El Salvador recorded 481 homicides in March, which turned the month into the Central American country's deadliest in more than a decade, The Associated Press reported.

The surge of violence may be due to the collapse of a gang truce, and both gang-on-gang violence and attacks on police and common citizens are spiking in what authorities say is an attempt by criminals to put pressure on the government, the news service detailed.

President Salvador Sánchez Cerén, meanwhile, refuses to negotiate with the gangs, which may have as many as 70,000 members in the country of 6 million inhabitants. The former guerilla fighter, who took office in June, upped the ante by sending gang leaders to maximum-security prisons and encouraging police to use their weapons without fear in the line of duty or in defense of lives.

The criminals, in turn, have taken to purposefully targeting police, and this year have already killed 20 officers, according to official figures. Mauricio Ramírez Landaverde, the director of the country's National Civil Police, noted that he had no doubt that the violence was politically motivated.

"The gangs deliberately want to run up the numbers, deliberately increase the figures to try to pressure, to try to corner the institutions and the entire country," Ramírez said.

The March report means that an average of 15.5 individuals were killed in homicides per day, and that figure has increased to 16 in the first days of April, Fortín Magaña, the director of the National Institute for Forensic Medicine, told ElSalvador.com

Beyond the hard line Sánchez has adopted with respect to the gangs, El Salvador is facing some basic challenges that make it difficult to turn the violent situation around, Sonja Wolf, a researcher with Mexico's Center for Economic Investigation and Investigation, told La Prensa Gráfica.

"The government of El Salvador did not adhere to its part (of truce), for example, to create correctional opportunities for the criminals," Wolf noted. "When the gangs take notice that they are not getting the results they had hoped for, they can decide -- and apparently they have decided -- to up the violence," she added.