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Haitian authorities have confirmed that Mathias Saintil, who ran the Boston gang in the capital’s largest slum, is dead, making him the highest-profile gang leader killed in Haiti in years.

Getting into it: Saintil’s gang operated in Cité Soleil, a sprawling slum in Port-au-Prince, and is part of the Viv Ansanm coalition, which the Trump administration added to its foreign terrorist organization list last year. There are conflicting accounts of how he died. Haiti’s National Police said he was shot several times in a police operation before dying at a hospital. But the National Human Rights Defense Network, a prominent Haitian rights group, said an explosive drone hit his car Thursday night while he was on his way to a street party, leaving him badly hurt. He died Friday afternoon.

The group said at least seven drones packed with explosives hit gang strongholds around the capital in a coordinated wave of strikes Thursday, killing five of Saintil’s men on the spot and wounding about 15, while a second strike elsewhere in Cité Soleil also killed civilians along with gang members. The drones were flown by a task force run out of the prime minister’s office with support from Erik Prince’s private security company, Vectus Global. Prince is the founder of Blackwater.

Human Rights Watch says the task force’s drone strikes killed at least 1,243 people between March 2025 and January, including 17 children, and the UN’s human rights chief has said most of them are likely unlawful.

“One less gang leader,” Prime Minister Alix Didier Fils-Aimé wrote on X. “The fight to free the country from the grip of bandits continues with determination.”

Security forces also recently bombed the home of Wilson Joseph, leader of the 400 Mawozo gang, who survived, went into hiding and has since asked the UN for peace talks. The push has intensified since El Salvador sent about 2,500 troops to Haiti after four Salvadoran aviation technicians attached to the UN-backed Gang Suppression Force vanished in an Oct. 18 gang ambush. The four men still haven’t been found.

This all comes as gangs control as much as 90% of Port-au-Prince, with more than 1,000 people killed in gang violence between July and October and about 1.4 million displaced, as the government tries to get security under control before elections that have been put off for years.