Eliza Barclay

A piece I reported back in September in Juarez, Mexico appeared on TheAtlantic.com this month. I discovered during my visit there that there is a small but vital movement of citizens eager to refashion their city into a more trusting, law-abiding place. The violence rages on, however, and the city remains the most violent in the hemisphere. As the LA Times reported this week, an artificial-intelligence model generated by a university researcher there projected that 5,000 people will be killed there this year. It’s a bit of a bizarre way to project such a figure, but it’s entirely believable. That violence will have to plummet before enough citizens feel safe enough to leave their homes and really participate in rebuilding the city. Whether that will happen in the short or medium term is pretty unclear.