Marco Biagi, who was the professor killed twenty years ago by the Red Brigades

He was 51 years old Marco Biagi when he was killed. It was the evening of March 19, 2002. He was returning home, like every evening, by bicycle coming from the station. He was fired six shots under the house where his wife Marina and two sons Francesco and Lorenzo, who were 19 and 13 years old, were waiting for him. They were the new ones Red Brigades to claim the murder, the latest organized by this group.

Marco Biagi dealt with labor politics and economics. He was a columnist for Il Sole 24 ore and a professor of labor law in Modena. Since the 1990s he had held positions such as consultant to various ministries in center-right and center-left governments. The law he helped to enact is named after him, even if inside him there is only part of his White Book: he was killed a year before it was passed. There Biagi law it is the one that has led to greater flexibility in contracting, also affecting article 18, which concerns dismissals.

In 2002 he was collaborating with Roberto Maroni, Minister of Labor of the Berlusconi government, but he had also worked with center-left executives. Biagi was killed with the same weapon used three years earlier, on May 20, 1999, to take the life of another labor lawyer, Massimo D’Antona, always from the Red Brigades. The message was clear: those who, as scholars, outside politics, worked on changes in the labor market were struck. They were the easiest to hit, the least protected.

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Gun and bullet they were signed even before the claim arrived with a leaflet sent by e-mail in which they wrote that he had been “executed”. He was unprotected despite the threats and requests for that protection that had been taken away from him after 11 September 2001 due to the change in priorities from domestic to international terrorism.

“I have never hated them, and also for this reason I have never felt the need to make approaches that would have given me nothing,” says Biagi’s wife of the members of the group who killed her husband. They were arrested on March 3, 2003. Police superintendent Emanuele Petri asked two people on a train for documents. They were two fugitives. He died in the firefight like Mario Galesi. It was he who had shot Biagi. Nadia Desdemona Lioce, also on the train, was arrested. In the following October, about ten other Red Brigades were arrested.

Most of the Red Brigades have served their sentences. Among this also Cinzia Banelli, the repentant of the group, living with a new identity. They are still in prison with a 41 bis regime, the hardest one is Nadia Lioce, Roberto Morandi and Marco Mezzasalma. Diana Blefari Melazzi died in prison in 2009.

Speaking with the Courier of Bologna, Marina Orlandi recounted the following years. «I had to raise two young boys and one of them was 13, he was still a child. I had to make them two citizens who still had faith in the state and institutions. I didn’t want to be a negative person, I always had this in mind: I wanted to be a positive person, like Marco was ». It’s still: “I believe that his ideas and projects are still topical, I want to keep his memory alive, I want to remove those leftovers of malevolent interpretations that have been on his work ». How would you like young people to remember him today? «As a person who he lost his life to defend the weakest“.

Source: Vanity Fair

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