Cesare Battisti: Dangerous Terrorist or Innocent Writer?

Cesare Battisti, a former radical leftist fighter from Italy who was sentenced to life imprisonment in absentia years ago for committing or participating in four murders, was finally arrested in Bolivia in mid-January and immediately transferred to Italy, where he was imprisoned. This suggests that his tumultuous nearly forty-year period spent between prison and evading capture, which turned his case into a judicial-diplomatic struggle, has come to an end. Battisti, who had fled Brazil a month prior and illegally entered Bolivia, was unarmed at the time of his arrest and carried Brazilian identification documents under his real name. Now 64 years old and still insisting on his innocence, he had been living in Brazil since 2004 and had spent about 15 years in France before that. Battisti, who is also fluent in Portuguese, was arrested on the streets of Santa Cruz. Although he had changed his appearance, he did not resist the police. Following Battisti's arrest, Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte expressed his happiness on Facebook, stating that Italian prisons await Battisti "not for his political views, but for the four crimes he committed and also for crimes related to armed struggle and terrorism." The right-wing government of Brazil also welcomed Battisti's arrest. Jair Bolsonaro thanked those who apprehended Battisti, labeling him a "terrorist." Battisti's four-decade-long evasion began with a poster reading "No to Slavery" during the launch of a book about his prison memories in Brazil in 2012. However, how did Cesare Battisti, whose case gained international dimensions from the early 1980s and turned into a protracted struggle between Italy and France and Brazil, spend the last four decades? Born on December 18, 1954, in "Ciampino di Latina," located fifty kilometers south of Rome, Battisti joined the group "Armed Workers for Communism" during the 1970s, a period known as the "Years of Lead." Before this membership, he spent a short time in prison for "violating public rights," but in June 1979, he was arrested in Milan in connection with the murder of a jeweler, and two years later, in May 1981, he was sentenced to 12 years and 10 months in prison for "membership in an armed group" and "concealment of weapons." However, a few months later, in October of that year, Battisti escaped from his prison near Rome and fled to France. He did not stay long in France and moved to Mexico in 1982, just as François Mitterrand's presidency was beginning in France. In line with many human rights developments during Mitterrand's presidency, he announced in 1985 that France would grant asylum to former radical leftist activists from Italy who had severed ties with their past and would not return them to their country. Five years later, in 1990, Battisti returned to France, and a year after his arrival, the French judiciary rejected Italy's request to extradite Battisti. On March 31, 1993, a court in Milan sentenced Battisti in absentia to life imprisonment for committing two murders and participating in two others in the 1970s, including the murder of the jeweler. Although Italy's request for Battisti's extradition had been rejected by France, Italy formally submitted the request again in 2002, which again yielded no results for the Italians. Two years later, in February 2004, Battisti was arrested in Paris but was released after a month and placed under the supervision of the French judiciary. In June of that year, Jacques Chirac, the then-President of France, announced his agreement to extradite Battisti to Italy, deeming it a "duty" of his government. A few months later, the French judiciary rejected Battisti's appeal. However, Italy still did not achieve its goal. Despite France's agreement to extradite Battisti, he fled the country and sought asylum in Brazil under a false identity. He later claimed that his escape to Brazil was facilitated by French intelligence services. The first three years of Battisti's life in Brazil were spent in hiding without much trouble, but on March 18, 2007, he was arrested in Rio de Janeiro and transferred to a prison in Brasília. Thus began Battisti's four-year imprisonment in Brazil. Italy continued to seek Battisti's extradition, but on January 14, 2009, Brazil decided to grant Battisti's political asylum request while he was still in prison. This decision sparked outrage and protests from Italy. A few months after the legal and official asylum decision for Battisti in Brazil, the Brazilian Supreme Court issued a permit for his extradition to Italy, but this time, leftist President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva announced a decision at the end of 2010 that prevented Battisti's extradition. The Brazilian Supreme Court issued a new ruling condemning Battisti to prison, but in February 2011, he claimed in a letter to the Brazilian parliament that he had "never harmed or killed a single human being." He also went on a hunger strike in a Brazilian prison, stating that "dying in Brazil is better than returning to Italy." Eventually, the Brazilian judiciary retreated, and in June of that year, confirmed Lula's decision and ordered Battisti's release. Italy's hopes from Brazil were also dashed, especially since Brazil granted Battisti permanent residency in the country. Italy turned to the International Court of Justice, but this international court also could not achieve any results. Until March 2015, when a federal judge in Brazil issued an order for Battisti's transfer to Mexico or France. However, Battisti continued to live freely in Brazil until he was arrested at the Bolivian border in October 2017 while attempting to travel overland from Brazil to Bolivia. Battisti was immediately released and transferred to São Paulo, but was placed under electronic surveillance for four months. With the start of the presidential election campaign in Brazil, Battisti's case also became one of the topics of this campaign, and right-wing candidate Jair Bolsonaro promised that if elected, he would return Battisti to Italy. When Bolsonaro won, he asked the Brazilian Supreme Court to review Battisti's case again. This time, a judge from the Brazilian Supreme Court issued a warrant for Battisti's arrest for the purpose of extraditing him to Italy on December 13, 2018, and the following day, this warrant was signed by Michel Temer, the then-President of Brazil, who had only a few days left in his presidency. Battisti requested asylum from the Bolivian government four days later, on December 18, but it was less than a month before the Bolivian police responded to this request with: arrest and extradition to Italy. In a letter he wrote to the Bolivian government, Battisti reiterated that he is not the "monster" that the Italian government intends to make him out to be. He had previously expressed regret about his past beliefs in an interview with the Paris newspaper Le Monde in 2011: "Certainly, mistakes were made. The claim of changing society with weapons was foolish. At that time, everyone had guns! The world was filled with guerrillas. Italy was in a pre-revolutionary state... Now it is easy to judge that time and to judge everyone with the same stick." In the 1970s, many radical left activists from Italy fled to France, but among them, Battisti showed another talent. While in France, he became a building guard to make a living and wrote about 14 novels in Italian that were translated and published in French. Battisti drew inspiration for his crime novels from his own life and that of other radical left activists in Italy. He also chose titles that are independently meaningful for his novels: "Never Without a Gun," "Red Shadow," "New Year, New Life," "My Escape," "Being Bamboo" (a Portuguese metaphor, like "Being a Cedar" in Persian, meaning bending but not breaking), "The Last Bullets," and more. In France, Battisti was also supported by some intellectuals and writers such as Bernard-Henri Lévy and Fred Vargas. In his novel "My Escape," Cesare Battisti wrote: "I write so that I do not get lost in the dust of endless days, to repeat to myself that it is not true. This is not me, the man that the media has turned into a monster and reduced to silence in the shadows." Regardless of the judgment about Cesare Battisti's beliefs and actions, his works narrate a segment of Italy's history and the bitter fate of a group of political fighters.