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CENTRAL AMERICA |
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Murders Up 40% in El Salvador
SAN SALVADOR – The number of murders in El
Salvador between January 1 and November 1
stands at 3,673, more than in all of 2008
and 40 percent more than during the same
period last year, the press reported
Tuesday, citing official statistics.
La Prensa Grafica newspaper based the figure
on data from the National Police, the
Attorney General’s Office and the medical
examiner’s office.
The number of murders, which average 13.9
per day, is 40.2 percent higher than the
2,620 homicides that were tallied during the
same period in 2008.
The National Police added that during last
month alone there were 431 murders, 158 more
than in October 2008.
Authorities warn that nearly two-thirds of
the 3,184 men killed this year were between
the ages of 18 and 30.
The San Salvador metropolitan area, which
contains 14 municipalities, has had 419 more
murders this year than during the same
period last year.
Seventy-six percent of the killings were
carried out with firearms.
In the face of the increase in violence, 94
percent of the residents of Greater San
Salvador supported the possibility of
increasing the use of army troops for
security tasks, according to a survey by the
firm JBS Opinion released Tuesday by the
Diario de Hoy newspaper.
The poll was made public at a time when the
government of President Mauricio Funes is
evaluating the possibility of adding 6,500
soldiers to the effort to fight the lack of
security.
Much of the violence is blamed on
ultraviolent gangs such as Mara Salvatrucha,
which evolved on the streets of Los Angeles
during the 1980s, with most of its members
young Salvadorans whose parents fled their
nation’s 1980-1992 civil war for the United
States.
Because many of the gangsters were born in
El Salvador, they were subject to
deportation when rounded up during
crackdowns in California in the 1990s.
Sent back “home” to a land they barely knew,
they formed gangs in San Salvador that
spread throughout the small nation and to
neighboring countries in Central America,
where membership is now counted in the tens,
or even hundreds of thousands and gangsters
are engaged in murder, drug dealing,
kidnapping and people smuggling. EFE
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