RIO DE JANEIRO, April 19 (Reuters) - A swath of Rio de Janeiro's Copacabana beach on Thursday was turned into a "Death Garden" of 1,300 red roses, one for each person killed by violent crime in the city and state since January.

Activists from the anti-violence group Rio de Paz stuck the flowers in the sand at dawn on the famed tourist attraction.

"With these 1,300 roses we want to help Rio citizens to understand the dimensions of the tragedy that has befallen us in less than four months," the group's president, Antonio Carlos Costa, told local radio.

Rio de Paz was formed at the start of the year, soon after a wave of unusually gruesome gang-related violence hit the city in December. At the time, drug gangs set fire to buses and shot up police posts.

Although organized gang attacks have subsided, gun battles between police and drug traffickers or between rival gangs occur almost daily, often claiming lives of bystanders caught in the crossfire.

Tuesday, 19 people were killed in two Rio slums, some in a shootout between rival gangs and others in police raids. Several innocent people were wounded by stray bullets.

The killings happened a day after the federal government agreed to speed up the deployment of a special security force around the city while it weighed a request from Rio's governor to send army troops to quell spiraling violence.

Rio has a homicide rate of around 40 per 100,000 residents, one of the highest in Latin America.

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