El Salvador Says It Destroyed Home of Haitian Gang Figure Lanmò San Jou After Crowdsourced Tip
After President Nayib Bukele publicly asked if anyone knew the location of the 400 Mawozo gang site, online open-source users shared coordinates that Salvadoran authorities then used to destroy Lanmò San Jou’s house and the gang’s headquarters, according to Bukele.
El Salvador’s government says it has struck a Haitian gang target based on coordinates supplied by users on social media.
According to reporting based on Bukele’s own posts, El Salvador destroyed the house of Lanmò San Jou and the headquarters of the 400 Mawozo gang in Haiti. The locations were identified after open-source researchers and other users on Twitter shared coordinates in response to President Nayib Bukele’s public question asking whether anyone knew where the gang’s headquarters was located.
Bukele later posted footage of the impact and said his government had kept its promise to destroy the site. The material available does not detail what platform or weapons El Salvador used or the extent of damage beyond the video Bukele published.
For Haiti, where gangs like 400 Mawozo have become powerful armed actors, a foreign president claiming to demolish a gang leader’s house and headquarters is a striking development. For Bukele, it extends his security narrative beyond El Salvador’s borders and shows a willingness to act on open-source intelligence gathered in full public view.
What happens next will depend on whether El Salvador releases more verifiable information on the strike, how Haitian authorities respond, and whether other governments begin making similar public appeals for online users to help locate criminal or armed group sites outside their own territory.
Sources
- OSINT