San Salvador, May 10 (EFE; additional reporting by The Costa Rica Star).- El Salvador’s murder rate so far in 2016 exceeds 38 per 100,000 inhabitants, well above the rate in several neighboring Central American countries, such  as Costa Rica, for all of 2015, according to official figures released on Tuesday.

According to information provided by police director Howard Cotto, so far this year 2,460 people have been murdered in El Salvador, equivalent to 38.43 per 100,000 residents.

In a little more than four months, El Salvador has surpassed the murder rates registered in other Central American countries during all of 2015.

Last year, Guatemala has a murder rate of 29.5 per 100,000, Panama had 12 and Costa Rica – which experienced the most violent year in its history – has a rate of 11.4.

On the final day of 2015, the Director of the Office of Judicial Investigations (Spanish initials: OIJ) explained that 558 homicides were excessive for Costa Rica.

OIJ Director Walter Espinoza added that his office estimates that 205 of the homicides, about 37 percent,  were vengeful hits that could be traced to drug trafficking in Costa Rica.

The World Health Organization says that a country is experiencing a homicide epidemic when the rate exceeds 10 per 100,000 inhabitants.

The number of violent deaths registered in El Salvador through May 9 exceed by 43.18 percent the 1,718 committed during the same period in 2015.

The average daily number of murders during the 130 days since Jan. 1 stands at 18.92 and, if this trend is maintained through the end of the year, El Salvador will experience 6,925 homicides.

If that figure is attained, the country would end the year with a rate of 108 murders per 100,000 people, exceeding the 103.9 figure from 2015, the year that is considered to be the most violent in El Salvador’s recent history.

Despite these figures, the government in recent weeks has said that there was a 41.6 percent drop in murders between March and April, with 603 killings in the third month of the year and 352 in the fourth.

The Salvadoran government is pursuing an offensive against gangs, which are pointed to as the cause of the high murder rate, deploying an elite force of 1,000 officers and 300 reservists and tightening prison rules to prevent incarcerated gang leaders from ordering murders from jail, which has been a relatively common practice. EFE