The homicide drop was a negotiated quiet

El Faro and Reuters establish, on documentary evidence, that the headline result was bought before it was won.

The reporting on Bukele's gang pact has accumulated for four years — El Faro broke the original Pacto con MS-13 investigation in September 2020, Reuters and others followed with U.S. court filings and Treasury sanctions, and by 2024 the chain of evidence is well-sourced enough that even sympathetic foreign press accepts the basic finding. The headline result is partly fictional, a negotiated quiet that was then re-narrated as a victory of force. The killings dropped because gang leaders agreed to drop them, in exchange for prison-condition concessions and protection of fugitives, before the régimen even existed. The régimen's 85,000 arrests, then, are not what produced the calm. They are what was done to the population once a constituency had been trained to cheer the calm.