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.

Pietro Mutti was called a traitor for trying to dissolve the group. Years later he was arrested and tortured, and became a ‘repentant’. The term ‘repentant’ refers to an ex-guerrilla under arrest who, in search of a reduced sentence, opts to cooperate with the government and betray his compañeros in struggle.

Pietro Mutti was one of the main organizers and idealists of the PAC. Afterwards, he became one of the most well-known betrayers. He exposed many people and today he is a free man, his life sentence removed. He told so many inconsistent stories that the government threatened to send him back to jail with his ex-compañeros if he continued to fabricate information.

It was this Pietro Mutti who accused Cesare of committing 4 homicides. One of the homicides occurred when Cesare was hardly still in the organization. Two other murders happened simultaneously in two places 500km apart (the way they handled this was accusing Cesare of committing one and planning the other). Cesare was found guilty for the 4 homicides in Italy and given an indefinite sentence, even though he was absent in the proceedings.

14 years later Cesare was a refugee in France, and Italy ordered his extradition. However the extradition was reversed and he continued his life in Paris.

In 2006, Italy ordered Batisti´s extradition from France again. He is now imprisoned and there is a large campaign ordering his release. Even the commercial media participated. Several thousand protests were organized for his freedom.

Soon after, Cesare came out with a book, and the media switched sides. The once unfairly imprisoned Itilian who had been convicted two times without any new incriminating evidence started to be treated by the major journalists as a cruel murderer, a terrorist, and a monster. His extradition was scheduled for June 30th.

Some months later, an Italian journalist published what he knew about the negotiations with France for Batisti’s extradition. According to his report, Italy signed an agreement with France offering to purchase a new Airbus for the TGV line between Lyon and Turim, completely disrespecting European trade agreements.

This man has been an object of negotiation all his life.

With some help, Cesare escaped to Brazil. He spent some time free in Rio, until they arrested him once more last year in March. Of course, Italy ordered his extradition from Brazil.

It took 10 months in detention before they first interrogated Cesare. Our first encounter was during this time, reporting for Indymedia. To this day his process has not advanced and he remains confined in the Federal Police Station.

The question Cesare always asks in his book is: “Why me?” He knows the answer all too well. “They’ve never been able to silence me. I never again tried to escape or hide myself. However, I never dropped my political action, even in the times when it’s been minimal.”

Cesare’s books give a rebellious call against forgetting. In Italy, the people in power want people to forget the 70’s, a time where there was no officially instated dictatorship, but many fascist practices continued, such as paramilitary groups, government-paid terrorists, and the arrest and torture of political activists. “Nobody talks about the bombings organized by certain State departments. The deathly actions of the famous Loggia P2, in which the current chief of state and his Minister of the Interior participated, have all been erased.” Cesare’s voice doesn’t let us forget.

Cesare is currently writing his third book in a trilogy which recounts his life as an eternal political refugee. “My flight without end”, his first book, has already been launched in Brazil. His second is locked up in the police computer. The third, he writes little by little, with his weekly ration of 5 sheets of paper.

“This time passed in prison has allowed me to reflect and analyze from afar what has happened in the last 30 years.”

And it is exactly this year that the “May of ‘68” turns 40. This is the anniversary of his rebellion, of his exploitation by Europe and especially France, and the generation that Cesare was a part of.

“My case can’t be analyzed out of context. We have to take advantage of this situation and speak on everything that was achieved in ‘68. At times there is the impression that everything we attained was a government gift. The government hasn’t given us anything, everything we’ve achieved has been paid for in full with our lives and our deaths. When one thinks of ‘68, they think of images of guerrillas and terrorism. The guerrilla warfare was only a part of it. The movement of ‘68 was made of people who wanted to live free, not die. The pistol has left its mark on the years, but ours were the years of love.”

40 years later, those moments don’t belong to the government who say they gave the successes, nor to the people who actively participated. They don’t belong to any political action, but to the “memory of youth”.

‘68 belongs to people like Cesare. He tells us that “A lot of love has accompanied me all over the world, even in the most infamous of Italian prisons. More than anything, love has helped me to not give up.”

This is for the people who haven’t and aren’t giving up, even when times are difficult. This is for the Zapatistas, the Picketers, those without land, the expulsed, the squatters, the House of Pombas*, the barricades in Oaxaca, the catraqueiros*, to everyone that hasn’t abandoned the dream and continues fighting for a better world.

Catraqueiros refers to the Movimento Passe Livre (“Free Pass Movement”) activists (Brazil) who fight for the right to live in and move about the city, demanding free public transport for all.

“Casa das Pombas” is the name of a squat in Brazil organized by the Convergence of Autonomous Groups, who were brutally suppressed by the police, and today continue to suffer political persecution. 10 of them were imprisoned for 10 days in 2007, and today still face charges of criminal association.