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unspeakablehorrorFairly long excerpt from this 2019 article under the cut:
How the Italian mafia makes millions by exploiting migrants. By Tobias Jones and Ayo Awokoya
by Tobias Jones and Ayo Awokoya
6 August last year, 14 immigrant farmhands in Foggia, on the ankle of the Italian boot, were coming home from a 12-hour shift picking tomatoes in 40C heat. The minibus carrying them was registered in Bulgaria; the driver didn’t have a licence or insurance. The seats inside were wooden planks, and it was so crowded that passengers couldn’t even see out. The vehicle was travelling at speed when it collided head-on with a truck loaded with tomatoes.
After the crash, you could see contorted limbs through the smashed windows. The entire front third of the vehicle was concertinaed and the roof was ripped open. Bags and clothing spilled out on to the road, and there were large patches of blood on the asphalt. Twelve of the 14 labourers died. Only two days before, also in Foggia, four labourers had died in a similar accident: 16 dead in 48 hours.
In the Italian south, the lives of foreign agricultural labourers are so cheap that many NGOs have described their conditions as a modern form of slavery. They live in isolated rural ruins or shanty towns. Some have Italian residency permits, but many don’t. A few have work contracts, although union organisers often find they are fake. Desperate for work, these labourers will accept any job in the fields even if the wages are far below, and the hours far above, union standards. The produce they pick regularly ends up on the shelves of Italian, and international, supermarkets, bought by consumers who have no idea of the suffering involved.
Although some of the workers are eastern Europeans, most of those picking crops in the Italian fields come from Africa, mainly – at the moment – from Gambia, Ghana, Nigeria, Sudan and Somalia. The number of arrivals has been growing exponentially in recent years: the number of boat people landing in Italy peaked at 181,436 in 2016.
The largest migrant reception centres are almost all in the south – in Sicily and Calabria – where mafia organisations exert greatest control and where agriculture requires a constant supply of labour. That supply is organised by gangmasters: agents who recruit seasonal workers and who are tasked with squeezing extra work out of them at the lowest possible cost.
“There are a few factors on which modern slavery thrives,” says Jakub Sobik, of the British NGO Anti-Slavery International: “Vulnerability, discrimination and a lack of the rule of law.” In Italian agriculture, all of these conditions are present.
There is no question that the migrant workers are vulnerable to exploitation, but Yvan Sagnet, a Cameroonian anti-slavery activist who once worked picking tomatoes in Puglia, explains that the vulnerability is mental as much as physical. “When you have been enslaved,” Sagnet says, “it’s such a strong thing that your head begins to reason differently. It’s not the slavery of hundreds of years ago, when you were deprived of your liberty. Slavery in the 21st century doesn’t need chains, because they exploit a continual sense of intimidation that the most vulnerable people, like immigrants, feel.”
Discrimination and violence against African workers gets worse in Italy with every passing day. In 2018, there were 126 racially motivated attacks recorded in the country, some fatal: in May last year a neo-fascist shot and wounded six black people in Macerata, near the central city of Ancona. A Cameroonian was shot in the city of Aprilia, an hour’s drive from Rome. A few weeks before, in July, a Moroccan man was beaten to death there. The problem is so severe that the Italian intelligence agency warned earlier this year about the rise in far-right groups and “a real risk of an increase in episodes of intolerance towards foreigners”.
But it’s the absence of the rule of law – Sobik’s third prerequisite for modern slavery – that is most evident in Italian agriculture. Labourers without papers are considered outside the law, so they can expect no protection. “You know that what you’re suffering isn’t right,” says Sagnet, “but you can’t denounce it because they’ll report you as an illegal immigrant.”
In the Italian deep south, where the mafia runs a parallel system of local rule with its own violent enforcement, the law holds little sway. Workplace inspectors are “very few and very corrupt”, according to Rocco Borgese, secretary of the FLAI-CGIL union (which represents agricultural workers) in Gioia Tauro, Calabria.
In 2018, Global Slavery Index, an organisation providing a country-by-country ranking of the number of people currently enslaved, estimated there are 50,000 enslaved agricultural workers in Italy (the Index claims a total of 145,000 people are enslaved in the country as a whole, forced into prostitution and domestic services). The UN’s special rapporteur on slavery said last autumn that 400,000 agricultural workers in Italy are at risk of being exploited and almost 100,000 are forced to live in inhumane conditions.
“There’s a form of exploitation which, in some ways, exceeds what happened in the past, when slave-owners at least cared about the health of their slaves because they needed them,” said an Italian-Ivorian trade-unionist and campaigner, Aboubakar Soumahoro. “Today, there’s not even that care.”
Rather than denying the situation, the country’s interior minister, Matteo Salvini, has repeatedly said immigrants are the “new slaves”. The observation isn’t sympathetic but strategic: publicising their destitution is a calculated attempt to dissuade more from coming to Italy. It serves his political purpose to perpetuate their ghettoisation, and also shores up the far-right narrative that immigrants can never integrate.Salvini and his allies have turned logic on its head. For them, the victims aren’t the people who have been enslaved, but the Italian people. In their view, the criminals aren’t gangmasters who exploit the workers, but immigrants (“every day in Italy”, Salvini has tweeted, “immigrants commit 700 crimes”). One of his most familiar slogans is “la pacchia è finita” (“the free ride is over”) – echoing the popular myth that refugees and pro-immigration leftists have somehow got rich at the expense of ordinary Italians. When you speak to rightwing politicians in Italy, almost all reiterate the conspiracy theory that mass immigration has been financed by dark forces.
It is true, however, that some people are making money off the backs of the displaced and desperate. Italy’s agricultural sector is booming, with food products making up 8.7% of Italy’s flagging GDP. The tomato industry alone is worth £2.8bn. Mass immigration is chaotic and uncontrolled, but the exploitation of immigrant workers is systematic.
“The criminal economy is far better organised than the ordinary one,” says Leonardo Palmisano, sociologist and author of Mafia Caporale (“Gangmaster Mafia”), a study of the illegal exploitation of workers in Italy.
Supermarkets and their suppliers cite their use of certifications that are intended to reassure consumers that the goods we buy are produced under legal labour practices. But as these stories demonstrate, such figleaves are totally unreliable, and simply make the consumer unwittingly complicit: those purchasing Italian produce are unaware that their healthy Mediterranean diet is, sometimes, the fruit of 21st-century slavery.
Rosarno, in Calabria, on the toe of the Italian boot, is an ugly town full of unfinished buildings and uncollected rubbish. It is notorious as a stronghold of the ’Ndrangheta, the Calabrian mafia, whose principal sources of income are drug trafficking, protection rackets, construction and agriculture. Nothing moves here, it’s said, without their assent.
Thousands of immigrants head here every winter to work on the orange harvest, and end up staying in shanty towns three miles west of Rosarno. This cluster of temporary shelters, near a town called San Ferdinando, has grown up on the far side of the dual carriageway, the railway, and an industrial estate. Close by are the red-and-white cranes of Gioia Tauro port, the entry point for much of the cocaine sold in Europe. As you approach, you see dozens of young black men riding old bikes, plastic bags dangling from their handlebars. All the bushes for miles around have been coppiced by labourers for twigs and sticks to build their shacks.
There are three shanty towns in San Ferdinando. Testa dell’Acqua is a horseshoe of 20 leaking mobile homes. The white walls have turned black with mould. Old freezers have been refashioned into chicken houses and TV aerials are tied to long branches. There’s even a small cultivation of maize. Nearby, 700 more people live in 54 blue tents (more than a dozen per tent) supplied by the Italian Ministry of the Interior, which were put up in August 2017.
The main shanty town has the mud and improvised paths of a very edgy music festival. Stray dogs, cats and rodents pick through piles of rubbish. Police cars prowl outside day and night. You can still see the shack that was left uncompleted by a 29-year-old Malian, Soumaila Sacko, who was killed while he was in the process of constructing it: he had arranged 15 vertical sticks, five by three. About a quarter of the roof of sheet metal had been hammered in place. He was shot dead last summer by an Italian while he was trying to find some more metal in a nearby abandoned warehouse.
The encampment, though, is strangely vibrant. There’s music and laughter. You feel as if you could find anything here: there’s a bar, a hairdresser, an ironmonger, a butcher, a bike-repair guy, a mosque and a church. There’s even a football team, called Qui Bosco (“Here’s the Wood”). The resourcefulness is evident: old inner-tubes have been knotted to tie down a tarp, an old shelf has become a bridge over a ditch of plastic bottles, a metal bed base is used as a screen door.
This area is of Calabria is known for its orange groves, and in late autumn, as the fruit turns, like traffic lights, from green to amber, young men turn up carrying all their worldly goods, and negotiate with someone to buy an old, damp mattress (€5) and rent a patch in a shack on which to sling it (often €30 a month). Nothing is dry.
Here, the nationalities are mostly Nigerian, Gambian, Ghanaian, Sudanese, Somali and Burkinabé. About 5% are women. There is one tap, but the water isn’t drinkable. Toilets are nothing more than holes in the ground. There are a few generators and various gas bottles for cooking. Nobody knows how many people live in these conditions around San Ferdinando, but at the height of the season, there are probably 2,000 people.
A charity offering medical support in these shanty towns, MEDU, says 21% of those it sees have intestinal ailments, 17% respiratory problems, and 22% osteoarticular pains. Many have mental health problems, and the horrors they have suffered on their journey here have left them with PTSD. As we walk round, a young Nigerian woman called Honour shouts: “You must help us.” She shows the rashes up her arms; she doesn’t know if the skin irritation is due to constant contact with pesticides in the fields, or mosquitoes and horseflies. One of the many microbusinesses here is a trade in painkillers, especially ketoprofen. Sometimes they have to cycle for one or two hours to get to work, and most people are so exhausted that all they do when not working is sleep.
Life expectancy in slums such as this is very low. Jacob, a Ghanaian who keeps chickens in the disused freezers, shows us where Nigerian migrant worker Becky Moses used to live before she died in a fire in 2018. Fire is a constant danger: it is the only way to keep warm, and people will burn anything: old car seats, tyres, cardboard. Three others have died in fires on this site alone in the last six months.
There are dozens of slums like San Ferdinando across southern Italy, swelling and contracting according to the season. Often, the labourers are driven from one remote shanty town to another by gangmasters. After a winter in Calabria picking oranges and kiwis, they go north in the spring to Campania to pick strawberries, melons and shallots. In summer, they cross to Puglia, the heel of Italy, to pick tomatoes and peppers, before moving to the Veneto or Piemonte to pick grapes in early autumn. There are variants: some will go to Cassibile, in the south-east corner of Sicily, for the new potatoes, or stay behind in the slums once the workers have moved on to pick through the detritus and try and sell off scrap metal and sodden mattresses.
A major draw for tomato-pickers is Borgo Mezzanone, near Foggia. One of the men who died in the carminibus crash last summer had a brother, Sid, who was living in London but came to Italy when he heard the news. Sid shows us around the camp. He says he couldn’t believe his brother had been living in such misery. “It’s not real,” he says.
We enter the camp through a man-sized hole in a fence. “Welcome to Africa,” says Sid ruefully. Smoke is billowing from makeshift homes. Everywhere there are plastic bottles, smashed concrete, planks of wood, torn clothing, old brick phones and empty bottles of whisky and vodka. Abandoned mattresses act as walls and roofs to the shacks, bungied together with the swelling chipboard of kitchen worktops. Someone has painted on a wall in white: “shut up becaus is rule”.
Migrants usually arrive in Italy with nothing but debts, after borrowing money from relatives back home to finance their journey to Europe. They usually know nobody when they reach their destination, and have no one to appeal to when in difficulty. Few even reveal to relatives back home the desperate situation in which they find themselves. In an abandoned warehouse, not far from the shanty town of Borgo Mezzanone in Puglia, an immigrant worker called Njobo tells us: “The Africans that are living here, most of them are living a fake life. They look for beautiful pictures and put them on Instagram. None of us would take a picture from this place and send it back.” He gestured around his makeshift home, revealing the dilapidation of his surroundings, the room dotted with shredded plastic rags and broken glass.
These immigrants don’t only have debts to relatives, they are also desperate to obtain residency permits. The so-called Bossi-Fini law of 2002 (named after the two party leaders who drafted it) grants a residency permit only to those who have work contracts, meaning immigrants will put up with exploitation in order to obtain one. Those without residency permits are even more vulnerable. Two of the people who died in fires in the San Ferdinando shanty town had drifted there to hide from authorities because their permits had recently expired.
Pay, already low, is even lower for “clandestines”. Many of the labourers we spoke to say gangmasters regularly withhold their identity documents and pay. Even if, in theory, they are free to leave, circumstances force them to stay put. “If you have worked for a week or for two weeks and they haven’t paid you,” says Sagnet, “and they have your documents, of course you don’t leave.”
Many migrants have reported being beaten by employers, who also make sexual demands. Violence, especially against women, is alarmingly common. Beauty, a Nigerian woman in a purple wig who lives in the San Ferdinando shanty town, told us: “You never feel safe. Even when you sleep, you have one eye open.”
Tayo, a 22-year-old Nigerian, was assaulted when she tried to defend a friend. Sexual violence is a constant in these bleak places: in 2015, in Ragusa, Sicily, a labourer living in a shanty town was killed and his wife raped. In 2011, an investigation revealed dozens of Romanian labourers had been forced into prostitution.
Inside the camp, there are shops selling everything: iPhone chargers, bracelets, sim cards, bread, crisps, hair extensions, bike pumps and shoes. Vendors are roasting pieces of meat coated in a thick marinade and heckling passers-by. There’s a group of men intently watching a game of draughts. Restaurants in shacks advertise their menus: “The best taste of The Gambia”. There’s a club lined with discoloured sofas and afrobeat blaring from the stereo. Another restaurant doubles as a brothel. But there is no running water or formal sanitation facilities anywhere.
“If, when I was in Africa, you had told me this is what Europe was like, I would insult you,” Njobo says. “I would never have believed it.”
The men and women living in these shanty towns are exploited from the moment they arrive on Italian soil. The sociologist and author Leonardo Palmisano, who investigates agricultural slavery and organised crime, says: “The mafia in the south controls the reception of immigrants. Centres for asylum-seekers have processed hundreds of thousands of immigrants, and the mafia is often part of the management.”
The Italian state pays €35 per immigrant per day (and €45 for minors) to reception centres that house them. During the mass migrations of recent years, the government contracted out the housing and feeding of migrants, which became a billion-euro industry. The largest reception centres in Italy are called Caras (centri di accoglienza per richiedenti asilo, or “welcome centres for asylum-seekers”), each in command of multi-million euro contracts for providing food and other services. One investigation in 2017 into the Cara Sant’Anna (based in an abandoned military airport in Isola di Capo Rizzuto in Calabria) estimated that, over 10 years, the Arena mafia clan had embezzled a third of the €100m state funding. Tiny portions of out-of-date food were served. The number of residents was exaggerated to increase cashflow. The asylum centre had become, in the words of the investigating magistrate, “a cashpoint for the mafia”. The running of Cara Sant’Anna has now been taken over by the Red Cross.
Something similar was happening all over the country. The Roman mafioso, Salvatore Buzzi, whose consortium repeatedly won contracts to arrange housing for migrants, was heard in a 2014 police wiretap boasting: “Have you got any idea how much I earn through immigrants? I make more from immigrants than I do from drugs.” His consortium enjoyed annual revenues of €55m.
The political wind was turning against those refugees even before Matteo Salvini became the Italian interior minister in June 2018. In 2017, 58% of asylum requests were turned down. The appeals process, too, was abolished. Those so-called diniegati – men and women denied asylum – invariably preferred to disappear into the nearby agricultural slums than risk deportation.
There, the migrants continue to be exploited for profit, through a system called caporalato. This is the practice through which the recruitment and payment of day-labourers is subcontracted to a gangmaster, the caporale. An ancient and sinister figure in Italian history, the caporale was – throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries – a proto-mafioso, the enforcer of the landlord’s will. The difference now is that the mafioso himself is likely to be a landowner, and it’s his orders that are being enforced by a usually non-Italian caporale.
The practice of caporalato has been illegal since a 2016 law banned intermediaries from exploiting vulnerable agricultural labourers (thanks, largely, to the courageous campaigning of Yvan Sagnet), and yet it is still ubiquitous. At 4am, you see hundreds of labourers cycling on main roads, without lights, to reach the pick-up points for transport to the fields. There, at crossroads and in lay-bys, the black labourers wait for a caporale and his minibus. No one knows if there will be work. “Work yes, work no,” says one phlegmatic man, moving his hands as if he were juggling invisible balls. The only certainty is that anyone who has agitated for fair pay or better conditions will be automatically excluded.
Costs vary, but in general the labourers have to pay around €3 for transportation to and from the fields. The vehicles usually carry double the legal limit of passengers, with men and women sitting on top of each other. The fields are so remote that, once there, the workers are obliged to buy sandwiches and water for €3-4. It costs 50 cents to charge a phone or, if anyone falls ill or has an accident, €20 to be taken to hospital.
Although piecework in agriculture is illegal, that is how all labourers are paid: the going rate is €3.50 to fill a chest with 300kg of tomatoes, or €5.50 if they are cherry tomatoes; workers receive €1 for a huge case of tangerines or 50 cents for one of oranges. The going rate for 100kg of grapes is €13. Even if you work at top speed, it is hard to make much more than €30 a day, and that’s before all those deductions. Contracts are essentially worthless: local unionists try to intervene, checking online to see if the correct social security payments have been made on behalf of workers. They very rarely have. Union representative Rocco Borgese shakes his head glumly: “We have lost our humanity,” he says.
Because the Bossi-Fini law ties residency to the possession of a work contract, many purchase a contract for hundreds of euros. Other times, the contract is issued in the name, not of the immigrant, but of a local man or woman who doesn’t work and has probably never been to the fields. This guarantees the local person agricultural unemployment benefit if, on paper, it looks as if they have worked for more than 53 days in the year. In 2015, 3,000 of these “false labourers” were discovered in Calabria.
For the labourers dropped off at dawn in the fields, the work is relentless. In December 2018, we went out with five Africans cutting broccoli. They were wearing ill-fitting gloves and cracked wellington boots. Their clothing was frayed and encrusted with dry mud. They were each given a small knife. A green John Deere tractor crawled forward, and the five men crouched down, cutting the thick stems and chucking the broccoli heads in a crate behind the tractor. The stems, in the winter dawn, were covered in icy shards, and their knives often broke against them. By the end of the day, broken blades lay in a small pile just inside the tractor. With inadequate footwear, it was easy to slice your foot open. It was so cold we could see steam rising off the mens’ bent backs.
Because the Bossi-Fini law ties residency to the possession of a work contract, many purchase a contract for hundreds of euros. Other times, the contract is issued in the name, not of the immigrant, but of a local man or woman who doesn’t work and has probably never been to the fields. This guarantees the local person agricultural unemployment benefit if, on paper, it looks as if they have worked for more than 53 days in the year. In 2015, 3,000 of these “false labourers” were discovered in Calabria.
For the labourers dropped off at dawn in the fields, the work is relentless. In December 2018, we went out with five Africans cutting broccoli. They were wearing ill-fitting gloves and cracked wellington boots. Their clothing was frayed and encrusted with dry mud. They were each given a small knife. A green John Deere tractor crawled forward, and the five men crouched down, cutting the thick stems and chucking the broccoli heads in a crate behind the tractor. The stems, in the winter dawn, were covered in icy shards, and their knives often broke against them. By the end of the day, broken blades lay in a small pile just inside the tractor. With inadequate footwear, it was easy to slice your foot open. It was so cold we could see steam rising off the mens’ bent backs.
In the space of seven hours, these five men managed to fill 110 crates of broccoli. They were owed around €30, but nobody knew when they would be paid. When they are, they have nowhere to store their wages, so they carry cash – sometimes a month or two’s savings – at all times. This makes them targets for muggers and vulnerable to violent attacks.
After a long shift, the men were driven back to an abandoned farmhouse. Eleven people shared the two-bedroom ruin. There were no windows, running water or electricity. They each paid a rent of €20 euros per month. The only heat came from burning scrap wood. Many don’t survive these punishing conditions. In the summer of 2015 alone, 15 labourers died, including Paola Clemente, in the fields of Andria in Apulia, and Abdullah Muhammed, a 47-year-old Sudanese, in Nardò, further south in Puglia. In October 2017, a Ghanaian man, Daniel Mensah, died of hypothermia. In an article in the British Medical Journal in March, doctors representing another Italian medical charity, Doctors With Africa, wrote: “Over the past six years the number of agricultural workers who have died as a result of their work is more than 1,500.”
On 2 October last year, a Calabrian mayor, Mimmo Lucano, was arrested. He stood accused of abetting illegal immigration and public-contract crimes, allegedly arranging a sham marriage for a Nigerian woman and improperly awarding refuse collection contracts to a local cooperative. For years, Lucano had been the mayor of Riace, a hilltop town 20km east of Rosarno.
The town first became famous in 1972 when a snorkeller discovered the so-called Riace bronzes, a pair of stunning statues of bearded, naked Greek warriors dating from 450BC. Now, though, Riace is renowned throughout Italy as one of the only places to have attempted true, revolutionary integration of migrants. The town, which was underpopulated, welcomed migrants and opened schools and businesses to them. Lucano’s arrest represented a crackdown on anyone offering an alternative to the deliberate marginalisation of migrant workers. (The investigation which led to his arrest was ironically code-named “Xenia”, the ancient Greek word for hospitality.)
“He’s a nothing,” Matteo Salvini said of Lucano after his arrest.
When we wandered around the streets of Riace last autumn, it was hard to imagine a sharper contrast to the agricultural slums. There were black toddlers singing in English from a balcony (“rain, rain, go away … ”). A veiled woman laughed with an elderly Italian man on a street corner. Bottles of water were left on park benches in case anyone was in need. The recycling bins were tidy wooden rectangles. Since the steep streets are too narrow for trucks, the binmen in recent years have been immigrants using donkeys.