Cesare Battisti (militant)

Cesare Battisti (born 18 December 1954) is an Italian former member of the terrorist group Armed Proletarians for Communism (PAC), who is currently imprisoned after years on the run.

Cesare Battisti was born in 1954 at Cisterna di Latina, near Latina.

PAC was a far-left militant group active in Italy in the late 1970s during the period known as the "Years of Lead".

Battisti was sentenced to life imprisonment in Italy for four homicides (two policemen, a jeweller and a butcher).

Many Italian political activists had fled to France during the 1970s-1980s.

He left the classical lyceum he was attending in 1971, engaged in petty crime, and then moved on to more serious offenses.

In 1976, he moved to Milan, and took part in the activities of the Armed Proletarians for Communism (PAC), an autonomist Marxist group which conducted armed struggle, and which had a "horizontal", decentralized structure, opposed to the centralist organization of the Red Brigades (BR).

The organization, which counted approximately 60 members, had its roots in Barona, a district in the south of Milan.

Four assassinations were committed by the PAC: Antonio Santoro, a prison guard accused by the PAC of mistreatment of prisoners (on 6 June 1978 in Udine); jeweler Pierluigi Torregiani, who had shot and killed a robber in an act of self-defense (on 16 February 1979 in Milan); Lino Sabbadin, a butcher and member of the neo-fascist Italian Social Movement (on the same date, near Mestre); and DIGOS agent Andrea Campagna, who had participated in the first arrests in the Torregiani case (on 19 April 1979 in Milan).

The PAC also engaged in several robberies.

The murder of Torregiani and Sabbadin had been decided upon by the PAC because both of them had previously killed left-wing militants.

Torregiani was killed in revenge in front of his 13-year-old son, who was also accidentally shot by his father.

The son was left paraplegic and considers Battisti to be responsible for the shooting.

"It's not about the person of Cesare Battisti," he declared to the national press agency ANSA, "It's in order that everyone understands that, sooner or later, those who have committed such serious crimes should pay for their faults."

Cesare Battisti was arrested and jailed in Italy on 26 February 1979, then sentenced to 12 and a half years in prison for participation in an "armed group" ("partecipazione a banda armata").

He was sentenced on the grounds of material evidence and testimony provided by two "collaboratori di giustizia" (defendants who testified against their former accomplice) who benefitted from lighter sentences for their testimony.

The status of "collaboratore di giustizia", also popularly known as pentito, was established by anti-terrorist legislation enacted during this period.

He fled first to France in 1981, where he received protection under the Mitterrand doctrine.

Battisti was tried in absentia and sentenced to 12 years for being a member of an armed group and for the material killing of two people and instigating another two homicides, based on testimony from Pietro Mutti.

PAC militants organised Battisti's escape on 4 October 1981, from Frosinone prison.

He fled to Paris and then Puerto Escondido, Oaxaca, Mexico, very shortly afterwards.

While in Mexico, he founded a literary review, Via Libre, which is still active.

He also participated in the creation of the Book Festival of Managua, Nicaragua, and organised the first Graphic Arts Biennal in Mexico.

Battisti began to write at the suggestion of Paco Ignacio Taibo II and collaborated with various newspapers.

Pietro Mutti, one of the leaders of the PAC who had been sentenced in absentia for the assassination of the prison guard Santoro, was arrested in 1982.

He sought the status of collaboratore di giustizia and his testimony, which helped him reduce his sentence, implicated Battisti and an accomplice in the four assassinations claimed by the PAC.

In 1985, the Socialist President of France François Mitterrand had indicated that "leftist Italian activists who were not indicted for violent crimes and had given up terrorist activity would not be extradited to Italy"; this became known as the "Mitterrand doctrine".

Battisti's trial was thus reopened in 1987, and he was sentenced in absentia in 1988 for two assassinations (Santoro and DIGOS agent Campagna) and complicity in murder in the two others (jeweler Torregiani and butcher Sabbadin).

Trusting in this declaration, Battisti returned to France in 1990, where he was arrested at Italy's request in 1991, when his sentence was confirmed in the Court of Cassation.

He thus passed five months in Fresnes prison and then was freed after the extradition request was rejected by the Paris Appeal Court on 29 May 1991.

French justice concluded that the anti-terrorist legislation enacted in Italy "went against the French principles of law," which, along with the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR), prohibited in particular extradition of a person sentenced in absentia if that person had not been in a condition to adequately defend himself during his trial.

The court also declared the evidence against Battisti as "contradictory" and "worthy of a military justice."

After his release in 1991, Battisti lived in Paris, where he wrote his first novel, Les Habits d'ombre ("The shadow clothes").

Two thrillers, L'Ombre rouge ("The red shadow") and Buena onda ("Good wave"), took as their setting and backdrop the Parisian world of Italian fugitives from justice.

He was sentenced to life in prison in 1995.

The court sentenced him in 1995, on appeal, to a life-sentence.

Two years earlier, the Court of Cassation had quashed, on procedural grounds, the case against Battisti's accomplice, who had also been accused by Pietro Mutti.

After the de facto repeal of the Mitterrand doctrine in 2002, Battisti fled to Brazil under a false identity to avoid a possible extradition, where he lived as a free man until an order of extradition issued in December 2018.

He then fled to Santa Cruz in Bolivia, where he was arrested in 2019 by an Italian team of Interpol officers and extradited to Italy.

He is also a fiction author, having written 15 novels.