Cesare Battisti, the long inaction in France before fleeing to Mexico, Brazil and Bolivia

The day following the first appointment with the Milan public prosecutor in prison in Massama, Oristano, where he has been detained since his arrival in Italy after extradition from Bolivia in 2019, the former red terrorist Cesare Battisti receives the second official visit of investigators and investigators to pick up the thread of the statements on his criminal past. The life prisoner - four murders committed at the end of the 1970s - started from afar, since he was a boy, and in front of his lawyers Gianfranco Sollai and Steccanella remembers having "attended schools until the first months of the third classical high school of Manzoni in Latina »and then began« to commit a crime with thefts and robberies ». His new career had not allowed him to "continue his studies". He got married “for the first time in France and I had two daughters. The first was born in Mexico, where I had taken refuge in the eighties, the second in Paris, with the same French woman. I divorced in the late 1990s and early 2000s and was still a fugitive in France. Then in Brazil I remarried and got divorced again. Finally I lived with a Brazilian woman with whom I had a child. I maintain relations with the whole family environment ».

Survival beyond the Alps was guaranteed to him by the “solidarity of some formations such as the Liga Rivolutionaire. I have not committed any crimes neither in that period nor in the subsequent phases of my inaction. In 1982 I went to Mexico because in France there was not yet the Mitterand doctrine, in France there were too many political revolutionaries and they advised us to go to some countries of South America and Madagascar. I went to Mexico thanks to a collection among comrades. I was welcomed by the Situam union, I was there for eight years. In the early days I supported myself thanks to the solidarity of my companions, then I moved from the capital and went to San Miguel da Allende, where with some companions I opened a restaurant: the Corto Maltese. We also produced pasta which we sold to various shops. With some companions I founded the magazine Via Libre. I returned to France in 1990 because my wife wanted to go home and in the meantime the Mitterrand doctrine had been launched which, as is well known, guaranteed the non-expatriation of political refugees to Italy so that obviously they would not commit crimes. I stayed there until 2004. I supported myself by writing books and writing for some magazines, including Acqua, Playboy and others. I signed myself with pseudonyms. I supported myself with translations, copyrights, had contacts with large French publishing houses and earned enough to support my family and buy a house in the Paris region where my two daughters still live today. I had sold the rights to adapt my book "Last Shot" into a film, I was writing scripts for mini television series. I also worked for F3 and Antenne 2. In February 2004 I was arrested for extradition, after 19 days I was released from prison with a ban on leaving Paris. Realizing that the extradition procedure would end against me, I decided to flee to Brazil alone, I was already separated. From 2004 to 2007 I lived in semi-clandestinity, maintained thanks to the support of the Sintuso University Syndicate, ideologically aligned to the left but without connotations of violence. He supported me as a political refugee. In 2007 I was arrested with the request for extradition to France after the international request made by President Sarcozy to follow up on the already accepted request for Italian extradition. I was released from prison in 2011 and did various jobs as a house keeper and in publishing. I have published four books, I have done technical translations of union articles. I had legal papers because President Lula had granted me permanent residence in the territory, so I was not a refugee. I was considered an immigrant. Lula did not accept the extradition request. I stayed in Brazil until 2018 when the new President Bolsonaro had granted the Italian authorities my extradition, what he called a gift to Italy. So it was that I decided to escape to Bolivia where, however, I had contacts with the historian Choquehanqua, with whom I already had contacts for the writing of Kilometer zero which, however, will probably be entitled Towards the dying sun: a historical novel on the Portuguese conquest of Brazil. The rest is recent history".

Contacts with organized crime

The prosecutor then asked him about any contacts with the Italian or foreign organized crime, which Battisti denied: "Never had anything to do with exponents" of that world, "I would have irreparably compromised my image as a refugee political and was against any conception of mine. I cannot exclude that among the many acquaintances I had in 37 years of inaction I may have come across people belonging to the world of common crime, but if this had happened it certainly was without my knowledge. It occurs to me that when I was expelled from Bolivia and was flying to Italy, a police officer told me that I had dated an individual, whose name I do not remember, whom I knew as the youth president of Evo Morales (Mas), which, according to the official, would have been linked to circles of common crime. This is the person who accompanied me from the border between Brazil and Bolivia, or from San Matias, to Santa Cruz della Sierra. It was a matter of solidarity with me between the Movimiento sen terra and the Sintusp, which have lost contact with the Bolivian government. I have had to deal with this person only on this occasion and in a couple of others during which he accompanied me to buy some things in the city center ».

Apologies to the families of the victims

The interview is over, the former terrorist has eviscerated over 40 years of inaction. But then he makes spontaneous statements: "I can only apologize to the families of the people I killed and to whom I hurt because I think that the armed struggle was a disastrous movement that crushed a cultural and social revolution that had started in 1968 with certainly positive prospects for the country but which the armed struggle contributed to crushing. I apologize even though I cannot deny that at that time for me and for all the others who joined the armed struggle it was a just war. Today I can only confirm the discomfort I spoke of in reconstructing my past and reliving moments that can only provoke my revision of a past that at the time I considered right. Speaking of armed struggle today is something meaningless for me ».

In Cosenza, then in Ferrara

Battisti after his stay in Massama was transferred to the Rossano prison in Cosenza in September 2020, from where he was moved a few weeks ago due to his protests (and a hunger strike that began on 2 June 2021) linked to his placement in the section of the Calabrian prison intended for Islamic terrorists. Now he is in Ferrara. Here he will continue to serve life sentences after a life spent in crime and deny having committed it, only to admit his responsibilities after being in the hands of Italian investigators. When the legend about the alleged political persecution had collapsed.

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