SAN SALVADOR – El Salvador, a nation of roughly 7 million people, could end 2009 with more than 4,000 murders, the PNC national police force says.

“This year we will have an unprecedented number, we will have a negative balance regarding the quantity of homicides. We’re not far from closing (2009) with 4,000 and some,” PNC director Carlos Ascencio said in comments cited by Diario de Hoy newspaper.

Through Nov. 22, the murder toll stood at 3,882, compared with 2,826 during the same period in 2008 and 3,179 for all of last year.

President Mauricio Funes’s government announced Nov. 6 that it was assigning an additional 2,500 army troops to public-safety duties.

The new contingent will join the roughly 1,300 soldiers serving since June on joint task forces with PNC members.

Much of the violence in the country is blamed on brutal gangs such as Mara Salvatrucha, 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 “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 of thousands and gangsters are engaged in murder, drug dealing, kidnapping and people smuggling. EFE