains east of the capital. In 2021 it abducted 16 American missionaries and a Canadian, a case that made it known around the world. Days before the strike, the gang’s leader had asked the UN to begin talks.

Who is cheering, and who is worried?

Haiti’s prime minister, Alix Didier Fils-Aimé, thanked the Salvadoran military on X and said the two countries and the international force would work to restore state authority. “THE GANGS WILL GET NO SLEEP!” he wrote. He is due to visit El Salvador next week to discuss the troops’ future.

Amnesty International is worried. Its Americas director, Ana Piquer, said the response to gang violence “must not replicate the abuses and impunity” seen elsewhere, and called on both governments to publish the agreement covering the deployment, explain the rules on the use of force and who is accountable, and open prompt, independent investigations.

At home, Mr Bukele’s crackdown on gangs runs under open-ended emergency laws, and rights groups say it is unlawful, pointing to mass trials and the treatment of detainees in his mega-prisons.

Why does it matter beyond Haiti?

A head of government took a target request from a stranger on social media, answered it publicly and then announced the strike the same way. It is a rare, very public way for a foreign force’s target to be chosen and claimed in another country, and it is why Amnesty is asking who is accountable.

The stakes in Haiti are high. The UN says at least 5,700 people were killed or injured by gangs or in operations against them between 1 January and 11 September this year. Haiti is due to hold elections in July and October next year, its first in more than a decade, and no vote can happen while gangs control large parts of the capital.