The bells of the church of Santa Chiara had just struck 9 in the morning.
The ex-prime minister’s small convoy had left his home a few minutes earlier and was awaiting him in the Chamber of Deputies, where he was to attend a controversial personal victory: at the height of the Cold War, the largest Communist Party in the West was going to support a Christian Democrat government in a vote of no confidence, an idea that both Washington and Moscow opposed.
But the first stop every morning for this man deeply pious it was mass in the parish of Santa Chiara, in his residential neighborhood on the outskirts of Rome.
The two cars that made up the escort of the president of the Christian Democrats headed up Via Fani when, at Via Stressa, a Fiat 128 with diplomatic registration stopped in front of them, forcing them to stop.
A lead storm fell on the vehicles, machine-gunned by a dozen members of the Red Brigades guerrilla, several of them disguised as Alitalia pilots.
The five escorts did not even have time to draw their weapons, they were massacred. And only one man remained unharmed and terrified: Aldo Moro.
That March 16, 1978, Italy was plunged into a nightmare that lasted 55 days and ended with the corpse of the most powerful man in the country in the trunk of a red Renault 4.
The car was parked in via Caetani in the center of Rome, symbolically halfway between the headquarters of the Christian Democrats and the Italian Communist Party (PCI).
The ghosts of that assassination, which is now 45 years old, still haunt Italy.
The numerous errors of the police investigation, the chiaroscuro and intrigues of Italian politics, the context of the Cold War and some unclear episodes of those turbulent days have nourished an endless number of books, films and television series, the last of them sterno night (Night Outside), by Marco Bellocchio.
They have also given rise to numerous speculations and conspiracy theories in which history and fabrication are intermingled and which come to see a state crime at the bottom of the Moro case.
“As happened with (John Fiztgerald) Kennedy in the US, the black holes of research have released the imagination of many Italiansand they have contributed to that obsession”, explains to BBC Mundo Rosario Forlenza, professor of History and Political Anthropology at the Free International University of Guido Carli (LUISS), in Rome.
“Years of Lead”
Italy was then immersed in the “Years of Lead” of the 1970s, a period of great instability, immersed in the social struggles of the labor movement and shaken by “black” terrorism, such as that of the neo-fascist groups, and “red ”, like the one of the Brigate Rosse (Red Brigades), of Marxist-Leninist ideology.
The red star group, which had drawn on radicals expelled from the PCI and other formations, intended to unleash a communist revolution in Italy through armed struggle.
In the mid-1970s they began a campaign of attacks against what they considered “bourgeois power”, including businessmen, magistrates or politicians. They specialized in the “leg shot”.
Aldo Moro symbolized that power but, with his kidnapping, they also managed to hit their rival on the left, the PCI.
Moro had been prime minister twice, although at the time of the kidnapping he held the symbolic position of president of the Christian Democrats, the party that had dominated Italian politics since the end of World War II.
But More was aware that the country had radically changedand that, somehow, this had to be reflected in the government.
A similar conclusion had been reached by the communists of Enrico Berlinguerwho had watched with alarm the fate of Salvador Allende after the coup in Chile.
The communist parties, they concluded, could not govern in democratic countries without the support of moderate forces, so “to avoid the Chilean solutionproposed to form a great alliance between the popular forces of Italian democracy, the socialists, the communist masses and the Catholic masses”, explains Forlenza.
This proposal was calledhistorical commitment” (historic commitment).
The agreement was going to be reflected that March 16 in the tricolor parliament, with the opposition of the wing most to the right of the Christian Democrats and also of the extreme-left, which did not understand that the PCI supported the government of Giulio Andreotti.
Moscow watched with alarm as a communist party receded from its sphere of influence and the US Secretary of State, the powerful henry kissingereven went so far as to warn Moro about the possible consequences of a rapprochement with the communists, according to what his widow later denounced.
The country is paralyzed
Thousands of Italians of different flags took to the streets to demand the release of Moro.
Pope Paul VI, his personal friend, incessantly appealed at the Angelus in Saint Peter’s Square for the kidnappers to release him without conditions. Later it was learned that the Vatican was willing to pay up to 10,000 million lira (about $5.5 million dollars at the time) for his ransom, cash that was never made clear where it came from.
Despite the commotion, Andreotti was sworn in as prime minister, as planned.
Two days after the kidnapping, the newspaper “Il Messaggero” received the first call from the Red Brigades, who indicated where to find the organization’s first statement.
In the envelope was also the polaroid that will become iconicthat of Moro in shirt sleeves with the banner of the BR in the background, whom they define as “strategist of this Christian-democratic regime that has oppressed the Italian people for 30 years.”
Moro, they claimed, would submit to the trial of the “Tribunal del Pueblo”.
Kidnapping opened an ethical debate in Italian politicswhich was accentuated as the dozens of letters that Moro wrote from his captivity became known, where he asked the government for a negotiation to be released.
Did you have to negotiate with the kidnappers? The bulk of his party refused. So did the communists. Only the Vatican, the socialists and some of Moro’s personal friends wanted to talk with the Brigades to free him.
“For many Italian politicians the question was, Did we save one man’s life or the life of the Republic? For a democrat there was no other choice”, analyzes Rosario Forlenza.
Uncomfortable
More had become, however, a awkward character for his own party.
As the days passed, his letters grew angrier, more reproachful.
He accused his former companions of hypocrisy, he felt abandoned by them, victim of power struggles, and they responded in the press assuring that the president of the Christian Democrats had gone crazy, that those words could only be the result of pressure from the kidnappers.
But, if the language of Aldo Moro, usually complex and obscure to such an extent that in Italy the expression “heYongua morotea“, to define a cryptic and polyhedral form of expression, “in the letters it was crystal clear”, points out the LUISS professor.
“In my opinion, Moro feels that, for the first time, he can say what he wants, and he is very direct in his criticism, for example, of Andreotti, and that generated fear in the match,” he adds.
The topic had gotten out of control. The government continued to refuse to negotiate with the Brigades, which even offered to exchange the former prime minister for 13 members of the group who remained imprisoned. But the Andreotti executive held firm.
However, the police investigation did not bear any fruit. In the 55 days that Moro was kidnapped no arrestsnot even after one of the strangest events that took place in those already unusual days and whose protagonist would later be twice Prime Minister and also President of the European Commission: Roman Prodi.
Prodi was then a professor at the University of Bologna, and he assured that that April he practiced with several colleagues a seance in which they asked Moro’s late party friend, Giorgio La Pira, about the whereabouts of the president of the DC.
According to the testimony that Prodi gave three years later to a parliamentary commission that investigated Moro’s death, La Pira revealed a name to them through the ouija board: gradoli.
Prodi told this revelation to the headquarters of the Christian Democrats in Rome, and they informed the police, who went to the tiny commune of Gradoli, north of the capital, without finding a trace of Aldo Moro there.
It seemed to occur to no one whether there would be a via Gradoli.
Later, the police discovered that there was indeed a Via Gradoli in Rome, which housed one of the gang’s hideouts. Mario Moretti, who would later confess to being the author of the shots that ended Moro’s life, used that apartment but, as the record was leaked to the press, he avoided returning to the house and was not arrested.
In a bizarre coincidence of fate, three decades later, in that same building, four policemen would bribe the then president of the Lazio region, Piero Marrazzofor having relations with a Brazilian transsexual.
But, beyond their possible supernatural encounters, the consensus is that someone mentioned the address to Prodi, and that the story is a fabrication to protect the identity of the source.
“Who told you that there were Red Brigades on that street? It is not clear. Many things of those 55 days are not clear and, without falling into conspiracy theories, in which I do not believe, it is true that these gaps feed them ”, reasons Forlenza.
Handling?
One of those theories stems from the memories of someone who was on the front line those days.
Cuban-American psychiatrist Steve Piecznick, specialized in hostage-taking, he was sent to Rome by US President Jimmy Carter to assist the Italians during the crisis. He worked closely with the Minister of the Interior, Francesco Cossiga.
In his memoirs, published 30 years later, Piecznick claims that, along with Cossiga, they manipulated the Red Brigades into killing Moro because the country “was on the verge of total destabilization” and they had to prevent Berlinguer, the leader of the PCI. would come to power.
At one point during the kidnapping, a statement allegedly from the Red Brigades appeared in which they claimed that they had killed the former prime minister. He statement was false but, even so, the government possibly made it public, Forlenza ventures, to take the pulse of public opinion.
“Moro had been sentenced to death, directly by the Red Brigades, and indirectly by the Christian Democrats,” the famous Sicilian author wrote about the episode. Leonardo Sciascia in his political essay “El caso Moro”.
The theories of the US envoy, a conspiracy theorist who also claims the 9/11 attacks and the Sandy Hook school shooting were false flag operations, may be more or less sensational, but he is not alone. .
Several authors have delved into the hypothesis that, once Moro was kidnapped, some national and international sectors were interested that he was not still alive.
Among them are the journalist Sandro Provvisionato and the judge Fernando Imposimato, instructor of one of the processes on the kidnapping, who in his book “I had to die” they assure that “there were up to eight occasions in which Moro could be released but nothing was done.”
According to their accusations, the kidnapping and murder of Moro was a “political crime” where the material author was the BR and the intellectual author “a series of powers”.
Moro, acknowledges Rosario Forlenza, “had many enemiesalso within his party and among the Catholics further to the right because, although he was a deeply religious man, he believed in the separation between Church and State and was a reformer”.
And, although there were rumors that the CIA or the KGB could have influenced the terrible outcome, “the truth is that Mario Moretti, who was the leader of the Red Brigades, repeatedly assured that they acted alone and that they were not manipulated by nobody”, affirms the historian.
Consequences
Despite everything, Andreotti was sworn in as president of the Council of Ministers, as the head of government is called in Italy, with the support of the PCI. But the Moro case was a inflection point in Italy.
Forlenza proposes an image, that of the funeral of Aldo Moro that was held in the church of San Giovanni Laterano and that Pope Paul VI officiated without the presence of the body of the deceased or that of his family, who had broken all ties with Democracy Cristiana to those who accused of having sentenced Moro with his immobility.
“In the images, the most important politicians of the time are seen in the front row at the funeral. But, in reality, more than Moro’s, It’s the funeral of the Pfirst republic“.
The so-called First Republic in the background did not disintegrate until the early 90s, when the scandal of “Tangentopolis” exposed the rottenness that had corroded the Italian political and business system for decades. But his coup de grace had begun with the kidnapping and murder of a man who tried to talk to avoid the shipwreck of the country.
The Red Brigades also failed to survive their biggest blow.
Kidnapping divided the brigadistas between those who wanted to execute More and those who thought it was a mistake. Many of the latter later left the group.
one of them was Adriana Farandawho recognized the newspaper La Repubblica that “the end of the Red Brigades began on the last day of Aldo Moro.”
“The assassination was a strategic error by the BR because, not only was the reaction of the State greater, but also, for the labor movement and the working class, they had crossed a red line, they went too far, nobody thought that what they had done was acceptable”, analyzes Forlenza.
On May 9, the body of Aldo Moro appeared on Via Caetani. He had received a dozen bullets and his body was wrapped in several blankets. They had finished 55 days of anguish.
But the wound that opened in Italy never closed.
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