SAN SALVADOR, El Salvador — A tiny Central American country blessed with spectacular natural beauty, El Salvador is now the most dangerous country in the world not engulfed in an ongoing war. Last year, there were 3,942 murders — nearly 11 each day, 57 percent more than in 2013 —a staggering killing rate in a country of only 6.1 million people.

An ambitious five-year plan to curb the shocking violence in El Salvador through prevention and social programs was announced last Thursday, raising genuine hopes of ending the daily horrors after more than a decade of disastrous Mano Dura (Iron Fist) policies.

The $2 billion Safe El Salvador plan promises parks, sports facilities, education and training programs for the country's 50 most violent municipalities, as well as improvements to the worst prisons where the country's biggest gangs — Mara Salvatrucha 13 (MS13) and Calle 18 — have proliferated over the past decade.

How the 124-point action plan presented by the Council on Citizen Security will be funded is unclear. But, the prevention-focused proposal appears to be the most comprehensive yet to reduce violence since the 1992 peace accords, which ended the bloody 12-year civil war.

There were fears that President Salvador Sanchez Ceren, a leftist guerrilla commander in the civil war, would bow to public pressure to impose yet another crackdown on the gangs, accused of causing most of the bloodshed. The most recent spike in murders is blamed on the breakdown of a two-year truce between MS13 and Calle 18.

"The heavy-handed Mano Dura and Zero Tolerance policies have not reduced crime or improved public safety," said Jeanne Rikkers, a violence-prevention analyst from the human rights organization Fespad.

"To see a comprehensive, well-founded security policy with 75 percent of funds allocated to prevention coming from a coalition of mainly conservative groups — which have long resisted a balanced integrated approach to tackling the violence — is incredible."