A-Infos (en) Italy, Sicilia Libertaria #462 - Our Stories. The Mafia Cemeteries. (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

I don't know whether discovering a mafia cemetery is, in itself, big 
news. For me, it was - shortly after the '92 attacks - near San Giuseppe 
Jato, a stone's throw from where, ten years earlier, Saro Riccobono and 
four others had been killed. But even that - setting aside the objective 
complexity of the sites - isn't what matters most to me. After all, it's 
a story which, retraced years later, reads like a tragicomic, almost 
Fantozzi-style tale. A cranial vault protruding among the debris on 
pizzo Mirabella, along the stream of the Vallone Procura. A vault I 
mistook for a sort of shapeless shell; I pulled it out, handled it and, 
finally, once I realized what I had in my hand, I interpreted it as a 
Mesolithic man - and managed to take it home. Back then, as a Natural 
Sciences student, that's how I saw it. It seems incredible, but that's 
truly what happened, at least until some people I turned to for a 
"determination" opened my eyes. What followed was something like a dash 
to the carabinieri and further twists. The news hit all the papers: four 
skeletons were recovered. A fact I've never hidden, though it has 
remained unpublished until now. In the end, after not too much prodding 
from friends, I decided to publish everything in a book I titled exactly 
as it happened: "How to Discover a Mafia Cemetery in San Giuseppe Jato 
and Take It Home." Because that "Corleonese necropolis" (as the 
newspapers called it) allowed me to "re-see" places and sensations, 
until I focused everything on a concept that today seems faded: people 
don't want to see the mafia because it is very close to us. We even 
distort its historiography by making it begin in the peasant world 
which, with class detachment, we point to as brutal, uncultured or - to 
use a word with fully negative connotation - "viddano." Yet the mafia 
wasn't born that way: it appears along the trail of the management of 
violence that belonged to the feudal nobles and then to the bourgeoisie 
which, in the very first decades of the '800, emerged from its social 
oblivion. The fiefs in which the economy of the time turned (only 
apparently erased but substantially reappearing in the latifundium) 
changed hands; the new owners were up-and-coming bourgeois with solid 
political ties, ready to take over (also by force) the management of an 
economic system based on the most degrading control of peasant masses 
who continued to be deprived of everything. The new masters were 
notables, in any case well-off people ascribable to the so-called 
galantuomini, by which term a prestigious class role was meant. Among 
them, according to historian Giuseppe Carlo Marino, the mafia godfathers 
have their origins. The mafia defended the interests of the bourgeoisie 
because it was itself bourgeois. There are many examples, and in the 
book I tried to leave a record of them, also mixing in stories from my 
own life, because the mafia - whether deliberately or not - we have all 
breathed. Some rejected it; others made of it, with only apparent 
detachment, a class dis-honor. But in those mountains I lived my 
Anarchy. I went for the birds (ornithology has always been my passion) 
and I almost felt I was rereading Histoire d'une Montagne by the 
anarchist geographer Élisée Reclus, who "felt" Nature, noting aspects 
that foreshadowed environmentalism. Reclus had been to Palermo; in his 
Nouvelle géographie universelle, printed in the second half of the '800, 
he described the contrast between noble palaces and the poverty of the 
masses; and then the number of Palermo's «maffia» affiliates, estimated 
between 4,000 and 5,000. I, instead, have written only a tale in which I 
revisited the mafia "close" to me - not the murderers' mafia (luckily it 
never brushed my family), but that of the "Sacco," of the notables I 
came to know, of respectability, of the churches of Palermo bene and of 
the racism toward poor neighborhoods (of course branded as "mafia"). I 
saw again the Conca d'Oro and the Vallone Procura, which I bade farewell 
to amid carabinieri with pickaxes and shovels, already wrapped in the 
darkness that carried the scents of the evergreen maquis. In those years 
the most sensational attacks occurred, for the prominence of the victims 
and the force of the blasts. Only those who refuse to see pretend not to 
think of the subversive potential of those events, which thus far have 
lacked judicial truth about the possible real masterminds. It had 
already happened when the State sent, for a police crackdown, the famous 
Cesare Mori and, earlier still, Prefect Malusardi. We forget it, but the 
criminal pyramid had been well described precisely for the Partinico 
area decades earlier, while, earlier yet, the mafia associations and the 
very structuring of the organization were known - which, with the 
arrival of Lucky Luciano after the war, would become the Sicilian Cosa 
nostra. The Fantozzi-farce elements lie not only in my tragicomic find, 
but also in the way the general public learned terms like mafia 
commission and its branches into families and "tens." Terminology made 
known by the "fascinating" film The Godfather. Practically everything 
was there, including the "pentiti," influential friendships, esteemed 
professionals. In those years, however, Palermo's politicians and 
prelates denied the existence of the mafia. Had they not noticed? Its 
elimination could only have occurred within a social uprising which, 
however, when it broke out (the most formidable example is that of the 
Fasci dei lavoratori siciliani), was crushed by the State and by the 
mafia itself. Perhaps Ciro Troiano, criminologist, is right, who in the 
book's preface recalls how, as a boy at a relative's house, God and the 
State fell on my head. Without that restless episode - which I still 
"feel" today - I am certain I would never have found that piece of 
skeleton I brought home.

Giovanni Guadagna

https://www.sicilialibertaria.it/
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