Meridiana. 73-74, 2012. Ecocamorre

«Meridiana», venticinquesimo anno
Gabriella Corona e Rocco Sciarrone

Il paesaggio delle ecocamorre
Gabriella Corona e Rocco Sciarrone

The landscape of ecocamorre
In this article, the authors highlight the factors that determined the rise of certain illegal activities that are especially destructive of the environment and have produced their most conspicuous effects in Campania, and especially in the Provinces of Naples and Caserta. These activities mainly include large-scale illegal housing development and the traffic of both urban and industrial waste, both of which have been going on with special intensity in this region since the 1980s. The growth of this particular interest of criminal organizations finds its explanation both in the characteristics of policies for southern Italy –special policies to promote industry, post-earthquake reconstruction funding, authorizations to derogate from existing urban plans, the failure to modernize the waste disposal cycle – and in the web of alliances that camorra clans have managed to weave in the business world and public institutions, especially municipal administrations. Today there are signs that ecomafias are threatening to spread to other areas in Italy, including the Center and North.

Passato/presente della camorra: dimensione sociale e dimensione politica
Marcella Marmo

Past and Present in camorra’s History: Reflections Upon its Social and Political Dimension

The primary and continuative aspects of the camorra’s history are discussed from the former nineteenth-century organization to the contemporary evolution. The historical analysis focuses on the model of power syndicate settled in the Campania felix between Naples and the rural hinterland. The active culture of the organization Onorata Società is analysed with respect to several components: the fiscal model based on squeezing; the code of honour as criminal élite’s political/military language; the criminal organization segmented both into each quarter and oligopolistic markets; the wide range of social networks (among criminals, within the milieu of poor people, with social élites and police institutions). These strong characters of the nineteenth-century criminal group devoted to squeezing, are compared with today’s camorra, by recent studies which often do not focus the dependence of social and political collusions on primary power of syndicate supremacy.

La questione rifiuti e la camorra
Isaia Sales

The waste disposal question and the camorra
The author analyzes the ways in which criminal organizations, prevalently in southern Italy, have become specialized in crimes producing serious environmental damages. He shows that mafias are not the cause of waste-related problems, but the effect. In the case of urban waste, the penetration of the camorra into the urban waste business is a consequence of the major emergencies Campania faced during the first decade of the 2000s. In the case of toxic waste, instead, the camorra’s involvement has merely met a «demand for illegality» coming from firms operating on the legal market. In the second part of the article, the author reviews the factors that have determined the «success» of camorra organizations, and especially of the Casalesi clan. He also examines the reasons why the Campanian mafias have become the paradigm of ecomafias working in the waste disposal sector.

I crimini contro il territorio. Conversazione con Raffaele Cantone.
A cura di Gabriella Corona e Rocco Sciarrone

Crimes against the environment A conversation with Raffaele Cantone
In this interview, Raffaele Cantone offers some keys to the interpretation of «eco-mafias» and their activities, dwelling especially on the factors that contributed to the concentration of this phenomenon in Campania, and notably in some areas in the Provinces of Naples and Caserta. Local geographical factors, as well as a capacity for criminal innovation and forging political allegiances, have allowed camorra leaders to successfully enter the waste disposal sector, and especially the toxic waste traffic. These factors include some easy road connections, in-depth knowledge of the land afforded by the rural origins of the clans, the clans’ domination of the land transport sector and their experience in the building sector, and the higher profitability of farmland when used illegally as a consequence of the crisis of the agricultural sector caused by international competition. This, however, is not an exclusively southern phenomenon. It is becoming increasingly widespread in some areas in the North of Italy, favored by the slowing down of the southbound traffics. Cantone dwells extensively on the inadequacy of public administrations, pointing out especially the ineffectiveness of their preventive and repressive control. The collusion of the clans with local administration and the weakness of the sanction system play a decisive role in favoring environmentally destructive practices such as uncontrolled building development and illegal waste disposal, which have been prominent in the national and international news over the last few years.

Rifiuti urbani e rifiuti speciali: i fattori strutturali delle ecocamorre
Daniele Fortini

Urban waste and toxic waste: the structural factors of ecocamorre
Italy has a widespread and deeply-rooted fabric of public services, especially in its north-central regions, in spite of a scarcity of industry in the South. Nevertheless, the country’s waste disposal systems still display serious structural deficiencies. The author reviews the modes of penetration of illegal and criminal activities in the disposal cycle of both urban and special waste, as well as the types of environmental damage they produce. Notably, he looks at issues such as the failure of most Italian regions to set up a joint management of urban and special waste, the rise of costs of disposal in landfills as a result of agreements between landfill owners, and between landfill owners and groups of entrepreneurs, etc. The most serious environmental damage caused by waste disposal is the uncontrolled burning of waste in various areas in the Italian peninsula, and especially in certain areas in Campania that have earned the nickname of «Terra dei fuochi» (Land of Fires).

La camorra nella governance del territorio
Vittorio Martone

Waste Management, Public-Private Partnerships and the Stone Guests. The camorra as a Stakeholder in Territorial Governance.
In this essay we analyze the illegalities committed in the management of E.Co.Quattro S.p.A., a joint venture that manages the waste in 20 municipalities in the Province of Caserta from 2000 to 2005. This company is the centre of an interesting system of penetration of organized crime in waste management. Particularly, in public-private partnership the camorra enter directly into the territorial government by setting up a monopoly in environmental services taking control on public spending. In this frame, the aims of the essay are: to reflect on the mechanisms of insertion of the camorra in waste management; to analyze the institutional and regulatory frameworks that facilitate infiltration; to observe the progressive specialization of the camorra in this market; to reconstruct the complex relational network that supports it. Through public-private partnership the «eco-camorra» becomes a stakeholder in the local governance and takes control of basic functions, like planning the land use of urban and rural development. A «governance model» that has devastating consequences on land use, with a proliferation of storage areas and landfills that transform the environmental integrity of large areas.

Camorra e criminalità ambientale in Veneto
Gianni Belloni

Camorra and Environmental Crime in Veneto
The Veneto in northern Italy is an exception: there seem to be present, as opposed to other regions of northern Italy, structured criminal organizations. In fact, criminal organizations are present in the Veneto region for at least a couple of decades, but their modus operandi has been hybridised to the socioeconomic context of the region. The context is characterized by the presence of minorities, the careful protection of the area and other institutions unable to regulate the economy, and by frequent episodes of corruption in public administration. In recent years,the illicit trade waste has seen the leadership of the Veneto traffickers who acted through agreements with traffickers for the illegal disposal of waste. Today the direction of the waste trade is not yet from Veneto to Campania and, simultaneously, the role of organized crime has changed, becoming more nuanced and difficult to identify. The Camorra would pass from waste disposal to the reinvestment of money in companies.

Il pane e la droga. La camorra di provincia tra mercati legali e illegali
Carolina Castellano

Bread and Drugs: The camorra in the Provinces in Legal and Illegal markets
In studies of the Camorra, the simultaneous presence of the legal and the illegal has been analyzed especially in relation to the construction industry, the conquest of which, made possible by the accumulation of capital deriving from drug traffic, would represent an important step in the passage from a predatory to an entrepreneurial character. This leads to an interpretation of the economy of the Camorra where illegal activities (drug trafficking) give way to the legal reinvestment of capital. Thus the food industry is considered secondary. However it is in the food industry that clans from Neapolitan provinces (Naples and Caserta, particularly) have their origins, and where they continue to maintain a stable presence. The article treats this interpretive scheme, analyzing the case of a clan (the Polverinos), from the north of Naples, formed within the Nuvoletta clan that has controlled Marano since the 1970’s, thanks to agreements with the Corleone clan and thanks to the military defence of Cutolo. At present the Polverinos control a wide area that goes from the hill districts of Naples out to the northern areas where it monopolizes bread making and meat products, while controlling the importation of hashish into Southern Italy. This study aims to analyze the family origins of the clan and reconstruct its internal organization, paying close attention to the organization of drug trafficking, and its relations to the other clans. The importance of the commercial matrix of the family thus emerges, falling into line with its strategy of territorial control and the construction of horizontal and confederative ties upon which it has staked its fortune.

L’anticittà della camorra: la condizione disurbana della provincia di Napoli
Agostino Di Lorenzo

Ecocamorre and land manage
The author, who has held important responsibilities in the land and landscape planning sector of the Campania Regional government, uses the concept of «camorra anti-cities» to investigate the urbanization of the hinterland of Naples, mainly from the 1980s until the present day. The broad range of mechanisms driving the illegal building development system have led to the rise of a city model exploiting every available square foot of land and lacking infrastructure and collective spaces and services. This urban reality is the result not only of actual criminal actions, but also of a widespread «culture» of illegality that has penetrated within public institutions and permeates every land management action and plan. At the end of the article, the author shows how, in spite of everything, there is still scope for the implementing of significant regional land planning policies capable of halting and impeding these processes, and improving the still healthy parts of the regional territory by building a metropolitan ecological network as an environmental infrastructure for economic development and job creation.

Un piano per uscire da Gomorra
Antonio di Gennaro

An escape plan from Gomorrah
Over the last years, public debate on the Caserta area has been dominated by outcries over the deterioration and pollution of land, landscape and environment as a result of illegal behavior, unauthorized building and waste traffic. One of the first institutional responses to the issues that have been raised was the land management plan for the province of Caserta, passed in July 2012. This highly innovative plan sets, once and for all, the guidelines for town urban planning, fixing rigid limits as regards land use, the protection of basic resources (water, land, ecosystems, landscapes) and the recovery of deteriorated areas. After synthetically going over the content of this plan, the article examines some specific aspects of its approval process. It concludes with some reflections of the possible effects of the plan, as well as the reactions of public opinion and the media to its passing.

I «confini» della camorra
Luigi Musella

The «Limits» of camorra
The Camorra is not designed solely as a crime. Thus the social scientist cannot refer only to court documents. Social exclusion relates much more on the causes of the phenomenon. This essay, then, uses some stories that show the culture from which it feeds the Camorra of Naples. In particular, if we analyze some cases, the work of social workers, we understand the situation of some neighbourhoods and the vitality of the phenomenon.

La ricerca di Amato Lamberti sulla camorra, in memoria
Luciano Brancaccio

Costruzione identitaria e democrazia locale in Libano
Rosita Di Peri

Identity Construction and «Local Democracy» in Lebanon
The article explores the relationship between identity, politics and«local democracy» in the contemporary Lebanon. Its aim is to analyse the increasing interest of the Lebanese political forces in the local dimension, in order to understand how and to which extent this is a genuine interest or a calculated interest. In the first section the article examines the aspects that, in a historical perspective, affected the construction of the State in Lebanon and had a strong impact in building the Lebanese confessional system, namely the cultural, religious and internationals factors. Those elements played a key role in slowing (and, sometimes, blocking) a process of empowerment from below that would lead to the emergence of a shared civic culture, a crucial element for the realization of a common path towards «local democracy». The second section will outline the «local decision-making process» of Lebanon, its limits and its intrinsic potential. After a short overview on the administrative structure, the article will analyze some recent projects and local dynamics (especially the municipal elections) in order to show how the«local democracy» dimension in Lebanon, despite its progress, is still deeply rooted.

La cliometria e l’unificazione nazionale: bollettino dal fronte
Carlo Ciccarelli e Stefano Fenoaltea

Cliometrics and the Unification of Italy: A Bulletin from the Front
The present is a brief report on the authors’ ongoing quantitative research on the sub-national aspects of the Italian economy over the decades from Unification to the Great War. The initial regional estimates for the census years 1871,1881,1901 and 1911 suggested that the north-western «industrial triangle » emerged over those decades, as factories attracted by the subalpine waterfalls that replaced artisans attracted by their customers in the capitals of the pre-Unification states. The new, finer-grained provincial estimates enrich even more that story. The concentration of factory industry in the subalpine provinces of the northwest is already evident in 1871; industry was subsequently intensified in those self-same provinces, with no significant diffusion to the right bank of the Po river. Over the pre-war upswing, the subalpine provinces languished and Milan boomed, as progress in the transmission of electric power effectively moved the waterfalls from the mountain valleys to the plain; but the fastest industrial growth was registered in Emilia, where land-reclamation led to the cultivation of sugar beet and the construction of refineries. The most novel results concern the earliest decades: the fastest-growing provinces were then almost uniformly southern, apparently because Unification released the local economy from the shackles imposed by the Bourbons’ high tariffs.

La situazione economico-sociale del Mezzogiorno negli anni dell’unificazione
Vera Zamagni

The Economic and Social Conditions of the Italian South at the time of Unification Revisited
This short essay discusses the recent view put forward by some authors according to which there was no per capita income gap between the North and the South of Italy at the time of Unification and therefore economic dualism was born after unification. Three are the arguments developed: first, the soundness of the new numerical estimates of the income gap is disputed, on various grounds; second the relevance of per capita income in the pre- modernization period as an indicator of likelihood of progress is considered very limited. There are other more important indicators to look at: commerce, transports, manufactured goods, finance and, above all, literacy. The third argument is connected to a recent research on the fiscal reforms enacted immediately after unification, which did not produce a levelling of per capita tax payments between North and South. The conclusion reached is that the revision has not proved that the North-South economic and social gap was born after unification.

La favola di una strage
Daniele Giglioli

The tale of a mass murder
The author critically dwells on some formal and thematic aspects of the film Romanzo di una strage by Marco Tullio Giordana. Overall, he finds that the film gives a lukewarm and moderate representation of a historical period that was dominated by cries and rebellion, and thus contrasts strongly with that impassioned period, marked by violence and conflict. The reassuring acting style of the cast, the weak use of color and soft-toned images, and bodies’ almost total lack of materiality appear as a metaphor of a renunciation and mistrust of Politics and participation in History, a metaphor whose dominant component is impotence. But this is how for some time now a significant part of the Italian middle class prefers to depict itself.