A-Infos (en) Sicilia Libertaria: Ransom 17 - 1950s: emigration and colonialism (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

The defeat of the peasant struggles which already exploded under the 
Allied military administration and which culminated in the early 1950s 
with an agrarian reform deceived by the landowners, goes hand in hand 
with other defeats such as in the sulfur sector in full crisis, in the 
naval industries, in the Ragusa asphalt; here a great struggle in 1949, 
which lasted several months against the restructuring initiated by the 
owners, culminated with employment and self-management and ended with a 
compromise on the number of those fired and the transfer to a new 
company which would start the transformation into a cement factory.
Emigration becomes the obligatory outlet after the defeat, and increases 
the capitalist development of Northern Italy and Central-Northern 
Europe, clearly defining roles and functions between the North and the 
South of the country. In the decade '51-'61, 18% of the population of 
the South moved towards the northern regions; a mass of 9 million people 
to which must be added the flow towards foreign countries. Sicily's 
contribution is 400,000 individuals, equal to 10% of its population, an 
official figure net of "temporary" movements that do not involve changes 
of residence, and the imprecise but considerable number of clandestine ones.

While the parliamentary left continues to focus on agrarian reform and 
industrial reform to solve the employment problem on site and within the 
framework of regional autonomy, the Statute is already starting to leak 
when it comes to economically benefiting the Region. This is the case of 
the blocking, by the government of Rome, of the effects of article 40 on 
the establishment of a "clearing house" which makes available the 
provision of economic resources coming from the export of island 
products and remittances from emigrants . But the policy of the DC and 
its allies is projected within the political-economic-geographic 
dichotomy of the country, and emigration is considered an essential 
condition to overcome the demographic and employment problem. It just 
needs to be organised, conveyed and assisted.

The former president of the Region, the Christian Democrat Alessi, 
declared to the Regional Assembly on 18 April 1949 how it was necessary 
to "consider emigration not only as an economic necessity, but also as a 
spiritual condition of Sicily, a particular form of development of 
vitality island always renewed during the recurrent hemorrhages thanks 
to the generosity of the island mothers... The problem, therefore, was 
not so much to hope that the Sicilians would no longer go abroad, but 
rather to 'give a soul to this emigration of ours, an existence , a 
decoration, a link with our land...'" (1).

While the independentists limit themselves to asking for the expansion 
of transoceanic flows, every policy aimed at solving the employment 
problem within the economic framework of the Island is weakened. The 
Region also establishes a Regional Fund with specific bodies to organize 
migratory flows; collection centers for Sicilian emigrants were even 
established, but in 1952 the labor councilor of Naples had to admit the 
failure of these interventions and leave everything to the foreign 
policy of the State. The coal agreements against emigrants will 
characterize the 1950s.

All this is counterbalanced by the conditions of discrimination, racism 
and harsh exploitation that emigrants encounter in Italy and abroad; the 
tragedy of Marcinelle, the mine in the Charleroi mining district in 
Belgium, with its 262 deaths, including a large number of Sicilians, 
becomes the emblem of how emigration is actually a tragedy, with the 
departure from the island of the best workers and the agricultural towns 
that are inexorably depopulating.

Having ended the peasant epic badly, begins that of the outcasts who 
cross the borders clandestinely or framed within human flesh 
import-export projects, while it is established, with the law of 10 
August 1950 n. 646, the Cassa per il Mezzogiorno, with which the sixth 
De Gasperi government intends to finance agricultural and industrial 
initiatives aimed at promoting the economic development of the southern 
regions.

The Scelba police force keeps watch over the workers' protests that are 
trying to break the wall of exploitation desired by a rigid and 
oppressive bosses, conniving with the mafia, its precious aid in 
managing order and hiring; the example of the engineer is enough. 
Piaggio, who denied the workers of the Palermo shipyards during the 
interval the meat that he had granted to the workers of Genoa: "In Genoa 
the climate is cold, here in the heat you risk getting stomach problems, 
colitis" (2). Piecework, overtime, blackmail and dismissals are the 
order of the day in mines, shipyards and construction. Between 1947 and 
1952, 11,642 accidents with 117 deaths were recorded in the sulfur 
mines; we do not invest safely in systems that need to be renovated and 
downsized; from 10,000 miners in 1955 we went to 6,250 in 1962. The 
missing numbers went to Northern Europe, to find other mines to enter. 
The goal is to bring the number of Sicilian miners to 2,800.

The Cassa per il Mezzogiorno, both as regards agriculture and the 
industrial sector, seen throughout the development of its existence, 
will favor a strong centralization of capital in the hands of agrarians 
and industrialists, will cause a new expulsion of proletarians from the 
countryside towards new industrial zones or, for the most part, the 
North, with modest numbers of recycled people in the tertiary sector 
thanks to the patronage power of the DC.

The policy of the large industrial centres, with a high concentration of 
labor and no take-off of parallel economies, if it raises the average of 
income from work, will bring more benefits to the regions of the Center 
and North than to the southern ones and Sicily.

Under the illusory and false mirage of development it cages the South 
into an even greater dependence; with the excuse of eliminating the 
desert it is further desertified; with the promise of jobs they are 
mortally wounded in the activities most linked to the territory 
(agriculture, craftsmanship); under the pretext of reviving it, it was 
transformed into the cesspool of multinationals. A great blunder and a 
betrayal while politicians, industrialists, cardinals and trade 
unionists fill their mouths with modernization. Southern Italy and 
Sicily become the privileged laboratory for the production of the false 
ideology of development to cover a true practice of robbery and waste.

A rigged game is being played in which the masses are made to claim 
industrial hubs, factories, construction sites, in an economic framework 
that sees Mattei-style characters acting as saviors of the depressed 
southern homeland; the "concessions", almost always characterized by a 
lack of connection with the territory, arrive after exhausting and hard 
battles. Government and industrialists, with their following of 
politicians and parties, including left-wing ones, and trade union 
organizations, within this enormous game, pursue the objective of 
implementing the bosses with powerful injections of capital and of 
disseminating plants in the territories of the South with a strong 
social and environmental impact, without failing to water everything 
with the illusion of an imminent exit from underdevelopment, another 
category with an ambiguous, almost nefarious meaning. The 
developmentalist and laborist ideology will lead the people of the South 
practically up until today (see Ilva case) to become entangled in the 
contradiction of defending their (shaky) jobs at all costs (including 
that of health, life, environmental poisoning ). All of this is 
summarized by the banner of the citizens of Gela who took to the streets 
in 2002 against the feared closure of the ENI plant due to the ban on 
the use of pet-coke: "Better to die of cancer than to die of hunger".

The waste of billions, which, if used differently, could perhaps have 
rebalanced the economic and social differences with the rest of the 
country, was such only for the lower middle classes; for the magnates of 
national and multinational industry, for their local lieutenants 
involved in the patronage, military and cultural management of the 
operation, it was a great deal. A river of money, taken from the popular 
masses, has replenished the bosses' coffers. 120 billion lire were 
invested to build the ANIC petrochemical plant in Gela, a monster that 
occupies an area of 5 million square metres. Today both chemistry and 
oil have disappeared and of course jobs. On the Ionian side (3), after 
Moratti built the first refinery, Rasiom, in the Gulf of Augusta, in the 
1950s, attracted by the demand for labour, many inland families moved to 
the coastal road. Thus, within a few years, Marina di Melilli was born, 
a village located on the "Fondaco Nuovo" coast, which soon had almost a 
thousand inhabitants. Soon the village was surrounded by other 
establishments, all or almost all of them authorized through bribes to 
Sicilian politicians of all parties: ISAB, COGEMA, the ENEL 
thermoelectric power plant, Montedison, etc., until it was decided that 
those houses were cumbersome, they had to be razed to the ground, moving 
those who lived in them elsewhere. Years of struggles, isolation, 
promises from the Industrial Development Area and the Cassa per il 
Mezzogiorno induced the residents to surrender (all except one); at the 
end of the 1970s the destructive work was completed.

ISAB diluted its hydrocarbons with water, discharging 60,000 liters a 
day into the sea; Montedison also discharged into the sea, and emitted 
300 tons of sulfur dioxide into the air daily; the other refineries did 
the same. Then lots of lead, chloride, aromatic products. And waste of 
fresh water: the natural lake existing under the land of the industrial 
area was plundered: already in 1979 the water table had dropped by an 
average of 60 meters and sea water had invaded it. The industries 
consumed immense quantities: Montedison alone over 5 million cubic 
meters per day, discharged into the sea after treatment, i.e. polluted. 
With contributions from the Cassa per il Mezzogiorno, a plant was built 
to collect water from the Ciane river. The whole area was impoverished 
of one of the most precious goods.

A beautiful motorway could not be missing to connect the petrochemical 
hubs of the two banks: the Syracuse-Gela; started in 1972, stopped at km 
n.5 (Cassibile) for almost 40 years; 50 years after the first stone it 
trudges to the gates of Modica; in the meantime the two poles have 
almost disappeared!

But another good will also suffer the devastating impact of industrial 
"development": agriculture. At the end of the 1970s, there were over 
300,000 jobs lost in the sector throughout the South East Sicilian area. 
It was certainly not a sector that was doing well, especially due to 
working conditions and wages, and then due to the road infrastructure 
and obsolete services. The Cassa per il Mezzogiorno should have financed 
and relaunched it, rather than wasting billions to destroy it and 
replace it with chemistry, contributing to the disappearance of olive 
groves, almond groves, orange groves, carob groves, and - a factor too 
often forgotten - of a centuries-old peasant culture.

But the apogee of waste will be reached with AIMA, the Company for 
Intervention in the Agricultural Market, founded in 1966 to regulate the 
market by distributing European Union funds; for over a decade it 
purchased citrus fruits from producers at cost to take them to pulp; in 
1984 in Sicily 8 million tons of oranges, mandarins and lemons will end 
up under the tracks of bulldozers. A real bonus for the mafia, which in 
many cases managed to get paid for the citrus fruits to be destroyed and 
then sell them regularly.

Pippo Gurrieri

Francesco Renda, Emigration to Sicily, 1652-1961, Salvatore Sciascia, 
Caltanissetta-Rome 1989, p.85

Giuseppe Restifo, "Underdevelopment and popular struggles in Sicily 
1943-1974, Pellegrini, Cosenza 1976, p.27.

Carmelo Maiorca, Hands on the city, Magazine, Siracusa 1991.

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