EMBLAZONED ON THE RUGGED, dry eastern slope of Cerro Bola, which looms over the northwest corner of Ciudad Juarez, enormous white letters form a message visible for miles: “Ciudad Juarez, the Bible is the truth. Read it.”

“I remember helping paint those letters as a teenager,” says Gustavo Arango, the 42-year-old pastor of JOPE Christian Center and a lifelong resident of Juarez. “That was somewhere around 1985.”

“That is the last thing the evangelicals of this city did together.”

As drug-related violence has plunged Juarez into the greatest crisis in the city’s history, even a mortal enemy has not convinced the evangelical community to come together. That dis-integration has hobbled the city’s second-largest religious community at a time when the city can least afford it.

Ciudad Juarez, like all of Mexico, is overwhelmingly Catholic, but evangelicals are present here in unusual numbers, perhaps as high as 10% of this city of 1.5 million, according to Juarez-based journalist and activist Daniel Valles, himself an evangelical.

Valles, who also contributes to TMP, has been a vocal critic of the “extremely feeble” efforts to bring these evangelical thousands together.

“The religious community has organized protests, but in these marches for peace, less than 3,000 church-going persons have shown up. This is especially poor when we consider that is not even 10% of those identifying themselves as regular church-goers, to say nothing of the nominal Christians,” Valles wrote in his column in 2010, reacting to a two-day killing spree that took 56 lives.

Since the 1960s, scholars from Christian Lalive d'Epinay to David Stoll have predicted that this sort of dis-integration is the rock that evangelical social and political movements will dash themselves on in Latin America. This has defused any hope that secular analysts might have placed in this fastest-growing segment of the Christian population to be agents of social progress and change.

Of course, another explanation for the organizational failures in Juarez could be the security situation itself. The powerful stimulus for action, in this case, becomes an even more powerful depressant.

In a country where the drug-war death toll has exceeded 50,000, according to government reports, Juarez has paid a particularly heavy price. According to leading border watcher Molly Molloy, a research librarian at New Mexico State University and moderator of the Frontera List, 10,821 people have been killed in the city since 2008, making it, statistically, the world's most dangerous city.

It is important to note that the violence appears to be leveling off in Juarez for now, and some normalcy is returning to the city’s daily rhythms. The 74 people killed in the city in May 2012 was the lowest monthly toll in more than four years.

Like a person who has lived for a time with a disability, Juarenses seem tired of being asked about the violence. No one denies the very recent, very bad days, but Juarenses are quick to point out the ways their lives are not handicapped by the violence.

"Juarez is not Bagdhad," Valles emphasizes. "People aren't dodging bullets in the streets. You don't even see police around like before. You can see life here is not bad."

Nationally, murders have been dropping slowly since October of 2011, though InSight Crime analysis indicates that at the present rate of decline, Mexico won’t be back to pre-2006 levels of violence until 2018. And in a worrisome turn, killings in April were at their highest levels since October of 2011, and violence seems to be shifting to the east to the region closer to Monterrey, according to MSNBC.

By early 2011, near what would turn out to be the peak of the violence so far, Valles had enough. In March, 2011, Valles and his pastor Gustavo Arango founded Defendamos Juarez (Let’s Protect Juarez), based out of JOPE church.

In the past year, Defendamos Juarez has mobilized some 1200 Juarenses in teams cleaning up derelict properties in violent neighborhoods and in public demonstrations including street preaching, all aimed at “making hope tangible” in the city.

In a city where for the last few years sunset had become an unofficial city-wide curfew confining families to their homes, merely being out and physically present sends an important signal to the city.

It’s not just the context of violence that Valles is working against. This sort of community action is not part of Mexico’s cultural tradition, he insists. JOPE Christian Center with its 150 congregants, however, has rallied around Valles and Arango’s vision.

“Juarez is in crisis, and the city needs the work that we’re doing,” remarks Andrea, a very articulate 12-year-old on the site of a Defendamos Juarez project, pausing from stretching on her tip-toes to paint the top of a windowsill. “People wonder what we are doing. They want to know why we would do this, if we’re not getting paid. They sometimes ask if we’re from the government, or if we are campaigning.”

“No one is doing anything like this,” Valles says. “In Mexico, this sort of thing is unheard of.”

On this day, Defendamos Juarez is sprucing up a decrepit funeral home, painting it their signature color of white. The volunteers are decked out in white, as well.

“White is a color you see a lot in Juarez, on trees, to prevent infestation of bugs, for example,” Ricardo, another longtime member of JOPE, explains. “It’s pure and clean. And we’re helping purify the city.”

As important as the work of Defendamos Juarez is, debiliating systemic problems in Juarez make the vicious cycle very difficult to escape.

A bridge that Defendamos Juarez decorated with posters reading “La paz comienza creyendo” (Peace begins with believing) was later fouled by cartel hitmen who hung a body from the overpass. And the vast majority of murders in the city will never be solved, or even investigated, due to incompetence or corruption in the law-enforcement institutions. There is also evidence that Mexican federal troops have been the beneficiaries of extortion schemes, some targeting pastors, in the city.

While large-scale cooperation among evangelicals is not likely, in the face of faulty public insitutions, smaller-scale efforts like Defendamos Juarez are generating a critical base of opportunities for smaller kinds of trust-based cooperation. 

In that sense, Valles' vision of "making hope tangible" in Juarez is catching on.  Most of Defendamos Juarez’s 1200 volunteers have no direct connection to the church, after all.  And recently, other churches have begun to follow the lead of Defendamos Juarez, using their methods and sharing objectives, if not sharing the credit.