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Founder Renato Curcio, 36, and 150 other brigatisti are currently in jail or on trial for numerous crimes —39 murders, 30 kidnapings, ten jail breaks and a variety of subversive activities. But the organization continues to grow, and so does its appetite for mayhem. When Curcio, then a sociology student, formed the group in 1969, its activities were largely limited to rhetoric about the need for "an armed proletariat vanguard" to do battle against "the imperialist state of the multinationals." In the early 1970s, the group moved from vandalism and arson into a new field: kidnapings of plant managers and junior executives, who were usually freed after admitting crimes at "people's trials."
In the mid-1970s, the Red Brigades expanded their enemies list to include politicians, judges, policemen, lawyers, professors and journalists as well as businessmen, and added a new crime: murder. The targets in Italy's long tradition of political violence had almost always been the police, soldiers and statesmen. But for the Red Brigades, notes Rome Historian Rosario Romeo, revolutionary action "is essentially class action. They attack businessmen and professional men as representatives of a class rather than as individuals. Their targets are marked because of their social position, not their political beliefs."
The brigatisti apparently have some links to terrorist organizations in other countries, such as West Germany's Red Army Faction and various Palestinian groups. There is even some speculation that they have a Czech connection, although the evidence—like the Czech-made pistol used in Moro's killing—remains tenuous at best. But Italian officials are convinced that there is an important difference between the Red Brigades and say, the West German terrorists who operate in virtual isolation. The Red Brigades enjoy considerable support from left-wing organizations in Italy, which, at a time of lingering 7.4% unemployment (nearly half are people under 30). are attracting many middle-and working-class students and ex-students.
Some indication of the political consequences of the Moro assassination, meanwhile, could come from results of local elections in two provinces and 816 municipalities held over the weekend. Both major parties were expected to hold steady, with the Christian Democrats gaining slightly for their tough stand toward the kidnapers. But there was always the chance of a backlash in the emotional aftermath of the tragedy.
Most experts on modern terrorism agree that the danger in combating it is to fall into a repressive reaction—which is exactly what the terrorists seek to provoke—and thus undermine the democratic values that are under attack. In the 1970s. Uruguay, once the model of democracy in South America, succeeded in wiping out the leftist Tupamaros. The cost was great: the get-tough climate set the stage for the military to seize power and set up a dictatorship. The dilemma of how to cope with terrorism is not lost on any European government these days. Spanish Premier Adolfo Suarez's center-right coalition warned last week that the Moro tragedy was not an isolated phenomenon but indicated "a generalized threat to all democracies and an intent to destabilize on a European scale."