Red Brigades

The Red Brigades (Brigate Rosse in Italian, often abbreviated BR) was a Marxist-Leninist terrorist organization, based in Italy, which was responsible for numerous violent incidents, assassinations, and robberies during the so-called "Years of Lead". Formed in 1970, the organisation sought to create a "revolutionary" state through armed struggle, and to remove Italy from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. The Red Brigades attained notoriety in the 1970s and early 1980s with their violent attempts to destabilise Italy by acts of sabotage, bank robberies, and kidnappings.

Models for the Red Brigades included the Latin American urban guerrilla movements. Volumes on the Tupamaros published by Feltrinelli were influential", a sort of do-it-yourself manual for the early Red Brigades" and also the Italian partisan movement of 1943–45 which was interpreted as an example of a youthful minority using violent means for just ends.

The group's most infamous act took place in 1978, when the second groups of the BR, headed by Mario Moretti, kidnapped the former Christian Democrat Prime Minister Aldo Moro, who was trying to reach a compromesso storico, or "historic compromise", with the Communists. The kidnappers killed five members of Moro's entourage, and murdered Moro himself 54 days later. The BR barely survived the end years of the Cold War following a split in 1984 and the arrest or flight of the majority of its members. In the 1980s, the group was broken up by Italian investigators, with the aid of several leaders under arrest who turned pentito and assisted the authorities in capturing the other members. After the mass arrests in the late 1980s, the group slowly faded into insignificance. A majority of those leaders took advantage of a law that gave credits for renouncing the doctrine (dissociato status) and contributing to efforts by police and judiciary to prosecute its members ("collaboratore di giustizia", also known as pentito).