1968 opens and ends in Sicily: the Belice earthquake and the Avola
massacre are its beginning and epilogue. ---- The island had begun to
taste the fruits of modernization (refrigerators, televisions, cars,
meat consumption), but in twenty years its population had shrunk by
11.1%, and the gap with Northern regions had grown. ---- In Belice a
laboratory of initiatives, struggles, socio-cultural and educational
experiences had been active since 1952, driven by the stimuli of Danilo
Dolci and the volunteers involved in this path of rebirth and its
methods of struggle (fasting, nonviolent marches) linked to the
traditional reverse strikes; the battles for the Bruca and Jato dams,
for housing, against emigration (with reforestation and cooperatives)
had awakened the communities. A movement of popular committees and study
centers had placed the Jato, Belice and Carboj valleys at the center of
national attention for its tough battles, arrests and trials. A small
corner of Sicily was planning its own redemption and setting itself as
an example for the whole island and beyond.
But on 14 and 15 January a series of violent tremors completely
destroyed the inhabited centers of Gibellina, Montevago, Salaparuta,
Poggioreale, and damaged dozens more, causing 296 deaths, a thousand
injuries and 100,000 homeless people; in the following period hundreds
of survivors will fall ill due to the lack of assistance, medicines,
nearby hospitals, doctors, so much so that the real figure of victims
will reach a thousand; we will talk about a "state earthquake", due to
the vulnerability of homes and the conditions of the survivors of the
catastrophe, the causes of which are called underdevelopment,
abandonment, exclusion, political-economic-mafia power. Against all
this, protests and spontaneous forms of organization began immediately,
canceled out by the regime's information. First Aldo Moro descends from
Rome, with his baggage of promises in a land in which his party had
always disgoverned, and then the President of the Republic Giuseppe
Saragat, welcomed with a slap as soon as he gets off the helicopter by
the commoner of Montevago Tina Longhand.
The earthquake victims, mostly farmers, know that they have to fight to
get help. They try to go to Rome on March 1st, but in Palermo the train
is canceled because "on the Strait priority must be given to freight
trains loaded with oranges". The network of committees is rebuilt,
manages aid, sets up mobilisations, and the valleys once again become
sites of grassroots organization without parties and against the absent
State. Piero Riggio writes in "L'Agitazione del Sud" (1) after praising
the committees of Dolci, Barbera and the population: "The earthquake put
so much fear in us, but it made us touch the coldness of this monster
with our hands which is the State, has confirmed us in our ideas and we
hope that the earthquakes will contribute to intimately shaking our
farmers, our populations and awakening them from the deep lethargy into
which they have fallen".
From Belice 10,000 people will emigrate to the North; 16,000 will
remain in tent cities. A singular episode occurs on January 29th: the
emigrant trains are blocked at the Swiss border which doesn't want them
at that moment.
The students of Partanna are fighting for the reconstruction of the
schools destroyed by the earthquake, while in Sicilian schools and
universities they organize themselves as throughout Italy and Europe; on
8 March in Catania violent clashes between the student movement and the
police forces; in Palermo the protest spreads like wildfire and sexual
repression and social violence are discussed in schools; the protest
spreads to the workplace: thousands of workers at El.Si (Elettronica
Siciliana), a US-owned factory, occupy the plant for a month against the
attempted closure and layoffs. It is a struggle surrounded by the
solidarity of workers and students, which will force the mayor to
requisition the factory and keep it in business. In the Syracuse area,
the workers of the industrial area have been fighting for the contract
since March: it will last 4 months and will end with the signature by
the owners of Rasiom-Esso, Italcementi, Sincat-Edison; in Messina three
high schools are occupied (La Farina for 10 days) and then the
University; here right-wing students mix with the occupations and the
beating of left-wing militants is the order of the day, covered by
openly fascist members of the Police Headquarters and by the newspaper
"Gazzetta del Sud".
In May the flowers of '68 bloom everywhere; in Partanna 5000
proletarians from Belice demonstrate as part of the "day of local
pressure" against the governments of Rome and Palermo. On the 12th the
first official outing of the Catania anarchists with a conference by
Placido La Torre on power and the national and international situation;
their monthly magazine "L'Agitazione del Sud" gives ample space to the
Parisian revolt and the Sicilian situation. On 3 June in Palermo,
violent police aggression against workers demonstrating for wages and
the defense of local industries: 15,000 are on strike, of which 3,500 at
the Cantiere Navale, 1,800 at Espi industries, 1,040 at El.Si, 2,000
garbage collectors and 7,000 municipal. On 14 July an agreement was
imposed on Piaggio which broke the salary cages.
Demonstrations by farmers affected by the earthquake take place in
Salemi and Mazara del Vallo to protest against the precariousness of the
agricultural sector. The anarchist from Salemi Melchiorre Palermo
comments on the stalemate of the situation in the earthquake-stricken
areas on "L'Agitazione del Sud" (2): "What was the purpose of the 'human
blockades' in the streets, the 'general strikes', mostly exploited by
the false shepherds of our local trade unionism, the exhausting trips of
the mayors to Rome and Palermo, sometimes greeted by truncheons and tear
gas bombs? We can't continue like this. It is good to convince ourselves
that something can only be achieved with direct action, violent if
necessary, without allowing ourselves to be put to sleep by the
procrastination of parties and unions. This is why while we remember the
dead, we spur the living to act."
In the summer months, an alternative reconstruction model for the
earthquake-stricken areas, the "Democratic Development Plan", was
developed by Danilo Dolci's group; 10,000 march in Palermo on 10 July in
the "march of the forgotten": women, old people and children are
violently attacked for over half an hour with truncheons and tear gas,
the marchers react by throwing bottles, stones and unexploded tear gas
canisters at the police. The next day, the reporter from "L'Unità"
wrote: "A woman whose husband is in Germany, with a two-month-old baby
in her arms, falls. A policeman squeezes her neck until he suffocates
her; I'm a few steps away and I grab the screaming little girl while her
companion Ludovico Corrao barely frees the woman from her senseless
fury. A Carabinieri non-commissioned officer aims at a boy with stones
as big as a glass... The victims are chased and beaten bloody all the
way down to the Quattro Canti, half a kilometer towards the sea... A
policeman repeatedly and violently bangs his head against a boy from
Gibellina the ramparts".
The "50 days of pressure" begins on September 15th in the Belice, Carboj
and Jato valleys for the implementation of "urgent" relief efforts and
for the control of expenses incurred. Until November 4th there will be a
succession of meetings, demonstrations, press conferences, 3 fasts, a
delegation in Rome and 3 in Palermo, discussions on the development
plan, a procession for the new dam. To those who for years have
supported the toxic narrative of passive Sicilian earthquake victims,
waiting for state handouts, in the face of the more alert populations of
other earthquakes (Friuli 1976, Emilia Romagna 2012), these chronicles
and the following ones demonstrate a reactivity, a planning and
commendable levels of organisation.
In the autumn the first extra-parliamentary groups entered the scene
(Falcemartello in Catania, Siracusa and Lentini) and the anarchists
(with the Center for Studies on Nonviolence in Catania). The fight at
the "Parlatore" technical institute explodes in Palermo; the police raid
the school; the same happened in Messina in the occupied university
faculties, with dozens of arrests: in protest the rector and the deans
of all the faculties (except the Magisterium) resigned.
In Roccamena, in Belice, the "popular trial" of the government and
parliament is being held by the local Study Center; for three days the
peasant population expresses itself in a mature manner against the
enemies of the people; the situation is ready for a qualitative leap in
the clash, but this causes a rift between Dolci and Barbera, with the
former against raising it and the latter determined to do so; a unique
opportunity to put the State under pressure is lost. (3)
The student autumn is hot: in Palermo on November 1st in Engineering a
general strike is proclaimed against repression, for the unity of the
movement, for the requisition of premises, school buildings, the right
to assembly; on the 5th 10,000 march, the next day 15,000. In the same
days the movement of the Syracusan laborers against the arrogance of the
landowners gained strength; calls for wage increases, the elimination of
the differences between the area of citrus groves and that of
traditional crops, the equalization of working hours, the application of
the agreements of 1966, when the workers of Lentini were savagely beaten
by the police, as already in '63 it happened to those of Avola. Since
November 24, 32,000 workers have been crossing their arms in the
provincial general strike; the agrarians, with their reactionary
Farmers' Union, refuse to negotiate; on the 28th the state road 115 is
partially blocked, an action that becomes more frequent given the wall
of landowners; on December 1st the protest spreads and on the 2nd in
Avola there is a city strike in which the entire population
participates: the laborers occupy the state road, joined by students and
at lunchtime, by their families. The police force arriving from Catania
receives the order to load: 25 minutes of carousels with the trucks,
shots fired at eye level leave Angelo Sigona and Giuseppe Scibilia on
the ground, 48 are injured; 2 kg of shell casings will be collected. At
midnight the Minister of the Interior orders the resumption of
negotiations and on the 3rd the landowners reluctantly sign the contract.
The events in Avola were followed by an immediate reaction throughout
the country, and a general strike on the island; very violent clashes
with the police take place in the mining area of Villarosa; there is a
procession in Avola; thousands of students protest in Rome, in Trento
the university is occupied, in Genoa a bomb explodes near the municipal
offices, and on the 4th the demonstrators attempt to occupy the
Prefecture; demonstrations take place everywhere, and even RAI workers
contest the biased way in which the news presented the facts. On 8
December in front of the Scala in Milan a thick throw of eggs and
persimmons hits the bourgeois in furs, a sign reads "The laborers of
Avola wish you good fun"; on the 11th more clashes in Lecce, La Spezia
and Syracuse; on December 31st there is a protest in front of the
Viareggio Bussola called by anarchists and Potere Operaio; amidst
spitting and insults to the bourgeois, we shout: "The laborers of Avola
wish you a happy new year". Soriano Ceccanti, hit by police fire, will
remain paralyzed for life. (4)
68 speaks tragically Sicilian in a climate of revolt and desire for
redemption; but the third way is also looming, emigration: in the year
242,881 Sicilians leave the island, 143,000 move to Northern Italy and
99,000 abroad. (5).
Pippo Gurrieri
Piero Riggio, Bitterness and disappointments - Sicily after the
earthquake, "The Agitation of the South", Palermo, February 1968.
Melchiorre Palermo, Time stopped in Salemi, "The Agitation of the
South", Palermo, July-August 1968.
Fiorella Cagnoni, Valle del Belice, state earthquake, Moizzi, Milan
1976, p. 184-185.
Giuseppe Oddo, The mirage of the earth in Sicily. From the Allied
landing to the disappearance of the fireflies (1943-1969), Istituto
Poligrafico Europeo, Palermo 2021, p. 567-570.
For the drafting of this article I used largely my Il 68 in Sicilia
published in the special "The window" of Sicilia libertaria n. 58,
September 1988.
http://sicilialibertaria.it
_________________________________________
A - I N F O S N E W S S E R V I C E
By, For, and About Anarchists
Send news reports to A-infos-en mailing list
A-infos-en@ainfos.ca
massacre are its beginning and epilogue. ---- The island had begun to
taste the fruits of modernization (refrigerators, televisions, cars,
meat consumption), but in twenty years its population had shrunk by
11.1%, and the gap with Northern regions had grown. ---- In Belice a
laboratory of initiatives, struggles, socio-cultural and educational
experiences had been active since 1952, driven by the stimuli of Danilo
Dolci and the volunteers involved in this path of rebirth and its
methods of struggle (fasting, nonviolent marches) linked to the
traditional reverse strikes; the battles for the Bruca and Jato dams,
for housing, against emigration (with reforestation and cooperatives)
had awakened the communities. A movement of popular committees and study
centers had placed the Jato, Belice and Carboj valleys at the center of
national attention for its tough battles, arrests and trials. A small
corner of Sicily was planning its own redemption and setting itself as
an example for the whole island and beyond.
But on 14 and 15 January a series of violent tremors completely
destroyed the inhabited centers of Gibellina, Montevago, Salaparuta,
Poggioreale, and damaged dozens more, causing 296 deaths, a thousand
injuries and 100,000 homeless people; in the following period hundreds
of survivors will fall ill due to the lack of assistance, medicines,
nearby hospitals, doctors, so much so that the real figure of victims
will reach a thousand; we will talk about a "state earthquake", due to
the vulnerability of homes and the conditions of the survivors of the
catastrophe, the causes of which are called underdevelopment,
abandonment, exclusion, political-economic-mafia power. Against all
this, protests and spontaneous forms of organization began immediately,
canceled out by the regime's information. First Aldo Moro descends from
Rome, with his baggage of promises in a land in which his party had
always disgoverned, and then the President of the Republic Giuseppe
Saragat, welcomed with a slap as soon as he gets off the helicopter by
the commoner of Montevago Tina Longhand.
The earthquake victims, mostly farmers, know that they have to fight to
get help. They try to go to Rome on March 1st, but in Palermo the train
is canceled because "on the Strait priority must be given to freight
trains loaded with oranges". The network of committees is rebuilt,
manages aid, sets up mobilisations, and the valleys once again become
sites of grassroots organization without parties and against the absent
State. Piero Riggio writes in "L'Agitazione del Sud" (1) after praising
the committees of Dolci, Barbera and the population: "The earthquake put
so much fear in us, but it made us touch the coldness of this monster
with our hands which is the State, has confirmed us in our ideas and we
hope that the earthquakes will contribute to intimately shaking our
farmers, our populations and awakening them from the deep lethargy into
which they have fallen".
From Belice 10,000 people will emigrate to the North; 16,000 will
remain in tent cities. A singular episode occurs on January 29th: the
emigrant trains are blocked at the Swiss border which doesn't want them
at that moment.
The students of Partanna are fighting for the reconstruction of the
schools destroyed by the earthquake, while in Sicilian schools and
universities they organize themselves as throughout Italy and Europe; on
8 March in Catania violent clashes between the student movement and the
police forces; in Palermo the protest spreads like wildfire and sexual
repression and social violence are discussed in schools; the protest
spreads to the workplace: thousands of workers at El.Si (Elettronica
Siciliana), a US-owned factory, occupy the plant for a month against the
attempted closure and layoffs. It is a struggle surrounded by the
solidarity of workers and students, which will force the mayor to
requisition the factory and keep it in business. In the Syracuse area,
the workers of the industrial area have been fighting for the contract
since March: it will last 4 months and will end with the signature by
the owners of Rasiom-Esso, Italcementi, Sincat-Edison; in Messina three
high schools are occupied (La Farina for 10 days) and then the
University; here right-wing students mix with the occupations and the
beating of left-wing militants is the order of the day, covered by
openly fascist members of the Police Headquarters and by the newspaper
"Gazzetta del Sud".
In May the flowers of '68 bloom everywhere; in Partanna 5000
proletarians from Belice demonstrate as part of the "day of local
pressure" against the governments of Rome and Palermo. On the 12th the
first official outing of the Catania anarchists with a conference by
Placido La Torre on power and the national and international situation;
their monthly magazine "L'Agitazione del Sud" gives ample space to the
Parisian revolt and the Sicilian situation. On 3 June in Palermo,
violent police aggression against workers demonstrating for wages and
the defense of local industries: 15,000 are on strike, of which 3,500 at
the Cantiere Navale, 1,800 at Espi industries, 1,040 at El.Si, 2,000
garbage collectors and 7,000 municipal. On 14 July an agreement was
imposed on Piaggio which broke the salary cages.
Demonstrations by farmers affected by the earthquake take place in
Salemi and Mazara del Vallo to protest against the precariousness of the
agricultural sector. The anarchist from Salemi Melchiorre Palermo
comments on the stalemate of the situation in the earthquake-stricken
areas on "L'Agitazione del Sud" (2): "What was the purpose of the 'human
blockades' in the streets, the 'general strikes', mostly exploited by
the false shepherds of our local trade unionism, the exhausting trips of
the mayors to Rome and Palermo, sometimes greeted by truncheons and tear
gas bombs? We can't continue like this. It is good to convince ourselves
that something can only be achieved with direct action, violent if
necessary, without allowing ourselves to be put to sleep by the
procrastination of parties and unions. This is why while we remember the
dead, we spur the living to act."
In the summer months, an alternative reconstruction model for the
earthquake-stricken areas, the "Democratic Development Plan", was
developed by Danilo Dolci's group; 10,000 march in Palermo on 10 July in
the "march of the forgotten": women, old people and children are
violently attacked for over half an hour with truncheons and tear gas,
the marchers react by throwing bottles, stones and unexploded tear gas
canisters at the police. The next day, the reporter from "L'Unità"
wrote: "A woman whose husband is in Germany, with a two-month-old baby
in her arms, falls. A policeman squeezes her neck until he suffocates
her; I'm a few steps away and I grab the screaming little girl while her
companion Ludovico Corrao barely frees the woman from her senseless
fury. A Carabinieri non-commissioned officer aims at a boy with stones
as big as a glass... The victims are chased and beaten bloody all the
way down to the Quattro Canti, half a kilometer towards the sea... A
policeman repeatedly and violently bangs his head against a boy from
Gibellina the ramparts".
The "50 days of pressure" begins on September 15th in the Belice, Carboj
and Jato valleys for the implementation of "urgent" relief efforts and
for the control of expenses incurred. Until November 4th there will be a
succession of meetings, demonstrations, press conferences, 3 fasts, a
delegation in Rome and 3 in Palermo, discussions on the development
plan, a procession for the new dam. To those who for years have
supported the toxic narrative of passive Sicilian earthquake victims,
waiting for state handouts, in the face of the more alert populations of
other earthquakes (Friuli 1976, Emilia Romagna 2012), these chronicles
and the following ones demonstrate a reactivity, a planning and
commendable levels of organisation.
In the autumn the first extra-parliamentary groups entered the scene
(Falcemartello in Catania, Siracusa and Lentini) and the anarchists
(with the Center for Studies on Nonviolence in Catania). The fight at
the "Parlatore" technical institute explodes in Palermo; the police raid
the school; the same happened in Messina in the occupied university
faculties, with dozens of arrests: in protest the rector and the deans
of all the faculties (except the Magisterium) resigned.
In Roccamena, in Belice, the "popular trial" of the government and
parliament is being held by the local Study Center; for three days the
peasant population expresses itself in a mature manner against the
enemies of the people; the situation is ready for a qualitative leap in
the clash, but this causes a rift between Dolci and Barbera, with the
former against raising it and the latter determined to do so; a unique
opportunity to put the State under pressure is lost. (3)
The student autumn is hot: in Palermo on November 1st in Engineering a
general strike is proclaimed against repression, for the unity of the
movement, for the requisition of premises, school buildings, the right
to assembly; on the 5th 10,000 march, the next day 15,000. In the same
days the movement of the Syracusan laborers against the arrogance of the
landowners gained strength; calls for wage increases, the elimination of
the differences between the area of citrus groves and that of
traditional crops, the equalization of working hours, the application of
the agreements of 1966, when the workers of Lentini were savagely beaten
by the police, as already in '63 it happened to those of Avola. Since
November 24, 32,000 workers have been crossing their arms in the
provincial general strike; the agrarians, with their reactionary
Farmers' Union, refuse to negotiate; on the 28th the state road 115 is
partially blocked, an action that becomes more frequent given the wall
of landowners; on December 1st the protest spreads and on the 2nd in
Avola there is a city strike in which the entire population
participates: the laborers occupy the state road, joined by students and
at lunchtime, by their families. The police force arriving from Catania
receives the order to load: 25 minutes of carousels with the trucks,
shots fired at eye level leave Angelo Sigona and Giuseppe Scibilia on
the ground, 48 are injured; 2 kg of shell casings will be collected. At
midnight the Minister of the Interior orders the resumption of
negotiations and on the 3rd the landowners reluctantly sign the contract.
The events in Avola were followed by an immediate reaction throughout
the country, and a general strike on the island; very violent clashes
with the police take place in the mining area of Villarosa; there is a
procession in Avola; thousands of students protest in Rome, in Trento
the university is occupied, in Genoa a bomb explodes near the municipal
offices, and on the 4th the demonstrators attempt to occupy the
Prefecture; demonstrations take place everywhere, and even RAI workers
contest the biased way in which the news presented the facts. On 8
December in front of the Scala in Milan a thick throw of eggs and
persimmons hits the bourgeois in furs, a sign reads "The laborers of
Avola wish you good fun"; on the 11th more clashes in Lecce, La Spezia
and Syracuse; on December 31st there is a protest in front of the
Viareggio Bussola called by anarchists and Potere Operaio; amidst
spitting and insults to the bourgeois, we shout: "The laborers of Avola
wish you a happy new year". Soriano Ceccanti, hit by police fire, will
remain paralyzed for life. (4)
68 speaks tragically Sicilian in a climate of revolt and desire for
redemption; but the third way is also looming, emigration: in the year
242,881 Sicilians leave the island, 143,000 move to Northern Italy and
99,000 abroad. (5).
Pippo Gurrieri
Piero Riggio, Bitterness and disappointments - Sicily after the
earthquake, "The Agitation of the South", Palermo, February 1968.
Melchiorre Palermo, Time stopped in Salemi, "The Agitation of the
South", Palermo, July-August 1968.
Fiorella Cagnoni, Valle del Belice, state earthquake, Moizzi, Milan
1976, p. 184-185.
Giuseppe Oddo, The mirage of the earth in Sicily. From the Allied
landing to the disappearance of the fireflies (1943-1969), Istituto
Poligrafico Europeo, Palermo 2021, p. 567-570.
For the drafting of this article I used largely my Il 68 in Sicilia
published in the special "The window" of Sicilia libertaria n. 58,
September 1988.
http://sicilialibertaria.it
_________________________________________
A - I N F O S N E W S S E R V I C E
By, For, and About Anarchists
Send news reports to A-infos-en mailing list
A-infos-en@ainfos.ca
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