The Supreme Court of Brazil ordered on Thursday the arrest of former militant leftist Cesare Battisti, convicted in Italy for four murders and demanded to be extradited by that european country. Judge Luiz Fux, one of the members of the Supreme Federal Court, decided to capture the conservatorship of the Italian after the Prosecutor General’s office to ask him to stop it “to avoid the risk of leakage and to ensure their eventual extradition,” according to a note released by the Public Ministry of the south american country.
Battisti was sentenced to life imprisonment in his country for four murders committed over four decades ago, when he was member of the group of Proletarians Armed for Communism (PAC), an arm of the Red Brigades, the armed band most active in the wave of political violence which rocked Italy in the last quarter of the last century. The Battisti extradition was vetoed in 2010 by Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva on his last day as president, but already during the last election campaign the president-elect of Brazil, the right-wing Jair Bolsonaro, announced that it called for the Italian to be extradited to his country.
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Lula refuses extradition of Césare Battisti to Italy, Battisti said that he would prefer suicide to the extradition
Battisti was sentenced in absentia to life imprisonment in 1993 for several murders committed between 1977 and 1979, which he denies. He fled to France and, in 2004, when this country was preparing to revoke his status of political refugee, he traveled to Brazil, where he remained hidden for three years. His flight ended in Rio de Janeiro at the beginning of 2007, when he was arrested in a joint operation of agents from Brazil, Italy and France. The Supreme Court authorized his extradition in 2009, in a judgment not binding, which left the final decision in the hands of Lula, then head of State, who rejected it the last day of the year 2010.
In April of this year, justice filed the last complaint that was against the Italian as Battisti, during his stay in Brazil after the government decision, he had two processes: one for evasion of foreign exchange while attempting to cross the border with Bolivia in October 2017 with 25,000 reals (approximately 6.666 dollars) and another one from April of last year by declaring a false address in a public document.
In a statement released at the beginning of November, the fugitive, the Italian was confident “the democratic institutions of the brazilian”. Almost a decade ago, in an interview with the French magazine Paris Match, Battisti said to prefer suicide to the extradition: “I Always thought that suicide was a decision absurd; I never thought of myself as an act of courage. But now, she added, “I envision it as a possibility. I don’t want to leave to others —to justice and to the Italian Government— to decide about my own death.”
