San Salvador--Clad in bullet-proof vests and balaclavas, elite squads of soldiers and police are preparing to wage a guerrilla-style war on El Salvador's gangs, trying to fight a surge in violence that experts warn may only intensify.
El Salvador had its bloodiest month in a decade in March, as gang members armed with high-caliber assault rifles repeatedly attacked police stations and army posts.
The small Central American country of six million people registered 481 homicides for the month.
That capped a bloody first three months of the year, in which 23 police and six soldiers were killed in clashes with gangs.
In response, President Salvador Sanchez Ceren has created four new "rapid response" battalions -- one for the police and three for the army.
The country is now in a "defining moment" in its drawn-out fight against the ultra-violent gangs Mara Salvatrucha and Barrio 18, said security expert Juan Ramon Medrano.
"The government has not given up on prevention and rehabilitation, (but) it is fighting the gangs with intensifying repression, which has unleashed an escalation of violence," he told AFP.
The killings underscore the breakdown in a truce the gangs declared in March 2012, which was brokered by the Catholic Church with behind-the-scenes help from then president Mauricio Funes.
In response to the new wave of violence, Sanchez Ceren has reversed a key concession of the controversial truce, ordering more than 50 jailed gang leaders who were being held in "flexible" detention centers transferred back to maximum-security prison.
Seeking to break the logistical and communications networks with which the leaders have continued to exercise power, he also ordered jailed groups of rank-and-file gangsters be dispersed to prisons far from their families and each other.
The new battalions will only give the security forces more power, with "no effect on criminal networks," which are complex organizations that cannot be easily dismantled, he said.
AFP
