Aldo Moro
Aldo Moro (
September 23,
1916 â€"
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.
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
FUCI (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.
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.
|
Moro, photographed during his kidnapping by the BR |
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. [
1]
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. If Gladio's influence on Italy's
strategy of tension has been proven (see the
Bologna massacre as one example), no concrete proof have been found of Gladio's interference with Moro's kidnapping. However, Moro's widow later recounted his meeting with US President Nixon's advisor,
Henry Kissinger, and an unidentified American intelligence official, who warned him to abandon the strategy of bringing the Communist Party into his cabinet, telling him "You must abandon your policy of bringing all the political forces in your country into direct collaboration...or you will pay dearly for it." Moro was allegedly so shaken by the threat that he became ill and threatened to quit politics.
[Arthur E. Rowse, "Gladio: The Secret US War to Subvert Italian Democracy," Covert Action Quarterly, Washington, DC, Number 49, Summer 1994.]*
Operation Gladio*
Strategy of tension*
Democrazia Cristiana*
Red Brigades*
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.
*
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
