With the bulk of the violence occurring in the northern border region, edgy Mexico City has never seemed safer and the once-fearsome capital is leaving its bad boy image behind as it undergoes a big-time makeover.
Founded in 753BC – if the legend of Romulus and Remus is to be believed – it grew to become the fearsome Caput Mundi (capital of the world), the hub of an empire that stretched from Spain to the Middle East, from North Africa to northern England.
Yet amidst the gloom and despite the seaside capital's fearsome reputation, Mogadishans are on the move.
Like many capital cases, Elmore's was shaped by the fearsome combination of race and class.
The Shabab, the fearsome Islamist militant group that once controlled much of the capital, claimed responsibility for the attack, which government officials said left at least 15 people dead, including 7 attackers.
While rebels appeared to make many some gains in a semicircle of suburbs around the capital in recent weeks, those were followed by a fearsome government counterattack, and some analysts have suggested that what began as a victory for the rebels has become, as has happened several times before, a defeat.
Unlike previous plans, the New Partnership for Africa's Development (Nepad), brainchild of South Africa's president Thabo Mbeki, was to have teeth.Last weekend, at a summit in Kigali, the Rwandan capital, those teeth were finally bared, and they were less than fearsome.
Chechnya's capital, for example, is called Grozny, which translates from the Russian as "fearsome".
The road it maps is anything but royal; these good people, after all, are republicans, albeit with a capital "R". But the document does lead to the G.O.P.'s unconscious, or part of it: its fearsome, rampaging id.
