Members of the Mara 18 gang attend a mass in prison.

You thought living in Johannesburg or Cape Town was dangerous business? Apparently not. The people of El Salvador, in Central America, have it much, much worse. With an average of 12 murders a day, peaking at 18 a day early this year, this is a much dodgier place to be texting in an alley.

Saturday saw the first time since 2009 where there wasn’t a murder. “After years when the number of murders reached alarming levels of up to 18 per day, we saw not one homicide in the country,” President Mauricio Funes said in a statement released on Sunday.

The heavy violence stems from the two most powerful drug gangs that run the country, the gang Mara Salvatrucha and gang Mara 18. The new statistic is being attributed to a truce between the gangs, which was called last month.

The murder rate in El Salvador is currently 66 people per 100 000.

Scary.

[Source: MSNBC]