ABSTRACT
The published accounts by two of the founders of the Italian Red Brigades (RB), Renato Curcio and Alberto Franceschini (Curcio 1993; Franceschini et al. 1988; Fassanella and Franceschini 2004), are full of references that clearly reveal the influence that the National Liberation Movement-Tupamaros (NLM-T) 1 had in the Italian organization’s first steps, in terms of experience in urban combat, both in general and as an example to follow in solving operational issues affecting their actions. The NLM-T was the reference they drew on toward 1970 once they began organizing underground. From the Tupamaros they took as their symbol the five-pointed star. It inspired their first armed propaganda stage, as well as some of their earliest actions (both the actions themselves and the way they were carried out): the first robbery, for example, which was meant to test their comrades’ level of commitment (as the Tupamaros had done in 1963); or their first propaganda kidnapping, which represented a qualitative leap in their operations and their public dimension (following an example of the NLM-T from 1968). The proximity and parallelisms between both organizations do not end there. There are many other examples that illustrate the initial ideological eclecticism of both groups (and how it was managed within a common organization), the use of violence and the repertoires of action in their first phases, the staging of their operations, and the propagandistic discourse, etc. There is, therefore, an explicit adoption of a model, insofar as it is taken as a generic reference; and an implicit adoption that can be traced in the way they operated, in the references for the armed propaganda stage, or in the type of actions, among others (Gracia 2015).
