WORLD WORLDWIDE EUROPE FRANCE - news journal UPDATE - (en) France, OCL CA #351 - "I've been on the run since 1980, but I don't have to make a mea culpa" - Interview with Leonardo Bertulazzi (ca, de, fr, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

 Like many figures in the social struggles that marked Italy in the

1970s, Leonardo Bertulazzi experienced repression and exile. He now
reflects on his journey at a time when, after being arrested in
Argentina, the Meloni courts are seeking his extradition. Born in 1951,
Leonardo Bertulazzi was an irregular activist in the Genoese column of
the Red Brigades until 1980, the year his escape began. Tried and
convicted in absentia for the kidnapping of Pietro Costa in 1977 and for
participation in an armed gang, he left Italy, crossed Greece, and lived
in El Salvador until 2002. Wanted internationally, he entered Argentina
where he was arrested. The Argentine authorities refused extradition,
and he was granted political asylum. In 2013, the Italian Court of
Cassation upheld the statute of limitations on his conviction, but the
Genoa prosecutor's office reopened the proceedings and overturned the
previous decision. In the summer of 2024, Argentine President J. Milei
arbitrarily overturned the asylum grant. In Italy, the Meloni government
seized the opportunity and restarted the extradition proceedings. His
political refugee status suspended, he was arrested and placed under
house arrest with an electronic tag. His fate now depends on the ruling
of the Supreme Court in Buenos Aires, where he currently lives.

For the context of emergency laws in Italy, see the article in the same
issue: From yesterday to today, a quick look back at emergency laws in
Italy...

You arrived in Argentina in 2002...
It was a terribly unusual year for Argentina. Terrible because the
financial collapse caused a sudden impoverishment of a significant
portion of society, and special because it triggered an immediate
response in terms of self-organization and struggle: "Let them all go!"
(= "Let them all go!") was the slogan. My wife, Bettina, and I began to
get to know the working-class neighborhoods and attend neighborhood
assemblies to organize soup kitchens, community pharmacies, and other
forms of self-management. We had lived in Salvador for many years, where
we had worked in similar contexts. In November, Interpol arrested me for
an extradition request to Italy. The piquetero organizations and
neighborhood assemblies expressed great solidarity with me, and there
was a campaign on my behalf.

And then?
After seven months of detention, the judge ruled that the extradition of
a person convicted in absentia was not admissible, and they released me.
The following year, during Kirchner's presidency (2007-2015), I was
granted political refugee status because the special laws, security
measures, pentitos (the "repentant" law), torture, mass trials,
exorbitant sentences, special prisons, Article 41bis-which allows for a
strict prison regime-and convictions in absentia did not guarantee a
reliable administration of justice.

What did you do in Argentina during those 23 years?
I worked as a graphic designer and translator until 2015, when I started
attending a municipal violin-making school. It was a large warehouse in
the suburbs where, previously, a carpentry shop with its equipment had
operated. We created a business producing musical instruments for
student orchestras in the suburbs of Buenos Aires. (...)

Since then, the country has changed a lot. The spirit of social
mobilization we experienced upon our arrival has faded due to
disappointment, weariness, resignation, and repression that have
gradually clipped the wings of all hope. The Milei government (since
2023) has expelled hundreds of thousands of undocumented workers and
violently repressed any attempt at resistance. Today, in Argentine
society, you can sense fear and, at the same time, a sense of pent-up
anger that is just waiting for the "tortilla se de vuelta" (literally,
for the "omelet to be turned over") to reverse the situation.

In Italy, there were already convictions against you. Special
legislation has become the protagonist: the search at all costs for the
collaboration of the repentant, with the carrot of laws on the awarding
of sentence reduction bonuses or, when that was not enough, with
torture, followed by sentences of decades of imprisonment based solely
on the statements of the repentant. This is a judicial process that has
its roots in the atrocities of fascism and the inability to purge the
judicial system after the fall of the regime. It is a heavy legacy that
has become a mental habit, a deeply rooted state of mind. It is
therefore not surprising that the special legislation enacted in the
1970s, far more ruthless than the Rocco Code (1) itself, provoked no
contradiction among those who applied it so diligently.

Let's turn to these trials.
I have two convictions: 15 years for Costa's kidnapping and 19 years for
participation in an armed gang, which were later combined into a single
sentence of 27 years. The trials took place after I had already left the
country for years.
The Genoa prosecutor's office writes: "It is reasonable to recognize
that there is currently no evidence that can prove the convict's
knowledge of his trial or of the accusations definitively brought
against him, then confirmed in his absence." The same Argentine judge
who, in 2003, under President Kirchner, rejected the extradition
request, accepted it today under Milei, arguing that there was no reason
to doubt the word of the Genoa prosecutor, who assured me that I would
be entitled to a new trial once in Italy.[...]In 2024, relations between
the governments changed, and Milei and Meloni embraced. I was dismissed
as a refugee, and the Genoa prosecutor's office presented the same
extradition request as 22 years earlier.

But with what justification?

None. All I need to do is have the nerve to say that I didn't know I was
on trial, and once extradited to Italy, I would be entitled to a new trial.

In one of your responses to the questionnaire for obtaining political
refugee status in Argentina, you wrote: "In 1968, a social movement
emerged-surprising in its scale-which for more than 10 years challenged
the country's social and political relations and determined the fate of
many people, including me."

The movement was gaining more and more ground in society, generating
hope for change, and already producing shifts in mentalities. For me and
for many of my generation, it was a celebration, a festival of hope, in
which students and workers of all walks of life, women and men, old
anti-fascist fighters and new ones, came together.

The movement's ascendant phase lasted for years, and then what? Then
there was the life I still lead today, filled with precarious work,
unemployment, and health problems-according to the adage, "the richer
you are, the healthier you are." A Mediterranean Sea that welcomes the
corpses of migrants, those desperate people who die simply because they
are looking for a life worth living, while at the same time, military
rearmament is encouraged, people are accustomed to the idea of war, and
fascism is propagated. I fought for a different present. In judging the
past, we cannot ignore the present, to which those who defeated us have
led us. I will not offer a mea culpa to the warmongers, to those who
provoked the resurgence of fascists.

You are not the first person wanted for acts from half a century ago.
Let us recall the recent ten "d'Ombre Rosse" (2) in France. Don't you
think that the events of this historical period are a still-open wound
for Italy?
We must reread the words of the French judges who refused to extradite
the activists convicted in Italy and who took refuge in France: "The
events are very old. Without overlooking their exceptional gravity, in a
context of extreme and repeated violence that cannot be legitimized by
political necessity, it must be considered that the disturbances of
public order are over." This consideration expresses the spirit of the
statute of limitations. In Italian society, the time of the open wound
has passed. I have read investigations into the "Years of Lead" which
reveal that many people don't even know what they were.

Why is so much attention still paid to these events?

I think one reason should be sought in this legacy I mentioned. In 2016,
a lawyer requested that my convictions be statute of limitations. On
June 12, 2017, the Genoa Court of Appeal declared the sentences
expiring. On February 23, 2018, the conviction was brought before the
Court of Cassation and became final. In the meantime, the Supreme Court
adopted a new position, stipulating that even an arrest following an
extradition request interrupts the statute of limitations. The
prosecution requested that the trial be reopened, citing a new fact that
had not been taken into account: my arrest in 2002 in Buenos Aires.
(...) The irony of persecution: it was my 2016 request for a statute of
limitations that was the pretext used by Milei to revoke my refugee
status; I had allegedly attempted to voluntarily take advantage of the
protection of my country of origin.

You've been on the run since 1980. Do you have any regrets?
There are things that matter that I haven't been able to do. I remember
a newspaper article a few years ago. It talked about the fugitives of
the 1970s who had taken refuge in Latin America, with particular
reference to the Genoese. The article described their beautiful life in
the Antilles, surrounded by hammocks, palm trees, and mojitos. I
wondered how anyone could imagine an exile in such a way, how a
journalist, without any direct knowledge of the person he was writing
about, could write such an article. But I also thought that, in his
ignorance, he was right: it's true that I lived well, but in a way that
had nothing to do with his imagination. I've met many people, many of
them in complex existential situations. Their stories and their memories
are the most beautiful book I've ever read, and they constitute my richness.

Please note: This interview is a translation revised by Boudjemaa
Sedira, a painter in Nîmes, and revised by the Lille and Strasbourg
Courts of Justice, of the article by former Br Bertulazzi: "Sono in fuga
dal 1980, ma non regalo mea culpa" published on March 18, 2025, in the
Italian newspaper "Il Manifesto."

Notes from the Strasbourg Court of Justice

1. Name given to the Italian penal code established by Alfredo Rocco,
Keeper of the Seals in the Mussolini government. Still in force today,
it has undergone numerous amendments, some more lenient (e.g., the end
of the death penalty) but sometimes more repressive (e.g.,
anti-terrorism laws).

2. Operation "Ombre rosse" (=Red Shadow) dates from 2021, it consisted
of the arrest and extradition of former activists of the Red Brigades,
Lotta Continua and other groups involved in the Years of Lead. Italy,
for whom this operation was highly anticipated, targeted 200 people
benefiting from the Mitterrand Doctrine of 1985 (a doctrine granting
asylum to people accused of political crimes provided that they have
"integrated well" into French society and as long as the requesting
country practices exceptional laws). Following negotiations with
Dupond-Moretti, then Minister of Justice, only ten names were retained
by France. Seven of them were arrested in April 2021, the other three
having managed to flee abroad. Released until their trial, in 2022 the
Paris Court of Appeal finally refused their extradition.

http://oclibertaire.lautre.net/spip.php?article4472
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