Shocking aerial footage has gone viral after Salvadoran forces obliterated a luxury gang mansion in Haiti, with the exact location handed over by ordinary Haitians on X.
President Nayib Bukele’s troops, backed by Haitian police, unleashed a dawn helicopter assault on the sprawling compound of 400 Mawozo leader Wilson “Lanmò San Jou” Joseph in Croix-des-Bouquets, just outside Port-au-Prince. The video, shared widely, including by accounts highlighting the “unreal” scene, shows white Salvadoran helicopters circling low, unleashing fire, and massive plumes of smoke and dust rising as the two-storey colonnaded property, reportedly complete with swimming pools, is reduced to rubble.
It all started days earlier when Bukele himself replied in Haitian Creole to a post showing the mansion: “Where is that house? Give us the exact address, we will destroy it.” Locals flooded the replies with GPS coordinates. He kept his word.
The strike hit early Sunday morning around 2:30 a.m. Haitian National Police’s drone task force, supported by Salvadoran aircraft and ground forces, carried it out. Reports citing sources claimed as many as 20 gunmen were killed inside, though the gang leader himself was not present. Bukele later posted the footage himself, declaring: “We destroyed the house of Lanmo San Jou and the 400 Mawozo gang’s headquarters. Most of them ran away without even trying to fight. What cowards!”
This is the first major direct hit since Bukele ordered more than 2,000 Salvadoran soldiers into Haiti late last month. The deployment followed an October 18 ambush in which four Salvadoran aviation technicians with the UN-backed Gang Suppression Force went missing near the capital. Haitians, exhausted by years of kidnappings, extortion and chaos under the Viv Ansanm coalition, have poured into the streets cheering the troops, chanting Bukele’s name and handing out water.
Haiti’s Prime Minister Alix Didier Fils-Aimé praised the Salvadoran commitment, declaring “THE GANGS WILL GET NO SLEEP!” as the offensive intensifies. The 400 Mawozo gang, one of the country’s largest, infamous for mass abductions, has controlled swathes of the capital for years while the state has crumbled.
Critics have questioned the opacity of the Salvadoran presence. Still, for many Haitians the message from the viral video is simple: after years of terror, someone is finally hitting back hard. Bukele’s social-media-savvy, zero-tolerance brand of justice, which transformed El Salvador, is now being exported, one crowdsourced coordinate at a time.
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