Exploited. Underpaid. Lodged in filthy hovels. Thoroughly thrashed if they protest. Diary of a week in hell. Among foreign labourers in the province of Foggia.
The boss wears a white shirt, black trousers and dusty shoes. He's Apulian, yet his Italian is poor. To make himself understood he asks for assistance from his bodyguard, a Maghrebian that assures him about order and security in the fields. "Listen to this fella: if he looks for work, tell him today we are full up", he says in his dialect and goes away in his SUV. The Maghrebian speaks excellent Italian. He shows no ranks on his wet T-shirt. But you soon get that he's the caporale [En. Corporal. Unlawful recruiter of workers to landlords in Southern Italy. Translator’s note]: "Are you Romanian?" A half smile convinces him. "I can take you on. But tomorrow,” he promises, "have you got a girlfriend?" "A girlfriend?" "You have to bring a girlfriend of yours. For the boss. If you bring one, he takes you on now. Any girl will do."
The caporale hints at a 20-year-old girl and her mate, busy with the rack of a huge tractor for the mechanised harvest of tomatoes: "Those two are Romanians like you. She’s been with the boss." "But I'm alone." "Then no work." There's no limit of shame in the triangle of slaves. The caporale wants a girl for his boss to rape. This is the price of work in the heart of Apulia. A lawless triangle which stretches throughout the entire province of Foggia. From Cerignola to Candela, and upward, towards the north, straight to San Severo. In the progressive region of Nichi Vendola. At half an hour from Gargano's shores. In the land of Giuseppe Di Vittorio, the hero of union struggle and historical secretary of CGIL. Along the road that takes pilgrims to the megashrine of San Giovanni Rotondo. A week infiltrated among the slaves is a journey beyond human prediction.
There are no alternatives, however, for one to have a closer look at the horror that the immigrants have to endure. They are 5,000 or so. Maybe 7,000. Nobody ever made a precise census. All foreigners. All of them paid under the table. Romanians with or without residence permits. Bulgarians. Poles. And Africans. From Nigeria, Niger, Mali, Burkina Faso, Uganda, Senegal, Sudan, Eritrea. Some landed days ago. They left from Libya and came here because they knew that here, in summertime, there's work. It’s unnecessary to patrol the coasts, if businessmen don't give a damn about the law. But in these surroundings they don't give a damn about the Constitution either: articles one, two and three. And of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. To secure their business, farmers and landlords have developed a network of ruthless caporali: Italians, Arabs, Eastern Europeans. They are accommodated along with their labourers in shaky hovels, where not even stray dogs go to sleep anymore. No water, no electricity, no healthiness. They make them work from six a.m. to ten p.m. And they pay them, when they pay, fifteen, twenty euros a day.
Whoever protests is shut up by blows of an iron bar. Some went to the police headquarters in Foggia. And they stumbled across the law requested by Umberto Bossi and Gianfranco Fini: they’ve been arrested and expelled because not in possession of the residence permit. Others run away. The caporali hunted them all night long. As in the manhunt told by Alan Parker in the movie 'Mississippi Burning'. Somebody in the end has been caught. Somebody has been killed. Now it's red golden season: the harvest of tomatoes. The province of Foggia is the reservoir of almost all the plants of production in Salerno, Naples, and Caserta. The perini [a variety of tomatoes. Translator's note] ripened here become canned peeled tomatoes. They become pulped tomatoes. And, the less ripe tomatoes are sold for salads. They leave from the triangle of the slaves and end up on the tables of all of Italy and half of Europe. Then there are the cluster tomatoes for pizza. There are other vegetables, like aubergines and peppers. Next to come will be the grape harvest. The businessmen pretend that they are unaware. And when the harvest is done they queue to get the subsidies from Brussels.
'L'Espresso' checked dozens of fields. None of them are in order with the seasonal labour. But this is not just unfair competition to the European Union. Within these horizons of olive trees and estates the worst crimes against human rights are tolerated.
It doesn't take a lot to get into the filthiest market of rural Europe. Just an invented name that can be used time after time. A photocopy of the expulsion order released one year ago in Lampedusa by the detention centre for immigrants. And a bike to run away as far as possible in case of danger. The caporale who required a girl in sacrifice is checking the harvest of perini in Stornara. One of the first fields on the left just out the town, along the straight and hot road to Stornarella. Better give up. To arrive here you need to bike on the 16th highway and then go for ten kilometres among the olive tress. The villages are little isles of houses in the countryside. At Foggia's station, Mahmoud, 35, from the Ivory Coast, says that here the harvest, maybe, is already on. He, who sleeps in a pit somewhere nearby Lucera, is workless: up there to the north tomatoes are still not yet ripe. So Mahmoud gets by by selling information to the last arrived by train. For a few coins.
Today must be the most torrid day of the summer. 42 degrees, as announced by the headlines at the newsstand of the station. Lost in the fields, a deserted shed looms out of the hot air. It's inhabited. They are resting on an old couch beneath a tree. Some speak Tamashek, they are Tuareg. A greeting in their language helps with the introduction. Racial segregation is severe in the province of Foggia. Romanians sleep with Romanians. Bulgarians with Bulgarians. Africans with Africans. The same goes with the recruitment. The caporali don't allow any exceptions. A white has no chance if he wants to see how the blacks are treated.
You need to borrow a name. Donald Woods. South African. Like the legendary reporter who exposed the horrors of apartheid to the world. "If you are South African you can stay,” says Asserid, 28. He left from Tahoua in Niger in September 2005. He disembarked to Lampedusa on June 2006. He says he's been in Apulia for 5 days. After he's been detained for 40 days in Caltanissetta and finally released with an expulsion order. Asserid crossed the Sahara by foot and on old off-road vehicles. Up to Zuwara, the Libyan city of traffickers and boats setting out to Italy. "In Libya all immigrants know that Italians recruit foreigners for the harvest of tomatoes. That's why I'm here. This is just a leg. I had no alternatives,” Asserid admits: "But I hope to save some money and leave for Paris soon.”
Adama, 40, from Niger, made it the other way round. He landed by plane in Paris, with a tourist visa. Then things went awry. They expelled him from France as an illegal worker. Then he went down to Apulia, for the red golden season. "This is the most northern Tuareg camp in History," chuckles Adama. But there's little to chuckle about. The water they get from the well with recycled jerry cans cannot be drunk. It's polluted with sewage and herbicides. The toilet is a swarm of flies on a pit. To sleep in two on filthy mattresses thrown on the ground, they have to pay 50 euros a month each. And it is a tariff that is already discounted. Because in other hovels the caporali hold up to 5 euros a night. To add to their 50 cents or an euro for hour of work. Plus the 5 euros a day to be taken to the fields. You can soon realise how easy is to earn money for the caporale.
At 2:30 p.m. he arrives in his Golf. And loads it beyond belief with people. "The guy is really African?" he asks the ones in front of the lone white. Nobody can give certain answers. "I pay three euros an hour. Okay with you? If so, come in," bids the man, short pants, vest, and a woman in bikini seen from behind tattooed on his biceps. We start. Nine in the Golf. Three in the front seat. Five in the back. And a boy rolled up like a plush on the trunk. Just for this travel of ten minutes the caporale will cash 40 euros. The boys call him Giovanni. They have already worked from 6 to 12:30. The two hour stop is no courtesy. Today is too hot even for the bosses to forgo the siesta. Giovanni introduces himself soon after, looking through the rear-view mirror: "I John and you?" Then he warns: "John Good if you good. But if you bad..." He doesn't understand English or French. And this is enough to drop the talk. But the scuba knife he keeps well in sight on the dashboard speaks for him.
Amadou, 29, from Filingue, Niger, shows the mood of the young men: "Giovanni, today is Friday and you have not been paying us for three weeks. By now we are running out of our supply of pasta. It's fifteen days we eat only pasta and tomato. The boys are worn-out. They need meat to work.” The three euros promised were just a lie. But Giovanni promises again. When he replies he always says: "We Turks.” Even if the plate of the car is Bulgarian. And his accent might be Russian or Ukraine. "I swear to God,” continues the caporale, "today we have the money and you'll be paid. You have to believe me. I work like you in Stornara. I don't cheat my colleagues." Giovanni lives in the outskirts. A cottage of bricks on the left, halfway up the road to Stornarella. Almost in front of another shaky shed without water, filled with mattresses and slaves.
The overloaded Golf runs and bounces all over the narrow main road to Lavello. The speedometer marks 100 Km an hour. That's mad. At the first farms of the village, Giovanni turns on the right onto a dirt road. Two more kilometres and we arrive. We continue by foot, in single file. The field is between two vineyards. These tomatoes are gathered by hand. When the boss sees the group of Africans, he imitates the cry of monkeys. Then he delivers orders with the insults made famous by deputy chairman of the Senate, Roberto Calderoli: "Come on Bingo Bongo.” At the same time a van unloads nine Romanians. Among them three girls, the only ones in the team. They work with their heads bowed. Who raises his glance is looking for trouble: "What the fuck are you looking at? Down to work," cries the boss coming close threateningly. His name is Leonardo, 30 years old or so.
He's Apulian. He wears Bermuda shorts, a vest and fashionable sunglasses as if he just came back from the beach. From how he speaks it seems he's the owner of the farm. Or maybe he's the son of the owner. He deals with the workers, a kind of commander of the caporali. His farm is about ten kilometres away, at the gates of Stornara. Just down the road Giovanni continues to take the slaves to the field. Leonardo is helped by another Italian, the caporale of the Romanians. One wearing a white T-shirt, long hair and a thin moustache. The third Italian is probably the buyer of the harvest. Thin, short blond hair. A mobile phone is hung over his torso on a golden chain. He speaks with a strong Neapolitan accent. He parks his SUV and soon makes himself heard. Somebody mistakenly put the full cases on the tomato plants.
And he screams like crazy: "The first guy who puts a case on the plants again, I swear to Jesus Christ that I smash his head." The three Italians sweat. But only because it's hot. Besides watching over their slaves, they do absolutely nothing. Giovanni goes to catch other labourers. Then he comes back two times with the supply of water. Four one-litre plastic bottles are supposed to be enough for the throats of 17 thirsty people. Bottles filled God knows where. One has a leak and arrives next to empty. The water smells badly. But it's cool at least. However it's not enough. Two sips of water in more than four hours of work at 40° under the sun doesn't quench the thirst. The majority of the African boys had not even had lunch or breakfast. So they manage eating green tomatoes secretly from the caporali. They don’t think about the fact that they are full of pesticides and poisons. Maybe that's why on the skin, for days, no mosquito sting will show anymore. Leonardo wants to know how come there are whites in Africa. He strolls among the curved backs as a teacher among the desks.
And he gives permission to Mohamed, a 28-year-old man from Guinea. To stop working or to speak you need permission here. Mohamed is well informed on why there are whites in South Africa. He has a degree in political science and international affairs in Algiers University. He speaks Italian, English, French and Arabic. And he answers remaining on his knees, before that Italian who confesses without shame he never heard of Nelson Mandela. "Did you get it?" Leonardo repeats after a while to the other two Italians: "In Italy the light ones are in the north while we in the south are brown. On the contrary in Africa in the south they are white and in the north they are black.” Suddenly the accident happens.
Michele is the oldest of the Romanians. He's about 70 years old, grey hair. He's loading filled cases on the trailer of the tractor. The wood is too thin, and dry. And a case bursts at the bottom dropping twelve kilos of tomatoes. Michele doesn't have time to bend down to gather them. Leonardo, with a clenched fist, hits him. A blow on the head. "Be careful, you twit," he yells, "you believe we are here to wait while you dump the cases?" Michele perhaps apologizes. He's too tired and offended to speak loud. "Fuck the apologies," Leonardo goes on, "you must be more careful.” We all stop to watch. A girl stands up to protest. The man with the Neapolitan accent rushes like hell: "Down, it's nothing. Down or tonight nobody goes home until it's finished.” As if these young men had a home.
Michele begins to load the trailer again helped by other Romanians. But after half an hour he is still sitting on the ground. He holds his head. He's bleeding heavily from the nose. A workmate of his squashes a ripe tomato to freshen his forehead. What he has done is explained to Leonardo by the man with the thin moustache: "I had to smash a stone between his eyes. I had to. That turd was angry with me because you beat him before. And because tonight there is no money to pay them. What have I got to do with it? He got a stone and I took it away from his hands. To think that a shitty Romanian threatened me." Leonardo smiles. The work stops only when the sun goes to hide behind the Dauni mountains. Michele is better. The Romanians rally around their caporale. Giovanni takes a photo of his boys. It is for the pay and if someone runs away. Then he makes them sign the record of the hours worked. Today it's over earlier than usual. The caporale tells Amadou the reason in the car during the return: "There are Carabinieri around."
Giovanni indicates a tomato field along the road: "Look there. This afternoon Carabinieri came in to catch some of my boys. I work here too. Africans like you and Romanians. They took them away to be repatriated. But don't worry, the field you work in,” he says pointing to his shoulder as if to show military stripes, "is controlled by Mafia.” It routinely happens when it is payday. Sometimes the bosses themselves call the vigili [In Italy policemen depending on the city council, as opposed to Police and Carabinieri, that are governmental bodies -- translator's note], the Police or the Carabinieri to point out the presence of immigrants in the countryside. It just takes an anonymous phone call. So the caporali keep their money. And the prefecture updates the data about the expulsions. But Amadou remarks that not even today the boys are being paid: "Are you Muslim?" Giovanni asks: "Yeah? Then I swear to Allah that next time you'll be all paid. And if you need meat be all my guests to my home. Of course next week, when you'll get money to pay for the meat."
On 14 May 1904 not far from here the police attacked a demonstration of labourers. There was the young Giuseppe Di Vittorio too. Among the victims was Antonio Morra, 14, from his early childhood a friend of the future unionist leader. Now the protests are smothered before they can spread. The caporali act as a parallel police. The entrepreneurs turn to them in case of trouble. Beginning with the setting of the rules: "Tomorrow morning I'll come to take you at 5 a.m." says Giovanni after letting off his passengers. It's close to 10 p.m. by now. Estimating a shower managed with the water of the well and a miserable dinner, there are barely 5 hours left to sleep. The African men explain soon the sanctions. Who is late, once on the field is punched. Who doesn't go to work is fined by the caporale. It doesn’t matter if he's ill.
It's twenty euros, practically a day of work for free. 50 kilometres northward, same story. The road map shows Villaggio Amendola. It was an ancient village. Now it's just a ghost town filled with Romanian or Bulgarian immigrants subjugated into slavery. Like the former sugar refinery in Rignano or the Ghetto that at night, to the sound of township music, looks like Soweto. At Villeggio Amendola even the deserted church has been filled with mattresses. Here 100% of the inhabitants are not Italian. All harvesters. And all foreigners. Except one. Giuseppina Lombardo, 51. She comes from Calabria. For the local farmers she's a saintly woman. She and her Tunisian friend known as Asis are able to put together a team of harvesters in less than half an hour. Giuseppina and Asis live with the slaves. The only well in Villaggio Amendola belongs to them.
The water is polluted but they sell it all the same: fifty cents for a 20 litre jug. The only store in the town is theirs too. They have bottles of mineral water, if someone simply does not want to lose a day’s work for dysentery. And they have meat and poultry: “At prices higher than one hundred percent and of dubious quality,” the inhabitants say. It is not easy to infiltrate this ghetto as an immigrant and overcome the fear of its prisoners. Because Asis, like all the caporali, does not forgive those who talk. He and his companion are the only law here. There are some who remember what happened the week of Easter 2005. That afternoon, a Romanian man of 22, just arrived four days before, returned to Villaggio Amendola with his grocery bags. He was in Foggia and walked past the caporale’s shop with the things he had bought. A bottle of oil and a bit of pasta. The witness that speaks to “L’Espresso” is convinced that Asis had considered that gesture a rebellion against his control. The Romanians tell of later seeing two men approach the fresh arrival. One of them, according to the witnesses, is a relative of Asis. They hit him over the head with an iron bar. It was a single blow. Then they dragged his bleeding and half-fainted body into a van. No one in the village had seen that man ever again.
The same thing happened this past 20 July. The day before, Pavel, a 39-year-old man, had an argument with Giuseppina Lombardo. Fifteen euros fell from his pocket when he was in the store and she believed that he had stolen them from the cash register. In Romania Pavel was a cook, earning 150 euros a month. Since 20 March 2004, when he arrived in Apulia, he has had to put up with violence and abuse. He does it so that he can send his earnings to his wife and to his “princess”, his daughter, a 15-year-old student. Pavel has fast arms. Last year he managed to fill up to 15 cases a day: 45 tons of tomatoes, working from dawn right through the night. With the piecework of 3 euros a case, according to him, the pay was good: eliminating the fee of transport to the field and the kickback for the caporale, Pavel managed to earn even 25 or 30 euros a day. But on 20 July Asis prevents him from breaking his record.
Someone told him that Pavel had protested for the matter of the money lost in the shop and for the exploitation of the labourers. The Tunisian hits him while he was sleeping, in a day that he was not at work, at two in the afternoon. Pavel was able to protect his head with his arms. The iron bar broke his bones and opens deep wounds in his flesh. He is certain that the only reason he had not been killed was for the intervention of the other men in the room. But they leave him there to bleed on the mattress until one o’clock in the morning. The other foreigners are afraid of Asis. Even by calling the police they run the risk of being sent back to their countries. At eight o’clock in the evening, someone finally calls the hospital in secret. The ambulance and an escort of Carabinieri arrive at Villaggio Amendola five hours later. This is how the incident unfolded, according to the formal report.
On 31 July Pavel is dismissed from the hospital in Foggia. Only four days before he had been operated on. They give him almost two months of prognosis. Iron clips are put in his bones, his arms are in casts. Doctors and nurses consign him to the police, violating the deontological code. And in the police headquarters they treat him as an illegal alien. Even if on the first of January all the Romanians could be European citizens. With his arms immobilised, Pavel is unable to clutch the pen in his hand. The ‘Head Director Dr. Piera Romagnosi’, putting the stamp on the expulsion order writes that he ‘refused to sign’. Even the prefecture of Foggia makes much of the details: in the expulsion papers it is annotated that Pavel is ‘without a passport’, an aggravating circumstance.
Yet, Pavel does have a passport. In the end, not coming up with an alternative, an inspector gives him ten euros and a car from the police headquarters brings him back to Villaggio Amendola. They drop him off in front of the Giuseppina and Asis’s store. The Tunisian is involved immediately in the situation. He wants to show everyone who is in charge. He threatens Pavel who then goes to hide in a farmhouse a kilometre away from the village. Some of his fellow countrymen secretly bring him bread and something to drink. After nine days of pain and suffering, a Romanian friend manages to contact a lawyer in Foggia, Nicola D’Altilia, former policeman from the north. The lawyer finds the farmhouse, meets Pavel and brings him immediately back to the hospital. The wounds are infected. The Romanian farmhand is in serious condition and malnourished. He is checked-in as a patient for septicaemia. The rest in news of the past few days. On 21 August Pavel is once again dismissed from the hospital. He goes back to the police headquarters to conclude the complaint he was filing against the Tunisian caporale and his Italian accomplice, that he was able to present to the emergency room police only on 14 August.
He is accompanied by the lawyer who had saved him. But after a day in police headquarters, the Public Prosecutor’s Office has Pavel arrested as an illegal alien: he had not respected the expulsion order that, as it was written, obligated him to leave Italy from the Roman airport Fiumicino. It didn’t matter at all if he could not have travelled at all in those conditions. They forced him to sleep on a wooden bench in the security chamber. Despite the operations, the broken bones and the wounds that were still fresh. The next day the hearing was held, immediately postponed to October. Not only had he lost his job, but thanks to the Bossi-Fini law Pavel risks from one to four years of prison. More than his caporale could get, who in the meantime is a free man. “That man,” Pavel says, still terrified, “was aiming at my head. He wanted to kill me.”
Some labourers have already been found dead in these parts. Slavomit R., a Pole, was 44 when he was burnt on 2 July 2005 in a field at Stornara. It is still an unresolved case. Just like those two abandoned cadavers that have never been identified in Foggia. The disappearances are another chapter in the horror. No one knows how many Romanian, Bulgarian or African workers have disappeared. The caporali, when they take them or massacre them with blows don’t even know their names. The only cases that have been discovered are those where the report came from the Polish Embassy. The diplomats of Warsaw had to be very insistent. Since 2005 they are searching for information on thirteen of their citizens. They came here to work as migrant workers in the triangle of slaves, and they never returned home.
The list compiled in August by the Consulate on the search of missing persons does not give much honour to Italy. Out of twelve “requests addressed to the police headquarters of Foggia”, the embassy acknowledged that for nine of these cases there had not been “any response from the police headquarters.” After months of useless waiting, the request was sent to the General Command of the Carabinieri. And, through the investigators of the ROS (Special Operations Team), the Prosecutor’s Office of the Anti-mafia of Bari had finally opened an investigation. No one is investigating at all on the death of an infant. Because what happened is apparently not a crime. The child was born at the end of September. Liliana D., 20, at almost her eighth month of pregnancy, was working among the tomato plants during the week of August Bank Holiday. They make her work in a field near San Severo. No one, not her husband, her caporale or her Italian boss think about protecting her from the sun and the fatigue.
When Liliana feels weak, it is already too late. She has a haemorrhage. She stays for two days without any medical aid in the run down shack she lives in. The slaves of the province of Foggia don’t have a family doctor. On Saturday 18 August in the afternoon, her husband brings her to the hospital of San Severo. The young woman risks death. She is checked-in at reanimation. They decide to make the child be born with a C-Section. But the doctors have heard that his heart is no longer beating. Even he is a collateral victim. A victim of this inhuman race that awards whoever is able to best cut the production costs. The agricultural industry of the region of Campania pays from 4 to 5 cents for each kilo of tomatoes from Apulia. In the street markets of Foggia the perini rise to 60 cents per kilo. In Milan, 1.20 euro for those that are mature and for sauces, and 2.80 euro per kilo for those still unripe.
At the supermarket the canned tomato sauce produced in Campania costs from 86 cents to 1.91 euro per kilo. The peeled tomatoes cost from 1.04 to 3 euros per kilo. Yet in the ghetto of Stornara, not even tonight, with the month almost over is there enough money for a piece of meat. “Donald, please don’t leave,” Amadou says. “Giovanni is very angry with you because you left the group. He’s looking for you, go tell him you’re here.” In the depths of this misery, Amadou already knows on whose side he has to be on. Among the many men forced to their knees, he has chosen the caporali. The moment has come to take the bicycle and flee. In the dark, before Giovanni decides to call his henchmen. And before they start the chase in the fields.
Fabrizio Gatti
Foggia, 1 September 2006
From "L'Espresso" - 1 September 2006
Also in Tlaxcala: 
Translated from Italian by Gianluca Bifolchi and Mary Rizzo, members of Tlaxcala (www.tlaxcala.es), the network of translators for linguistic diversity. This translation is on Copyleft.
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