Snatched from the World: The Phenomenology of Captivity in Italian Ransom Kidnapping

When we think about kidnapping in Italy, the first abduction that comes to mind is that of former prime minister Aldo Moro, who was kidnapped and murdered in 1978 by the Marxist-Leninist terrorist organization the Red Brigades. Yet that same year, forty-three private citizens were kidnapped for ransom by criminal organizations identified by the media under the general name of anonima sequestri (anonymous kidnapping), whose roots were Sardinian banditry, the Sicilian mafia, and the Calabrian 'ndrangheta. Unlike terrorists, these criminal syndicates never publicly claimed responsibility for their kidnappings. In 1977, before Moro's abduction, the number of ransom kidnappings reached its peak: seventy-five in a single year. 1 Political kidnapping was predominately linked to the Red Brigades, who between 1972 and 1982 abducted symbolic public figures in order to destabilize democratic institutions, the economic elite, and the media, and to "attack the heart of the state."2 This group was responsible for eighteen total abductions.3 In roughly the same period (1975-1984), the Sardinian banditry, the mafia, and the 'ndrangheta abducted 489 people-seventy percent of the ransom kidnapping victims in the history of the Italian Republic. If during the so-called Years of Lead (the years of political violence in Italy) the state was under attack by left-wing political terrorism, civil society was also threatened by the country's underworld and its terrifying crimes. In the wider period of 1969-1998, nearly 700 people were abducted for ransom in Italy.