Aldo Moro

Aldo Moro (September 23, 1916 – May 9, 1978) was an Italian politician, five times Prime Minister of Italy. He was one of Italy's longest-serving post-war Prime Ministers, holding power for a combined total of more than six years.

One of the most important leaders of Democrazia Cristiana (DC, in English the Christian Democrats), Moro was considered an intellectual and an incredibly patient mediator, especially in the internal life of his party. He was kidnapped by terrorists from the Red Brigades (BR) and killed in obscure circumstances in May 1978.

Early career

Moro was born in Maglie, in the province of Lecce (Puglia). His political career had started during the late times of fascism, in the G.U.F. university groups. He joined and in 1941 became president of the F.U.C.I. (Federation of Catholic University Students). After World War II, Moro was elected to the Constituent Assembly in 1946, and helped drafting the Italian constitution. He was then re-elected as a member of the house of representatives in 1948, where he served as a member until his violent death.

Historic compromise

During the 1970s, he was one of the political leaders who gave the deepest attention to Enrico Berlinguer's project of a so-called Compromesso Storico (historic compromise). The leader of PCI (Italian Communist Party) had proposed a solidarity between Communists and Christian Democrats in a moment of serious economical, social and political crisis in Italy, and Moro, then the president of DC, was one of those who had helped in finding a way to finally form a government of "national solidarity".

As leader of the parliamentary coalition he served as Prime Minister from 1963 to 1968, and again from 1974 to 1976.

Kidnapping and death

Kidnapping, March 16, 1978

On March 16, 1978 Moro was kidnapped in Via Fani, a street in Rome, by a militant Communist group, known as the Red Brigades and led by Mario Moretti, after the murder of his 5 escort agents. After 55 days of detention, Moro was murdered in or near Rome on May 9. His body was found later that day in a parked car, left between the headquarters of the DC and the PCI, with a clear symbolism.

Moro was kidnapped on his way to a session of the house of representatives, where a discussion was supposed to take place regarding the vote of confidence to a new government led by Giulio Andreotti (DC), for the first time with the support of the Communist Party. It was the first implementation of Moro's strategic vision defined by the Compromesso storico.

Negotiations

The Red Brigades (BR) proposed to exchange Moro's life for the freedom of several imprisoned terrorists. During the detention, it has been conjectured that many knew where he was detained (an apartment in Rome). When Moro was abducted, the government immediately took a hardline position: the "State must not bend" on terrorist requests. This was a much different position than the one kept in the kidnapping of Ciro Cirillo, a minor political figure for which the government negotiated with terrorists. It has been suggested that some politicians, especially the Christian-Democrat Giulio Andreotti, took the chance of getting rid of a political competitor by letting the terrorists murder him.

Romano Prodi and other members of the faculty of the University of Bologna passed on a tip about a safe-house where the BR might have been holding Moro on April 2. Bizarrely, Prodi claimed he had been given the tip by the founders of the Christian Democratic Party, contacted from beyond the grave via a seance and a Ouija board. While Prodi thought the word Gradoli referred to a town on the outskirts of Rome, it likely referred to the Roman address of a BR safehouse, located at via Gradoli 96. Later, other Italian members of the European Commission claimed that Prodi had invented this story to conceal the real source of the tip, which they believed to have originated in the Italian extraparliamentary left. ^*

Aldo Moro's captivity letters

During this period, Moro wrote several letters to the principal leaders of DC and to Pope Paul VI (who later personally celebrated his solemn Funeral Mass). Those letters, at times very critical of Giulio Andreotti (DC), were kept secret for decades, and published only in the early 1990s.Aldo Moro's letters from the "People's prison" (Italian). In his letters, Moro advocated that the state's primary objective should be of saving people's lives, and that the government should strive to comply with his kidnappers' requests. Most of the leaders of the Christian Democrats argued that the letters did not express truthfully Moro's intentions, having been written under coercion by his kidnappers, and refused to attempt any negotiation, in stark contrast with Moro's family's requests. In his appeal to the terrorists, Pope Paul VI asked them to release Moro "without conditions".

It has been conjectured that Moro used these letters to send cryptic messages to his family and colleagues. Doubts have been advanced about the completeness of these letters; Carabinieri's general Carlo Alberto Dalla Chiesa (later killed by the Mafia) found copies of the letters in a house that terrorists had in Milan, and for some reason this retrieval was not publicly known until many years later.

Via Caetani, midway between DC and PCI

When the Red Brigades decided to execute Moro, they placed him in a car and told him to cover himself with a blanket, that they were going to transport him to another location. After Moro was covered, they emptied ten rounds into him, killing him: the alleged killer was Mario Moretti. Moro's body was left in the trunk of a car in Via Caetani, a site midway between the Christian Democratic Party and the Communist Party headquarters, as a last symbolic challenge to the police, who were keeping the entire nation, and Rome in particular, under strict and severe surveillance. After the recovery of Moro's body, the Minister of the Interior Francesco Cossiga resigned, gaining trust from the Communist party, which would later make him the first President of the Republic to be elected at the first ballot.

Antonio Negri

On April 7, 1979, philosopher Antonio Negri was arrested and charged with a number of offenses including master-minding the kidnapping and murder of Aldo Moro, leadership of the Red Brigades, and plotting the overthrow of the government. A year later, he was found innocent of Aldo Moro's assassination. Almost all of the charges were dropped within months of his arrest due to lack of evidence.

In the New York Review of Books, Thomas Sheehan wrote at the time in Negri's defense, "Negri is a figure of some stature in Italy, and his arrest might be compared, imperfectly, to jailing Herbert Marcuse a decade ago on suspicion of being the brains behind the Weathermen."

In the same journal in 2003, Alexander Stille accused Negri of bearing moral but not legal responsibility for the crimes, citing Negri's words from one year later:

Every action of destruction and sabotage seems to me a manifestation of class solidarity.... Nor does the pain of my adversary affect me: proletarian justice has the productive force of self-affirmation and the faculty of logical conviction.

and

The antagonistic process tends toward hegemony, toward the destruction and the annihilation of the adversary.... The adversary must be destroyed.http://waam.net/jhjournal/view_article.php?a_no=124&p_no=1

Conspiracy theories about Moro's death

Many other theories have been advanced about Moro's death. Some suggested that Moro's murder could have been orchestrated by the Italian Masonic lodge, Propaganda Due (also known as P2), and that the Red Brigades (BR), which was claimed to have had an inside "supergang" team, and been infiltrated by US intelligence (CIA). The alleged presence of two motorcyle riders in the kidnapping has been proposed to explain the rapidity and cleaniness of the act, in which the kidnappers, as well as Moro, remained untouched while all the escorts were killed: but it has never been unconfirmed.

The "Gladio network", directed by NATO, has also been accused. In BR member Alberto Franceschini's book, Giovanni Fasanella and Alberto Franceschini (with a postscript from Judge Rosario Priore, who investigated on Aldo Moro's death), Che cosa sono le Red Brigades ("Red Brigades"), Published in French as Gardes Rouges: L'Histoire secrète des Red Brigades racontée par leur fondateur, Alberto Franceschini. Entretien avec Giovanni Fasanella. Editions Panama, 2005. Aldo Moro is described as one of Gladio's founders. There is some support for this view of American involvement in the overarching events known as the strategy of tension, and the strong American policy against a historic compromise that would admit the PCI into a government of national unity, as this might have meant that Italy would have withdrawn from NATO and that the U.S. would have lost access to vital Mediterranean ports. Another theory is that P2 members in the secret services sabotaged the investigation or intentionally failed to uncover the location where Moro was being held, in order to ensure his eventual death at the hands of the BR.

References

Interview with Giovanni Moro, Aldo Moro's son by La Repubblica, March 16, 1998.
The kidnapping is dramatized in the 2003 Italian movie Buongiorno, Notte (dir. Marco Bellocchio), released 2005 in USA as "Good Morning, Night".
The kidnapping is discussed at length in On Terrorism and the State by Italian philosopher and Situationist Gianfranco Sanguinetti.

External links

Banca dati della memoria: Moro's letters and +
Memorial Moro on strategy of tension
Buongiorno, notte, 2003 film about the kidnapping
Italian document March 2, 1987

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