Home » “The G8 in Genoa is never over: the beatings in the prison show that even today the state forgets that it is the state”

“The G8 in Genoa is never over: the beatings in the prison show that even today the state forgets that it is the state”

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by Piero Ceccatelli

At the G8 in Genoa I was in the barracks Diaz along with 92 other people, like me all beaten and arrested. I was beaten by two policemen who broke my scaphoid, hit me in the back, hips and neck. electric baton they left a deep mark on my shoulder. I was hospitalized for two days in hospital and this prevented me from being transferred to the Bolzaneto barracks. The second day I was questioned by the prosecutor, who ordered the release. I was in Genoa on vacation, because for some time I had been following, for personal interest, the movements that fought and are fighting on the issues of the global economy, fair trade. Six months earlier, in January 2001, I was on vacation with a hundred Italians Porto Alegre in Brazil at the world forum which gave rise to fundamental addresses on those issues. I thought of make a book out of it. Very different from what I then wrote together with Vittorio Agnoletto, in which we spoke especially the police“.
These are the memories of Lorenzo Guadagnucci, 58, journalist of the National Daily, writer and blogger. Author with Vittorio Agnoletto of the book “The eclipse of democracy“, Published by Feltrinelli in 2011 and reprinted in this 2021, twenty years after the G8 in Genoa.

Guadagnucci is one of the founders of the Truth and Justice committee for Genoa.

Lorenzo Guadagnucci

From the Ligurian capital, where he is to participate in the events in remembrance of the events, Lorenzo Guadagnucci answers the phone.

In Genoa, twenty years later. What do you feel?

“In order to answer, it is necessary to take stock of what has happened since then, an assessment in chiaroscuro. A thousand doubts remain, aspects in which a procedural truth has been ascertained that clashes with logic and with the reconstruction of the facts carried out among others by Carlo Giuliani’s father. But it is also true that there have been definitive sentences of law enforcement officers present at the Diaz school. Results, which on the day of the beating and for a long time after, seemed impossible to achieve. But it cannot be said that justice has been done “.

In what sense?

“The penalties were substantially light, the officials present at Diaz presented themselves to the trials with higher grades than at the time of the facts. Not removed, but promoted. And there is the most serious vulnus: the exponents of the chain of command were condemned, but not the material perpetrators of the beatings, those who broke the bones of dozens of people, were not even investigated because they were not recognizable. They had visors, in Italy the police have no legible serial number. Not being able to be recognized they got away with it. Furthermore, there is evidence that the police obstructed the work of the judiciary in every way “.

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So we read in a ruling by the European Court of Justice.

“Precisely. I was one of the signatories of the appeal, which condemned the Italian State for failing to do justice to the case as required by European law. The Court recognized the crime of torture in the behavior of the agents, which Italy introduced after that sentence, but was not contemplated by the criminal code at the time of the facts. And it is another of the causes of the light penalty for condemned officials “.

One of the Molotov cocktails shown by the police as material seized from the Diaz protesters

However, it came to a conviction.

“It was because a crime survived prescriptions and lack of certain evidence: it is not the injuries, the oppression, the beatings, but the crime of forgery. Nobody could contradict that the police reports had been written about completely untrue reconstructions. We were arrested, myself included, for crimes such as possession of weapons of war which in the Diaz gymnasium would have been available to all 93 guests. It was then proved to be Molotov cocktails that the policemen themselves had placed in the school “.

What’s your state of mind twenty years later?

“I expected much more than such an evasive procedural outcome. And I was expecting much more than a simple procedural outcome. I thought and hoped that there was a political stance on the events in Genoa. That a minister, the Parliament, the institutional leaders of the police repudiated the events, apologized, acted to understand why in those days the state ceased to be the state that Europe first created over the centuries, defining the limits of the power, of powers. In those days Italy went back to before the rule of law ”.


The center-right government had just taken office in July 2011. Then came the Prodi government with the extreme left in the majority.

“Governments have changed over the years, but attitudes have not changed. The European Court found that the police obstructed the course of justice. If this happened, it was with the consent of politics “.

Flowers and plants to remember Carlo Giuliani in Piazza Alimonda which will be named after the boy killed during the 2001 G8

The day before the Diaz there was the killing of Carlo Giuliani, shot by a 20-year-old carabiniere. With a fire extinguisher in hand, Giuliani was chasing the military truck.

“The reconstruction of the trial was closed before the investigating judge, without a hearing in the courtroom, as a case of legitimate use of weapons and self-defense. A procedural truth based on the unlikely hypothesis that the carabiniere had fired a shot in the air for intimidation and that a rubble or a stray stone would have diverted the bullet onto Carlo Giuliani. A procedural truth that collides with logic and with the reconstruction carried out by the boy’s family. A dynamic that leaves a thousand doubts and there has never been a contradiction in the trials on this issue ”.

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Is it correct to count the G8 among the great mysteries of Italy together with Piazza Fontana, Ustica, the massacres?

“No, we theoretically know everything about the G8, there have been convictions resulting from the attribution of responsibilities assigned with name and surname, a fact that is unprecedented in the history of Italy. However, the consequences, political and material, have not been drawn ”.

A policeman in riot gear

Also in this interview, as in your book, if you want to talk about the G8, you end up dealing mainly with the police.

“The truth is that I was in Genoa, interested in the issues that the Movement was debating then, which unfortunately today have not lost their relevance and drama. On the contrary”.

Twenty years later, from that point of view, how is Italy doing? How is the world?

“The movement was then the first, real important opposition to neoliberal globalization and how it manifested itself, with various organizations concentrating world power far beyond national governments and parliaments: the WTO, or the trade agreement, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund. That movement anticipated the critique of the development model that guides the world today. To the point that it is possible to update the slogan launched in 2001 to 2021: at the time it was said ‘Another world is possible ‘, today we must say ‘Another world is needed’“.

At that time, the “masters of the world” were public entities, very indirectly corresponding to elected bodies, to democratic principles. Today private individuals are in charge: the “Faang”, ie the owners of the virtual world and entertainment (Facebook, Apple, Netflix, Google) and those who have the monopoly of logistics (Amazon).

“The strength of multinationals was very clear twenty years ago, the privatization of common goods was in full swing, according to the canons of the ideology that wants the market to invade public areas and the state to withdraw from managing the economy, services , welfare. The state that limits itself to generic regulation and to correct market distortions. Thatcher marched in that direction in the 1980s, reinforcing a process already underway and which has led us to current results. The overwhelming power of Big Data says that regulation, the correction of excesses have never happened ”.

The “Faang” operate all over the world, without a homeland, aiming to escape all national laws.

“Free fox in free chicken coop. In 2001, 20% of humanity owned over 80% of the resources. Today, Credit Suisse itself declares that the gap has narrowed further: 13% of the population has 90% of the resources in their hands: the crushing of the excluded is even stronger ”.

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Back then, we were worried about the fate of the economy, today the general alarm is for the environment

“Also in this case there is a line of continuity. In 2001 we said that the unbridled economy would destroy ecosystems, compromising everyone’s future. The global nature of the Movement made it possible to immediately grasp the trends and effects of the climate changes underway. Then the signals came from Bangla Desh or Indonesia, which seemed distant to Westerners. Today those signals come from Germany and everyone is alarmed ”.

An almost prophetic vision.

“It was, even if the detractors have transformed that connotation into a negative meaning, defining the movements ‘Cassandre’, bearers of evil. In 2001 Susan George, a Franco-American economist announced that a financial bubble would burst, punctually arrived seven years later. In that case too, not the crime was demonized, but the announcement. It is no coincidence that the ‘Cassandra’ exhibition is currently underway at the Palazzo Ducale in Genoa, dedicated to the unheard prophecies of those times ”.

Today the Friday for Future demonstrations seem large, peaceful, happenings, to which governments and multinationals, apparently recipients of the protest, adhere or pretend to do so. After Genoa, have the ways of expressing opposition to the great world powers changed?

“The Social Forum at the time was by nature non-violent, opposed to any form of aggression, then we saw how it ended. The movements linked to Greta are bearers of the same characters. But how can we say that governments will never again decide to do as in Genoa, to set aside constitutional guarantees, to stage systematic violations of the rule of law? ”.

The exterior of the prison of Santa Maria Capua Vetere

Depends on what?

“Not from the will of those who make peaceful opposition, but from the degree of importance that the protest reaches. In 2001 the Movement gathered heterogeneous flows and voices, ranging from the nuns to the social centers. Too much not to be feared politically and not to be faced with force. If tomorrow another subject threatens not to ‘conquer the winter palace’, but to overturn the structures of consensus, grouping the maximum of consciences and intellects, how can we exclude a reaction by force? “.

The prison of Santa Maria Capua Vetere shows that state violence has not ended in Genoa.

“Looking at the videos, I saw the Bolzaneto barracks twenty years ago, where the Diaz arrested people were transferred and which I was spared only because I was hospitalized for the beating suffered. There is a single code, between the ‘reception committee’ of those arrested in Genoa, forced to pass between two wings of agents and soldiers who liked them and the abuses committed on prison inmates ”.

Your and Agnoletto’s book is called “Eclipse of Democracy”.

“Precisely. Sometimes the state forgets who it is. And where does it come from “.

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