SAN SALVADOR – At least 55 suspected street-gang members were captured in the capital suburbs of Ciudad Delgado and Mejicanos, El Salvador’s national police, known as the PNC, said.

The operation, which began in the wee hours of Thursday and in which close to 140 police officers took part, dismantled a fation of the Mara Salvatrucha gang accused of extorting businessmen and small shopkeepers in Ciudad Delgado, the PNC said in a communique.

The PNC chief in Greater San Salvador, Hector Mendoza Cordero, did not rule out further arrests or pressing charges against other inmates in jails around the country for their links to these crimes, the report said.

The PNC said that between June and October of this year some 300 operations have been carried out that have dismantled some 112 gang factions and around 60 criminal gangs.

The authorities hold MS and rival gang Mara 18 responsible for most crimes perpetrated in the country.

El Salvador logged 3,673 murders in the first nine months of this year, more than in all of 2008, the press reported this week, citing official statistics.

Much of the mayhem is blamed on Mara Salvatrucha and rival gang Mara 18, which evolved on the streets of Los Angeles during the 1980s among 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