1969 was a special year. After the 1968 youth and student rebellion,
workers also took to the streets, bypassing the traditionalorganizations of reference, political parties, and unions. This
coalescence contained within it a potential for struggle that was
extremely worrying for the existing power structures at the time, both
internal and external, which had already been alarmed since the early
1960s by the anti-fascist and anti-government uprising in Genoa and the
events in Piazza Statuto in Turin, as well as by the entry of the
Socialist Party into government. Carabinieri General De Lorenzo, in
league with the Segni presidency, plotted a coup in 1964; far-right
conferences with military figures took place in 1967. The struggle
spread, frequently taking on the character of a revolutionary rupture.
The state's response was swift; while the police and Carabinieri in the
streets reorganized their forces, the secret services sharpened their
weapons in the depths of power.
On the international level, the conflict between the two blocs, led
respectively by the USA and the USSR, after the 1962 Cuban Missile
Crisis and the escalation of the Vietnam War, reached such levels of
tension that they forced the liquidation of every possible adversary in
their respective areas of reference, demonstrating in practice a unity
of action against the exploited and oppressed in all countries. In 1967,
there was a military coup in Greece; the dictators Franco and Salazar
remained in power in Spain and Portugal, staunch allies of the USA; in
South America, military intervention against popular uprisings was the
order of the day and would gradually lead to military dictatorships in
Chile, Uruguay, Argentina, Bolivia, and Paraguay, under the direction of
the CIA, which oversaw the formation of the South American military
hierarchies (the famous Condor Plan); In the Warsaw Pact area, in 1967,
tanks crushed the Czechoslovak rebellion, while in Poland protests
continued and the regime opened fire on striking workers.
Even in our country, plans for a 'coup d'état' (after the one in 1964)
are on the tables of illustrious representatives of the state and
government, in collusion with the American administration: the fear is
that the proletarian uprising will bring with it an electoral increase
for the Communist Party, the strongest in the area of competence of US
imperialism in Europe, opening the doors of government to it.
The goal is to trigger a reaction from the middle class-the so-called
silent majority-in response to the growing prominence of the working
class, fueled by youth and student unrest. The violence inherent in the
growing social conflict must be exacerbated and escalated to terrorist
levels, to push the "moderates" to call for military intervention or, at
the very least, for an authoritarian strengthening of the state.
Espionage, infiltration, and provocation become daily and recurring
practices.
The first bombings took place on April 25, 1969, in Milan: one at the
Fiat pavilion at the Trade Fair and the other at the Foreign Exchange
Office of the National Communications Bank at the Central Railway
Station. Dozens of people were injured, though not seriously. A group of
five anarchists (Paolo Braschi, Angelo Della Savia, Paolo Faccioli,
Giuseppe Norscia, and Clara Mazzanti) were charged and arrested on the
recommendation of Commissioner Luigi Calabresi-a supporter of the
"anarchist theory"-and were only released in the spring of 1971.
Incidentally, the Catanzaro Court of Assizes recognized the
responsibility of the neo-fascists Freda and Ventura for those attacks
on February 23, 1979.
Ten more bombs were placed on August 9th on trains at various stations
in the Lombardy-Veneto region: eight exploded, injuring 12. A growing
press campaign accused anarchists, without any evidence, of being
responsible for these criminal acts. The Ordine Nuovo group in Veneto,
once again led by Freda and Ventura, would later be charged with these
bombings. It is worth noting that our comrade Giuseppe Pinelli-because
he was a railway worker-would also be charged with these attacks in the
fourth-floor room of the Milan Police Headquarters on the night of
December 15, 1969.
The most serious attack occurred on December 12, 1969: in Piazza
Fontana, in the center of Milan, a bomb exploded inside the Banca
dell'Agricoltura, killing 14 people and injuring 91 (three of whom later
died from their injuries, while others suffered permanent injuries).
Another bomb was found at the Banca Commerciale in Milan, and others
exploded at the Altare della Patria, in Piazza Venezia, at the entrance
to the Museum of the Risorgimento, and in the underground passageway
connecting the Banca Nazionale del Lavoro from Via San Basilio to Via
Veneto in Rome, injuring 16. It all happened in the space of 53 minutes.
The investigation immediately turned against the anarchists. The
mainstream bourgeois press unleashed a campaign to enforce order, while
the left-wing outlets (L'Unità, L'Avanti!) maintained a cautious, if not
accusatory, stance toward these "loose cannons." The memory of the March
23, 1921, attack weighed heavily on the case, when an anarchist-inspired
attack on the Diana Theater in Milan-targeting Police Commissioner
Gasti, guilty of the detention of Malatesta, Borghi, and
Quaglino-inadvertently resulted in the deaths of 21 spectators and the
wounding of 80.
Hundreds of arrests, searches, and interrogations took place, especially
of anarchist militants, members of the revolutionary left, and some
members of the far right, just to give the impression that the
investigations were going in all directions.
It was actually a provocation artfully orchestrated against the members
of the recently formed Roman anarchist circle 22 marzo, whose leading
figure was the Milanese anarchist Pietro Valpreda, who was in his
hometown that day, staying with his aunt, summoned to a trial for an
anti-clerical leaflet. Along with him, Emilio Borghese, Roberto
Gargamelli, Ivo della Salvia, and Roberto Mander were arrested in Rome,
while Enrico Di Cola managed to escape. In Milan, Giuseppe Pinelli was
invited by Commissioner Calabresi to follow him on his motorbike to join
the dozens of other detainees already at the police station.
The provocation, which was intended to trigger-on the day of the
victims' funerals, December 15th-a fascist street reaction, including an
assault on the PCI headquarters in Botteghe Oscure, was of such
proportions as to justify the use of exceptional measures such as the
suspension of constitutional liberties and the intervention of the army.
The main obstacle, however, was the wall of people who flocked from all
over Milan-from the factories in the hinterland to the metalworkers and
steelworkers of Sesto-to Piazza Duomo to attend the funeral ceremony,
accompanied by the alerting of all defense structures of
extra-parliamentary organizations and groups. The result of this massive
mobilization-as revealed by the findings of the commission of
inquiry-was the refusal of then-Prime Minister Rumor to form a public
health government that would have suspended constitutional liberties,
despite pressure from industrial sectors, the political apparatus, and
the military.
But not all cards were played. In those days, as revealed in a major
study conducted by lawyer Gabriele Fuga and Enrico Maltini (published
first by Zero in Condotta and then by Colibrì in an expanded edition),
the investigations and interrogations of those arrested were the
responsibility of men from the Reserved Affairs Office, headed by
Federico Umberto D'Amato, who had arrived from Rome with the clear aim
of pursuing the anarchist trail and carrying out the provocation. It is
no coincidence that on that very December 15th, after the workers'
mobilization at the funeral, these henchmen decided to force the issue
and coerce those arrested into making statements that would definitively
frame Pietro Valpreda-the designated monster-as the perpetrator of the
attack. Giuseppe Pinelli, a well-known comrade who has always been
active in the Milan area and beyond, in propaganda initiatives, union
struggle, counter-information, and assistance to political victims (such
as those of April 25th)-an ideal liaison between the groups in Rome and
Milan-is the one who must deliver what the Office, and therefore the
Ministry of the Interior to which he reports, wants.
Illegally held well beyond the legal limits, after three days of
detention in conditions we can only imagine, Pino was grilled using
methods well known to his comrades who, before him, had had to
experience the methods of Commissioner Calabresi and his team, now
reinforced by those from Rome.
We know the conclusion. On the night between December 15th and 16th,
Pino was thrown from the fourth-floor window of the police headquarters,
in the presence of numerous officials and police officers. He died in
the hospital shortly after the fall, hidden from prying eyes, far from
his family, who were kept at a distance. The police commissioner said he
had jumped into the void shouting "It's the end of anarchy!"; a police
officer said he had tried to catch him by the foot and that he was left
with one shoe in his hand (too bad for him, Pinelli had both shoes in
the courtyard where he fell); Calabresi said he wasn't even in the room
(and the statements of Pasquale Valitutti, present at the police
headquarters that night, who claimed he never saw the commissioner leave
that room, were never taken into consideration; in fact, Judge
D'Ambrosio had the courage to state-presuming Valitutti was dead -that
the latter had stated the opposite).
But the contradictory versions given by the police and the political
establishment about Pinelli's death contributed to undermining the veil
of lies that underpinned the entire operation, forcing the public to
confront the reality of things beyond the manipulations of power. The
version of Pino's "suicide" did not stand up to the test of facts, and
his murder subsequently became a given among most of the public.
On December 17, at a press conference, Milanese anarchists who met at
the Circolo Ponte della Ghisolfa in Piazzale Lugano 31 denounced the
massacre as a "State Massacre"-an expression that later became public
property-demanded the freedom of Valpreda and his companions, and
accused the police of Pinelli's death, a veritable assassination.
Exposing the state's lies became an absolute necessity, not only
regarding the specific incident, but also to gain social agency that was
being reduced and denied by manipulative and repressive action.
Demonstrations, demonstrations, leafleting, and rallies followed one
another wherever an anarchist group existed: the freedom of imprisoned
comrades and the truth about the assassination became central to the
movement's activity.
The anarchists, initially alone, found at their side progressive
intellectuals, honest exponents of civil society, journalists, and,
gradually, the forces of the revolutionary left and even sectors of the
reformist and institutional left.
The Piazza Fontana massacre will be the subject of various
investigations, journalistic inquiries, speculations of various kinds
and political maneuvers, giving rise to interrupted, repeated trials,
moved from Milan to Rome, Catanzaro, Bari, characterized by the
deliberate concealment of the truth through protection, silence, lies,
in a context of bombs and massacres, such as the neo-fascist ones of
July 22, 1970 on the Palermo-Turin express train near Gioia Tauro and of
August 4, 1974 on the Italicus between Florence and Bologna (a total of
18 dead and 187 injured), of May 31, 1972 (Peteano, car bomb against the
Carabinieri, of which the militant of Ordine Nuovo, Vincenzo
Vinciguerra, will accuse himself), of May 7, 1973 at the Milan Police
Headquarters (4 dead and 45 injured) by Gianfranco Bertoli, of May 28,
1974 (Brescia, bomb against a union demonstration, 8 dead and a hundred
injured), of August 2, 1980 at the Bologna station (85 dead and 200
injured).
A mass of innocent deaths, 135 victims and 550 wounded, fallen into what
is called the 'Strategy of Tension', which would later find another form
of tragic expression in the ambushes and deaths in the street
demonstrations. From 1970 to 1976, the following were killed by the
police: Bruno Labate and Antonio Campanella in Reggio Calabria, the
internationalist Saverio Saltarelli in Milan during the demonstration
that was harshly repressed on the occasion of the first anniversary of
the Piazza Fontana massacre, Massimiliano Ferretti, aged seven months,
suffocated by tear gas during the eviction of the occupied houses on
Viale Tibaldi in Milan, the pensioner Giuseppe Tavecchio hit by a tear
gas canister fired at chest height in Milan during the clashes of 11
March 1972, the anarchist comrade Franco Serantini in Pisa left to die
in prison after being beaten to death, the student of the Student
Movement Roberto Franceschi in Milan, Vincenzo Caporale of the PcdI in
Naples during the national school strike, Fabrizio Ceruso of the
Proletarian Committee of Tivoli, the invalid Zunno Minotti of Rome,
Giannino Zibecchi of the Anti-Fascist Committees of Milan during the
assault on the headquarters of the MSI members in 1975: Rodolfo Boschi
in Florence, retired Gennaro Costantino in Naples, Pietro Bruno of Lotta
Continua in Rome, engineer Mario Marotta in Rome, and Mario Salvi in
Rome in 1976 during the protest against the conviction of Giovanni
Marini. Furthermore, on September 26, 1970, five anarchists: Angelo
Casile, Gianni Aricò, Franco Scordo, Luigi Lo Celso, and Annalise Borth,
died in a mysterious car accident while traveling from Calabria to Rome
to deliver counter-information on the Gioia Tauro train massacre to the
editorial office of 'Umanità Nova'.
In this context, there is no shortage of controversial acts such as the
assassination of Commissioner Luigi Calabresi (17 May 1972) for which
three militants of the far-left group Lotta Continua were instrumentally
accused in 1988.
Valpreda and his companions were released on December 30, 1972, after
three years in prison and a law passed in Parliament amid popular
outrage. In 1981, the Catanzaro Court of Appeal upheld their complete
innocence in the massacre (though they were convicted of criminal
conspiracy, just to justify their years in prison). Neo-fascists Franco
Freda and Giovanni Ventura, along with secret service agents and
officials, were initially convicted and then definitively acquitted
between 1972 and 1991.
Meanwhile, a new investigation was opened in Milan in 1989 and concluded
with the indictment of a group of neo-fascists affiliated with Ordine
Nuovo del Veneto, in collusion with American and Italian intelligence
services. Sentenced to life imprisonment in the first instance, they
were subsequently and definitively acquitted by a ruling of the Court of
Cassation, which, while acknowledging the neo-fascist nature of the
massacre and the responsibility of Freda and Ventura (no longer liable
to prosecution due to their previous acquittal, upheld by the Court of
Cassation), failed to identify the actual perpetrators. Finally, the
families of the victims of the massacre would also have to pay the huge
legal costs! The State does not condemn itself. It is May 3, 2005.
Regarding the Giuseppe Pinelli case, we immediately note the examining
magistrate's dismissal of his death as accidental and the reopening of
the case, thanks largely to the relentless press campaign by the weekly
magazine "Lotta Continua," which, by blaming Commissioner Calabresi as
the main person responsible for Pinelli's murder, effectively forced him
to sue the magazine's editor-in-chief, Pio Baldelli. In the ensuing
trial, the blatant contradictions of the police officers present in the
room would become evident, to the point that the trial was suspended
with laughable excuses. Pinelli's widow, Licia Rognini, brought the
commissioner and his subordinates back to court in October 1971,
accusing them of our comrade's murder. However, the trial was
interrupted by the commissioner's murder in May 1972, a timely
interruption given the truths emerging during the trial, which would
cast doubt and lead to many interpretations of the commissioner's murder.
The judicial investigation continued, and on October 27, 1975,
progressive judge Gerardo D'Ambrosio, who later rose to fame with the
"Clean Hands" investigation and later served as a member of parliament
for the Democratic Party, concluded it with a paradoxical ruling: to
avoid blaming the police and denying their version of the suicide, he
invented an "active illness," an illness that, caused by his state of
stress, had pushed Pinelli to jump over the window railing and fall into
the void. This scandalous ruling can only be understood in the context
of the political climate of the time, characterized by the historic
compromise theorized by the Italian Communist Party, which was
interested in a collaborative relationship with the dominant party, the
Christian Democrats, which included the instigators of the massacres.
The Pinelli case could have disturbed the manipulators.
And it is perhaps because of the discomfort this affair left among many
of the key figures at the time that in 2009 the President of the
Republic, Napolitano, a former prominent PCI activist, chose to invite
Pinelli's widow-along with Calabresi's widow-to a public ceremony in
memory of the victims of terrorism, thus counting our comrade among the
victims of that anti-popular strategy of massacres.
We will continue our commitment to remember that 'the massacre was a
State act' and to claim the truth about Pinelli's assassination, in
harmony with the total commitment of the anarchist movement of the time,
aimed at breaking the political isolation into which the massacre plan
was intended to place it and to shatter the attempt to bring the
workers' movement into line and to extinguish social conflict.
It was with the Piazza Fontana massacre of December 12, 1969, that the
political operation unfolded with greater force. Through massacres,
threats of coups, exceptional laws, provocations, and media
manipulation, it succeeded, at least until today, in maintaining the
power structures, reshaping the party system, chloroforming and
rehabilitating the majority trade unions, and marginalizing and
criminalizing the "non-submissive."
Indeed, from the era of massacres and coup threats, to the harsh
repression of movements in recent years, to the resurgence of
Nazi-fascist activity, to the security syndrome with its emergency
legislation and the criminalization of migrants, one thread has unfolded
uninterruptedly: the thread of a policy that, beyond a few cosmetic
adjustments, maintains its authoritarian and class-based character
unchanged.
Two facts emerge clearly from this period: on the one hand, the
responsibility-confirmed by the specificity of those convicted,
investigated, and suspected-of neo-fascist and neo-Nazi operatives in
carrying out the massacre; on the other, the role of manipulators and
puppeteers played by specific state bodies in planning, organizing,
concealing, and managing this strategy.
The Republic's cabinets are full of lies and special operations, but our
memory is also full of the facts connected to them.
The need to re-examine the meaning and significance of that history, at
least in some of its salient points, is therefore always important. The
goal is not only to recall certain events and figures that have shaped
our time, but also to outline a framework from which to launch an
increasingly shared radical critique in a context dominated by the
security syndrome born of the endless war and the great lie that
underlies it, serving the exploitation of facts and the annihilation of
consciences. In essence, the maintenance of capitalist exploitation and
state oppression.
The date of December 12th can still retain all its significance today
only if it is not drowned in 'the way we were' and 'harmless reductionism'.
This is the will of the initiatives that we as a movement continue to
develop in denouncing and fighting the State of massacres and war.
Massimo Varengo
https://umanitanova.org/guerra-strage-oppressione-di-stato-12-15-dicembre-1969-56-anni-di-menzogne-e-repressione/
_________________________________________
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