It was Thursday, visiting day in the Federal Police Station of Brasilia. The place doesn’t inspire much confidence. Police enter and leave with their distinguished expressions and uniforms. We wait our turn.

3:00PM. We go in with two bags full with 4 packets of cookies, 4 apples, 4 guayabas, 4 pears, several bottles of juice, cigarettes, 2 books, and 5 sheets of loose-leaf paper. All of this is to last until next Thursday. We enter the room where we will meet the very reason we are here. On the other side of the glass is Cesare Batisti.

Cesare is 53 years old and has been detained in Brasilia for 10 months. He has spent a good part of his life in hiding. All of this because, like us, he strives for a better world.

It was Thursday, visiting day in the Federal Police Station of Brasilia. The place doesn’t inspire much confidence. Police enter and leave with their distinguished expressions and uniforms. We wait our turn.

3:00PM. We go in with two bags full with 4 packets of cookies, 4 apples, 4 guayabas, 4 pears, several bottles of juice, cigarettes, 2 books, and 5 sheets of loose-leaf paper. All of this is to last until next Thursday. We enter the room where we will meet the very reason we are here. On the other side of the glass is Cesare Batisti.

Cesare is 53 years old and has been detained in Brasilia for 10 months. He has spent a good part of his life in hiding. All of this because, like us, he strives for a better world.

In Italy during the 70’s, Cesare participated in the autonomous group PAC – Proletarios Armados por el Comunismo (Armed Proletariats for Communism), an off-shoot of the more well-known organization at the time – Las Brigadas Rojas (The Red Brigades)

Unlike the Brigadas, PAC never credited the working class as the driving force of the revolution. Many of its members had participated in other armed organizations, but had left because they didn’t coincide with their maoist-leninist principles. They criticized the gap between theory and action and the traditional hierarchy of political parties. Cesare explained to us “The PAC wanted to differentiate itself from other groups. The name represented new principles. In those times, anybody could act in the name of PAC, without geographical limits and with total autonomy. It was a slogan that could serve for any revolutionary who forswore taking power. Such was our understanding at the time.”

Fascinated by the PAC’s ideas, Cesare joined in ‘76. However he had stopped within 2 years when the Brigadas Rojas killed Aldo Moro on May 9th, 1978. Cesare and other members started to reconsider the use of violence, and even the group itself.

From that point emerged the new slogan of PAC: “Use arms for self defense, not to take human life or for terrorist activities”. However, because of the organization’s characteristics - decentralization, autonomous sections – every effort at control proved to be ineffective. And so it wasn’t surprising when a few months later a prison guard was assassinated in Milan. A group that identified itself as PAC confessed to the crime.

With this assassination, many members of PAC decided that they could no longer maintain their well-intentioned “semi-armed struggle”. It became necessary to stop compromising completely. Cesare began thinking about leaving the group, or dissolving it, discussing the issue time after time with his compañero Pietro Mutti.