FusiOrari

Thousands of tons of waste choke the streets of Campania, a region in Central Italy, also the most elegant and exclusive streets, according to an ineluctable rhythm. Who should take the blame for this disaster? For years newspapers, TV news, articles of almost all world news agencies have been reporting the annual, shameful emergency situation which irreparably affects such a beautiful region, as much rich in history and culture as so deeply afflicted by the plague of organized crime.

THE TRAGEDY – Photos and their relevant news reports are always the same. First act of this tragedy: colossal rubbish piles choke Naples’ streets, make traffic very heavy,  obstruct access to private homes, deny physically-challenged people the right to parking, turn pavements into huge stinky open-air dumps infested with rats. Then comes the second act: setting fire to bin liners. The technique is simple: Camorra clans pay 50 Euros per pile to Rom kids who set fire to rubbish. The kids wrap up these colossal rubbish heaps with videocassette ribbons, sprinkle them with alcohol and petrol and set fire to them. Air becomes immediately unbreathable and poisoned with dioxin, while liners’ plastic film melts and their stinking content decomposes. Finally the third act: violent protests by residents fed up with watching rubbish piles reaching the second floor of their houses, of being ridiculed and mocked all over Europe for years. A parallel phenomenon is reported in municipalities on Naples' periphery, where the population ferociously opposes re-opening of landfill sites which are already present on their territory or violently attacks the unrealistic projects of building waste-to-energy incinerators. At this stage, emergency takes a national importance and the government intervenes.

CAUSES - It is clear that, in order to solve a hoary problem having such dimensions and to extirpate an endemic evil such as mafia penetration, drastic measures and systematic, imperative, definitive and organized intervention are necessary. Instead, governments which have been succeeding on the shady stage of  politics have always adopted stopgap solutions only, measures which were precarious in their provisional nature. They decided to have the concerned areas cleaned up by the army, to sort thousands of tons of waste towards dumps located in other regions, to send trains fully loaded with toxic substances towards Austria or Germany. The outcome: waste emergency seems to arise following a cyclical, unavoidable pattern, as precise as a watch.  Having taken note of this unpleasant phenomenon, it is right and fair to identify its causes. Is the blame to be completely put on the high population density characterizing the areas near Naples and Caserta – reason for which it is not easy to find new landfill sites for waste disposal – or is it to be put on local administrations’ disastrous policies in managing the problem? This situation is apparently the result of pre-existing causes, cross-party interests, structural deficiencies. However, we are not at fault when we date back the origin and strengthening of this sort of cancer to the unscrupulous imperative of mafia clans: profit, profit and only profit.

CLANS’ POWER – It is estimated that if we piled up the quantity of toxic waste illegally disposed of in Campania as well as in Calabria and Apulia, we would build a mountain chain of 14 million tons garbage: a mountain 14,600 metres high! That is the reason why, for years the municipalities of Grazzanise, Cancello Arnone, Santa Maria la Fossa, Castelvolturno and Casal di Principe in the Caserta area and Giugliano, Qualiano, Villaricca, Nola, Acerra and Marigliano in the Neaples area have become the biggest (illegal) landfill sites in Europe either of toxic and municipal waste. According to a report of the Istituto Superiore di Sanità (Italian National Health Institute) cancer mortality is reported to be increased by 21% among residents in the last years. But this tragic figure apparently  does not impress the clans’ conscience.  Not at all! The business on illegal disposed waste guarantees a turnover of about 44 billion Euro in four years to the organized gangs of the mafia. In other words, an entrepreneurial association between Camorra clans and waste management companies was witnessed during the Nineties, aiming at a complete control on the whole waste disposal cycle. The Casalesi clan, lead by Schiavone Sandokan and Francesco Bidognetti illegally flooded with waste coming from the factories of Northern and Central Italy the countryside near Aversa. The Mallardo clan from Giugliano, instead, fully covered with toxic waste a disused  quarry near Giuliano. The Prosecutor’s Offices of Naples and Santa Maria Capua Vetere checked the accuracy of the information that in forty days more than 6,500 tons of waste reached Trentola Ducenta, a town in the Caserta area. In the territory neighbouring the municipality of Grazzanise, street sweeping waste produced by the city of Milan in a decade  has been piled up. Around Villa Literno, Castelvolturno and San Tammaro printers’ toners coming from Tuscany and Lombardy have been unloaded from the trucks which officially had to be used for compost transportation (compost being a particular type of manure) and have been dumped in the nighttime.  The ground hence has become impregnated with hexavalent chromium, which causes explosions each time it rains. But if you walk in the countryside surrounding Santa Maria Capua Vetere in the Caserta area, this phenomenon takes gruesome details, becoming an horror film. Indeed, you can even find an underground cemetery in these areas. It is not a necropolis dating back to Roman times and emerging from the darkness of the centuries, but rather a real open-air dump which has become  a “cemetery”. Actually, the mortal remains of “very dead people”, called “arcimorti”, rest in the countryside. They are the bodies of those people who died more than 40 years ago. Cemeteries periodically should provide for the disposal of  coffins and funerary equipment through specialized companies. Costs are very high, hence cemetery’s directors – upon the payment of a considerable bribe – instruct gravediggers to exhume dead bodies, load them on trucks and pile them up in the fields around Santa Maria Capua Vetere. People passing by even cross themselves!