Kidnapping and Murder of Aldo Moro
The Red Brigades took Aldo Moro out of his car in Rome on 16 March 1978 and killed him fifty-five days later. He was Italy's most experienced politician, five times prime minister, and was on his way to parliament for the vote that would install a government supported for the first time by the Communist Party — the historic compromise he had spent years negotiating, and which the kidnappers had a specific interest in preventing. Five bodyguards were shot dead at the ambush in Via Fani in about thirty seconds. What followed was a national argument conducted in public through his own letters. Moro wrote from captivity to his colleagues, to the pope and to his family, asking the state to negotiate an exchange of prisoners, and the government's position, held by his own Christian Democrats and by the Communists, was that the state does not treat with terrorists. The letters were then described in some quarters as written under duress or by a man no longer himself, which he answered in later ones with considerable bitterness. Paul VI, an old friend, appealed to the kidnappers on his knees and offered a ransom. He was shot on 9 May and left in the boot of a car in Via Caetani, a street chosen because it lies between the headquarters of the two parties he had brought together. The historic compromise died with him. The Red Brigades collapsed within five years, having achieved the opposite of everything they intended. They had wanted to prevent the Communist Party entering government and to provoke a state reaction that would radicalise the workers, and they lost the party the support of the workers instead.
- Year: 1978 CE
- Category: Political
