Of Federico Piana
Now that the investigators’ investigations are proceeding unabated, the massacre of migrants that took place last Monday at the petrol station along the state road 106 in Amendolara, in the province of Cosenza, appears more and more in its atrocious brutality. To the point of shaking the collective conscience.
The atrocious story of these four men burned alive inside a minivan set on fire by two Pakistani “corporals” – arrested by the police – who had wanted to punish them for their refusal to pay for transport to the fruit fields where they worked as pickers and where they were headed that day, turns the spotlight back on thousands of agricultural labourers, mostly foreigners, without rights, without rules, without dignity. And without a salary. What, claims the only survivor of the ferocious murder who is now testifying to the magistrates, the poor victims had tried to ask their tormentors for the umpteenth time before being burned.
The Afghan survivor says that those three of his compatriots and their Pakistani companion were busy with him picking strawberries in the immense fields stretching between Calabria and Basilicata in inhumane conditions, which have unfortunately become widespread normality. «They didn’t give us the money – he explained –. They only gave us a little food and a house. In the fields there is a large mafia of corporals.”
The indignant reactions from the political, social and trade union world were immediate. CGIL, CISL and UIL defined the incident as “a very serious fact which needs to be kept under close attention” and called for “strong action to combat gangmasters”.
The local Church has expressed deep sorrow and concern. “We cannot continue to pretend not to know” warned Monsignor Francesco Savino, bishop of Cassano all’Ionio and vice-president of the Italian Episcopal Conference. «There are phenomena that do not arise from nothing. The gangmaster is not a marginal deviation, it is not a folkloristic distortion, it is not an ancient residue forgotten in the fields. It’s a system. It is a domain structure. It is a modern form of slavery”, explained the prelate, reiterating that the time has come to “utter a single, naked, Christian, civil, necessary word: enough!”.
The testimony of the only survivor of the massacre that the investigators are collecting also refers to the domination of the mafias, in particular the Pakistani one, in the context of the gangmastering of foreign labor employed in the fields. A phenomenon that is certainly not new in the Ionian Sibaritide – which includes the areas of Amendolara, Roseto Capo Spulico, Villapiana, Corigliano-Rossano – and which has long led to judicial investigations which have brought to light a criminal system based on transport of laborers organized by intermediaries, unjustified deductions from wages, precarious housing conditions, vulnerability of foreign workers and difficulties in reporting exploiters.
The same mafia system that in Scanzano Jonico, about forty kilometers from Amendolara, immediately after the border with Basilicata, in October last year had allowed the death of four Indian agricultural workers who were traveling unbelievably crammed with six other workers of different nationalities on a small makeshift truck that was involved in a road accident.
Even then, the investigators’ investigations revealed a widespread and widespread method of recruitment and exploitation of laborers implemented by numerous international criminal organizations that seem to have gained the upper hand, without anyone really managing to counter their terrible actions.
