The end of the 20th century is approaching and our journey is also
coming to an end. ---- Cosa Nostra tries to focus on separatistblackmail, and in the early 90s it supports southern and crypto-fascist
leagues, with poor results: the southern leghismo does not work, the new
strategy, soon, will be called Forza Italia. The southern electorate
(increasingly disenchanted, with record abstentions from time to time)
is no coincidence a reservoir of reactionary or opportunist votes. The
PSI tried first, trying to extricate itself in an unscrupulous manner
between DC and PCI, to gather consensus with a southernist policy based
on the contribution of the mafia and corrupt bourgeoisie. After
Tangentopoli, which exploded in 1993, that practice is transferred bag
and baggage to Forza Italia with the electoral victory of '94. The
"clean hands revolution" leads to the restructuring of parties and
institutions (the majority system is born, wanted by the center left,
which will be its first victim) strengthening the levers of command, in
the same way that the arrest of Totò Riina leads to a change in the
leadership of Cosa Nostra and a recalibration of its strategies. The
PCI, which has become PDS, frees itself from the socialist ideological
ballast; the birth of Rifondazione Comunista in the long run will not be
able to give impetus to policies of resumption of social conflict and
the PRC will consume its existence in the pit of consociative,
institutional and sectarian practices.
The domination of priests in society is consolidated: in Palermo the
Jesuits and Opus Dei form the political classes of the right, center and
left (it is the period of the Network of Orlano and Father Pintacuda)
and some parishes become anti-mafia strongholds in the neighborhoods,
taking away young labor from the clans; this leads to the murder of
Father Pino Puglisi in Brancaccio on September 15, 1993.
Meanwhile, the phenomenon of the Northern Leagues and their pressure for
a federal Italy with a Po Valley drive split into North, Center and
South is growing. As a first effect, the parties of the so-called left
embrace the Northern corporate demands with the hope of recovering
electoral consensus. The result will not only be to strengthen them, but
also to abandon the South to the role of internal colony subject to
extractivist policies. Sicily is a large market for Northern products,
it has an industry that covers just 15% of its GDP, and it is mostly oil
production in transit; textiles are at 0.2% of national exports, food
stops at 2.6%.
On July 31, 1992, an infamous agreement between the Amato government,
Confindustria and CGIL-CISL-UIL establishes wage moderation and
abolishes the sliding scale. The left and the unions lead workers to the
slaughterhouse of resignation. The subsequent "technical" governments of
Ciampi and Dini continue to pass agreements against workers and to
tackle pension reform; Dini, at the Fiera del Levante in Bari in the
autumn of '95, dusts off the wage cages, that is, lower wages in the
South to finance businesses, finding the yes of CISL and UIL and the
"no" of CGIL. This will not pass, but only because in the South the
cages are already there, wages are lower, black and precarious work are
the rule.
On November 21, '92, a large southern demonstration, against the
policies of the Amato government, is called in Naples by Rifondazione
Comunista; about 50,000 people march in a procession. The anarchists of
South Eastern Sicily spread a leaflet, in which, among other things, a
concept is expressed that thirty years later, in times of differentiated
autonomy, maintains its surprising relevance: "Those who these days are
waving their arms in defense of the unity of the nation are the same
ones who have built their power on the North-South divide; their
occasional rhetoric barely hides their desire to continue with the usual
exploitation. What development is possible without self-determination?" (1)
However, the ragged southernism insists with the litany of the "absent
State", when it is more than evident that underdevelopment,
unemployment, depopulation, emigration, environmental devastation,
militarization are the fruits of a heavy, widespread and organized
presence of the State, that is, they are the character assumed by the
"development" of the South. And it is time to shake off the Southern
constraints: after having suppressed the Cassa per il Mezzogiorno
(1950-1984), its replacement AgenSud (1986-1992) was also eliminated to
concentrate all policies on the South in the Ministry of Economy and
Finance. Now there is only the Northern Question, towards which the
unanimous paths of de facto secession (of the rich) are moving. A
Question that comes from afar, that is produced in the one hundred and
forty years of national "unity"; it does not arise from the difficulties
of the North nor from a presumed ball and chain represented by the
South; Nicola Zitara makes this clear: "without the internal southern
colony, the North would have found itself in a condition similar to that
in which Austria found itself, after having lost its Danubian empire. A
small and ramshackle country, dominated by Germany and inhabited by men
without qualities". And he continues: "what does the South give to the
North? First of all a privileged outlet for small and medium-sized
industry...; secondly men capable of hard work, thirdly a large
unemployment that keeps the national level of wages and salaries low;
fourthly, savings and taxes - so much savings to advance to the Northern
industry all the expenses it makes in the South, and so many taxes to
pay the large expenses that the State makes in the North, fifthly, a
lever of brains, such as a country of 22 million inhabitants can
express..." (2).
The assault does not stop: the policies of militarization and war are
accompanied by devastating choices such as the reconversion to coal of
the ENEL power plant in S. Filippo del Mela (ME), the storage of nuclear
waste in the Pasquasia mine (EN) or the cutting of some railway lines
considered dead wood. Decisions that find a difficult but firm popular
response whose results will be seen only in the second decade of the new
century; even the mysteries of Pasquasia (did the mafia store toxic
waste in the mine?) will remain.
In the summer of 1990 a period of drought in Northern Italy creates
alarm: 58% of companies are in crisis; the fact that in the South those
in crisis are 75%, while in Sicily a good 94% (Coldiretti data) passes,
as will always happen, into the background. Thus, as some populations of
Catania had done ten years earlier, on July 12 the people of Ribera (AG)
invaded the town hall and destroyed everything in their path, then lit a
large bonfire, managing to wrest some commitments for water in the
countryside, where, in addition to the fruits, the water crisis was also
killing the plants.
The umpteenth earthquake (December 13, 1990, South Eastern Sicily)
highlighted the state of unpreparedness, improvisation and serious
responsibility of the institutions in prevention and interventions; in
the same period the crazy project of the Bridge over the Strait of
Messina was relaunched, with the money-eating machine of the Messina
Strait Company. Nature reminds us from time to time what the priorities
of Sicily and the Sicilians are, as during the prolonged eruption of
Etna in the winter-spring of '92, when Civil Protection, Etna Park
Authority and institutions gave life to an obscene spectacle in a
territory where they silently and complicitly witnessed the development
of building and land speculation; memorable explosive charges and
anti-lava walls that caused more damage than the volcano itself; and
while in Padania the writings "Forza Etna" appear, the inhabitants of
towns like Zafferana Etnea, threatened by the lava and the incompetence
of the men of the Civil Protection, practice direct action to try to
defend themselves from the magma (3).
But those elected to the most investigated Regional Assembly in Italy do
not sit idly by and on August 12, 1992 they approve the law on the
direct election of the mayor, accentuating the powers of the "first
citizen" and his unassailability, and extending the majority system to
municipalities with over 10,000 inhabitants: the mayor-boss is born.
On April 20, 1994, a strong charge by the riot police against 500
workers and families of Proter, a company of the Costanzo group, who had
not been paid for months, takes place in Piazza Municipio in Catania;
however, the protesters react and at the end of the clashes there are
about thirty injured on both sides, with a child left on the brink of
death. Episodes of intolerance of this type will be repeated regularly
in the decade (and after). And speaking of children, in Gela between
mid-December 1995 and mid-January 1996 15 children were born with
various malformations attributable to the pollution produced by ENI's
petrochemical plant, which were added to the 30 cases officially
recorded during 1995. Thus the failure of industrialization and its
predatory and extractive nature returned to the fore, the first victims
of which were the workers and inhabitants of the "miraculous" areas (the
parents were from Gela, Niscemi, Butera, Riesi). The employers' front
and its servants belittled, denied, and sowed fatalism.
The struggles of farmers explode, overwhelmed by fines for milk quotas;
roadblocks, complaints, trials and convictions for hundreds characterize
the mid-90s; there is no shortage of struggles, even dramatic ones, of
the unemployed, crushed by a clientelistic system and by neoliberalism,
the new verb of the parties. The century ends with the explosion of the
migratory phenomenon, the construction or re-adaptation of old
structures in state concentration camps called Temporary Stay Centers,
the inevitable revolts of prisoners (like in Trapani) with various victims.
Rights, spaces of freedom, prospects of peace and well-being for all,
better working and living conditions, environment and territories, are
under attack, thanks to the homologation of all political, economic and
trade union forces to the logic of capitalism and warmongering
neoliberalism. The NATO bombings on Belgrade in 1998-99, managed by the
post-communist D'Alema government, marked the definitive victory of the
"single party" of exploitation and war. The South was at the mercy of an
unleashed Northern League whose racist and predatory ideology pervaded
the entire spectrum of politics; it managed to react by abstaining en
masse at every election (in 1996 approximately 2 million Sicilians
abstained or voted blank); a protest that failed to transform into a
movement of social demands and that did not affect the mechanisms of
consensus enjoyed by the system. The data provided by Svimez speak
clearly: the Maastricht policy was the tombstone of the South, which
recorded 18 points less than the Centre-North in terms of investments in
the period 1991-1999; the GDP index, taking the Northern one as 100, in
the South in 1999 is 54.9% (it was 58.6 in 1991); 80,000 emigrants in
1999, against the average of 55,000 in the previous decade (the figure
will continue to worsen)
The longed-for redemption is increasingly an impossible dream for a few,
be they anarchists, revolutionaries, progressive independentists,
residual social centers, grassroots unionists, who struggle - divided -
in the (unlikely) construction of a new front of change.
Pippo Gurrieri
(1) Anarchists and the South. From a land of conquest and robbery to a
land of social redemption, Anarchist Groups of South Eastern Sicily,
November 1992.
(2) "Cultura Calabrese" n.2/1993.
(3) Natale Musarra, Etna to the rescue, "Sicilia libertaria" n. 99, May
1992.
http://sicilialibertaria.it
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