“She was trying to tell me something,” he said, a day after the funeral for Daisy Oviedo Mej&iacutea;, 22, who died in a storm of bullets while watching her brother play soccer a few weeks ago. “But she couldn’t. I gave her mouth-to-mouth but there was too much blood.”

Ms. Oviedo, a primary school teacher who liked to dance and sing with her students, was one of four people killed that day when gunmen opened fire at a park, the second such massacre here since November. She was innocent, the authorities said, another casualty in the violence and social ills rocking Central America as criminal groups turn the region into a main artery for funneling cocaine north to the United States.

Traffickers have used Central America as a stopover point since at least the 1970s. But the aggressive crackdowns on criminal organizations in Mexico and Colombia, coupled with strides in limiting smuggling across the Caribbean, has increasingly brought the powerful syndicates here, pushing the drug scourge deeper into small Central American countries incapable of combating it.

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