Italy sends troops to 'Triangle of Death' to fight polluters

[Emily]

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/italian-troops-sent-into-naples-triangle-of-death-to-stop-mafia-wars-over-illegal-waste-disposal-9231115.html

Italian troops sent into Naples' 'Triangle of Death' to stop mafia wars over illegal waste disposal
Michael Day Author Biography
Rome Tuesday 01 April 2014

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The Italian authorities have a history of sending in the troops to the south of the country after flares in mafia activity. But Massimiliano Manfredi, a Naples-born MP for the Democratic Party and a member of the parliamentary Anti-Mafia Commission, said that rooting out the corrupt officials who helped the mafia was more effective then sending in the troops. ?You don?t just fight the Camorra with the army. Its real strength stems from the fact that it?s embedded in the public administration,? he told The Independent. ?Rather than the military, we need strong controls on public procurement and to insist on the renewal of the ruling class to break the continuity between political power and organised crime. So we need a show of strength, but also to clean out politics where it?s contaminated.?

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/30/world/europe/beneath-southern-italy-a-deadly-mob-legacy.html?_r=0

A Mafia Legacy Taints the Earth in Southern Italy

By JIM YARDLEYJAN. 29, 2014

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Two jailed mafia informants had identified the field as one of the secret sites where the Camorra had buried toxic waste, near a region north of Naples known as the Triangle of Death because of the emergence of clusters of cancer cases. One environmental group estimates that 10 million tons of toxic garbage has been illegally buried here since the early 1990s, earning billions of dollars for the mafia even as toxic substances leached into the soil and the water table.

While the dumping has been widely documented, the trash crisis has only worsened, as the parallel problem of the illegal burning of toxic waste has brought the region another nickname, the Land of Fires. With new revelations fueling public outrage, the question is whether the Italian government will confront the Camorra and clean up the mess ? and whether the mess can be cleaned up at all.

?The environment here is poisoned,? said Dr. Alfredo Mazza, a cardiologist who documented an alarming rise in local cancer cases in a 2004 study published in the British medical journal The Lancet. ?It?s impossible to clean it all up. The area is too vast.?

He added, ?We?re living on top of a bomb.?...

 

[Giuseppe]

Re: Italy sends troops to 'Triangle of Death' to fight polluters

The story of the Army who should 'help' to trace and protect fomer agricultural sites from illicit toxic waste disposal is not new.

Recently, a judiciary investigation revealed that during the 2008 legislature, with the Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, several militarized illicit dump sites were notwithstanding regularly used by criminal organizations (Camorra, the regional Maffia version in Campania Region), protected from independent journalists' eyes by the do-not-crossing fences!

It was known since 1998 that several areas in the Campania Region and elsewhere in Italy were filled with very toxic waste from Northern part of paeninsula industrial companies, eager to dispose them at very low cost with the help of criminal syndicates.

A testimony by a former Camorra boss was filed 'confidential' after an hearing at a Parliamentary Commission, and remained secret until late 2013.

The boss told to MPs that ''the Triangle of Death dwellers will surely all die in twenty years, as we dumped a mess there''.

For more information, see, for example the recent book written by Enrico Deaglio, ''Indagine sul Ventennio'' ('Enquiry on the Mr Berlusconi era''), Giangiacomo Feltrinelli Editore, Milano, first edition: March 2014, ISBN: 9788807172762.

GM