Cpr - Repatriation detention centers

Islands. Spaces of education and civil disobedience

Cpr - Repatriation detention centers

Islands. Spaces of education and civil disobedience

With the murder of Peppe Valarioti, the 'Ndrangheta struck the PCI to stop the social struggles in the Gioia Tauro plain

The former deputy and former mayor of Rosarno Giuseppe Lavorato remembers his party colleague Peppe Valarioti, killed on 11 June 1980 by the gangs to stop the civic mobilization against illicit deals in large state projects in Calabria

Giuseppe Lavorato Politician

We publish, on the occasion of the anniversary of the murder of Peppe Valarioti, a memory signed by Giuseppe Lavorato, former deputy and former mayor of Rosarno, political master of the young PCI militant killed on 11 June 1980 by the 'Ndrangheta in Nicotera.

Almost half a century has passed (46 years, to be exact) since the mafia ambush that killed Peppe Valarioti, secretary of the Communist Party section in Rosarno (Reggio Calabria). It is not a history of times gone by, it is a history of the times that begins with the forceful entry of the 'Ndrangheta into major public affairs and into the political and institutional life of our country. It is an open wound, an unpunished crime, because the judicial investigation obscured the facts of the very harsh social and political conflict that caused it and threw away the testimony of the repentant Pino Scriva who, revealing a confidence given to him by Giuseppe Pesce, indicated Giuseppe Piromalli (the boss of the bosses of the 'Ndrangheta), the boss who pushed Pesce himself, the 'Ndrangheta boss of Rosarno, to plot the assassination.

Giuseppe Valarioti, an unpunished crime

The rain of public funds on Calabria and the appetites of the 'Ndrangheta

Giuseppe Piromalli was the one who had organized and chaired all the meetings in which government officials or their trustees sat next to the heads of the Calabrian mafia consortiums, with unfaithful servants of the State and businessmen to divide up the billions from the construction of the large port of Gioia Tauro, the Salerno-Reggio Calabria motorway, the doubling of the railway, the Rosarno-Gioiosa Jonica crossroad, the dam on the Metramo, the Limbadi, of the transfer of the inhabited areas and of the major works financed by the Colombus Package and by the extraordinary intervention of the State in the South.

A mountain of billions that transformed the great Calabrian mafia families from guardians and farmers into very rich entrepreneurs. And an army of bodyguards and scoundrels, from beggars with patches on their butts to bosses who drove large-engined cars and furnished their homes with luxury. This happened in the Piana and in Calabria in the seventies and eighties and is all documented in police reports, trials and sentences.

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From the denunciations in the squares to the trial against the bosses

But it also happened that, in the face of the mafia robbery of the money that should have brought work and civilization to our land, a united political movement was born which denounced the robbery in all the squares and popular neighborhoods of the Gioia Tauro plain and ignited a social protest which, in some places, took on the characteristics of a popular insurrection. Processions that shouted anger and contempt at the bosses of the 'ndrangheta and chased colluding or gossiping politicians from the stages of the demonstrations.

Social struggles that contributed to provoking the famous trial against "Di Stefano +59" in the court of Reggio Calabria, in which the testimonies of the communists Mommo Tripodi, Mario Tornatora, Francesco Martorelli, Ninì Sprizzi, Edoardo Macino and the socialist Salvatore Frasca allowed, for the first time in the history of Italy, a conviction of the big bosses of the 'Ndrangheta and, even more disruptive, the request to continue the investigation criminal proceedings against senior officials of the State, the region, and leading Calabrian and national political representatives.

Don Italo Calabrò, pioneer of social anti-mafia

Valarioti killed to hit the PCI and extinguish social struggles

The entry of Giuseppe Piromalli among the suspects in the fatal ambush of Peppe Valarioti would have consequently opened a Pandora's box of perverse plots that generated that great robbery, the enrichment and dizzying growth of the 'Ndrangheta. And he would have in fact linked the assassination to his motive: to attack the PCI, whose struggles and testimonies were decisive for the convictions of the bosses; arouse terror to subdue and extinguish the social struggle; suffocate and extinguish the requests for continuation of the judicial investigation in Reggio Calabria which endangered the great economic and power interests of the 'Ndrangheta and its very high accomplices.

The 'Ndrangheta attempted to subdue that party and extinguish that struggle with very serious acts of intimidation, but received increasingly firm and rigorous responses. A few days before being killed, during the demonstration in response to the mafia attacks, Peppe Valarioti shouted in the central square of Rosarno: "If you think you are intimidating us, you are wrong, the communists will never bend." Not having defeated them with threats and attacks, the mafia leaders decided to resort to ambush and assassination. And, to prevent any testimony about the instigators and motive, they killed Francesco Dominello, the perpetrator of the crime, and Francesco Aquilano, a fugitive from Nicotera (Vibo Valentia). On the body, found very close to the site of the ambush, there was a watch stopped at 11.25am on 11 June, a few hours after the murder of Peppe Valarioti.

These are the facts that link the memory of Peppe Valarioti to one of the highest moments in our national history: the insurrection of the poor people of Calabria, of the olive pickers, of the labourers, of the poor farmers, of the workers, of the young unemployed and of all the honest citizens against that perverse mix of political, business and mafia interests that has marked and still marks the history of the South and of the whole of Italy.