Red Brigades

Red Brigades
Brigate Rosse Participant in Participant in the Years of Lead
Flag of the Brigate Rosse
Active	1970–1988
Ideology	Far-left politics Marxism-Leninism Sovietization Anti-fascism
Leaders	Renato Curcio Margherita Cagol Alberto Franceschini
Area of operations	Italy
Battles and wars	Years of Lead Kidnapping of Aldo Moro (main)

Years of Lead

The Red Brigades (Italian: Brigate Rosse [briˈɡate ˈrosse], often abbreviated BR) was a left-wing paramilitary organization, based in Italy, responsible for numerous violent incidents, including assassinations, kidnapping and robberies during the so-called "Years of Lead".

Formed in 1970, the organization 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, kidnappings and murders.

Models for the Red Brigades included the Latin American urban guerrilla movements. The group was influenced by volumes on the Tupamaros published by Feltrinelli, "a sort of do-it-yourself manual for the early Red Brigades", and 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.

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).