The Program of Annihilation: 1978–80

Abstract

Although Mario Moretti and the other BR leaders believed that the Moro affair had been a political success (its failure would be recognized only in retrospect), they realized that operations at such a lofty level could not easily be repeated. What the BR could do, however, and proceeded to do, was to make constant and relentless the program of ‘disarticulation’ described in the 1978 Strategic Resolution and other documents. Agitated as 1977 had been (1806 acts of political violence), the data were much worse for 1978 (2725) and 1979 (2139). To have a sense of what these numbers meant to the texture of daily life, you need only calculate that, on average, there were over seven incidents of political violence every day, most of them in Rome, Milan, Turin and certain other areas of North-Central Italy. In 1978–9 almost 80 people were murdered for political reasons and 88 were wounded in ambushes, or, since the terrorists took August off, about two such crimes every week during the working year. The rapid acceleration in 1978 in what seemed to have been a decade-long descent into chaos was clearly linked to the irruption of 1977 and to some of its characteristics. That link is also evident in the pestilential proliferation of terrorist groups in 1977–9, for the BR were but the oldest and most important of an entire universe of active subversives.