«He is the sixth secretary of the Chambers of Labor who, in the space of a few months, was killed in Sicily»
This short but incisive sentence was written by the newspaper Unità on 5 January 1947. Accursio Miraglia was murdered with three gunshots in front of his house. The mafia had silenced him, but the ideas of social justice that he had carried forward and transmitted never died.
Like Miraglia, there are many names of trade unionists killed by the mafia. Giorgio Comparetto, Giuditta Levato, Pio La Torre, Hyso Telaray. Well-known and lesser-known names who, from the nineteenth century to today, have said no to organized crime and to collusion between politics, business and organized crime themselves. The aim of the book Terre e Libertà, produced by Spi Cgil and published by the LiberEtà publishing house, is precisely to tell and make known their stories of innocent victims of heinous crimes that have almost always gone unpunished. Only because they are on the side of legality, truth and the common good. A book, now in its third edition, presented by Tania Scacchetti, national general secretary of Spi Cgil, and by Claudia Carlino, and the national secretary of Spi Cgil, on the occasion of the thirteenth edition of Trame, the Festival of books on mafias.
«We at SPI feel the responsibility of transmitting the memory of these battles on the rights and the stories of these murdered trade unionists to those who perhaps have only read them in newspapers and books. Together we need to rediscover that feeling, the passion of those squares of the past to maintain those hard-won rights but at the same time remembering that these are not taken for granted as we sometimes believe. This is why the SPI has made itself available, with student organizations but not only, to act as a witness and deliver this intergenerational relay of knowledge and memory” stated Carlino.
During the meeting, among others, the recent case of the Indian laborer Satnam Singh was recalled, who aroused indignation when he was abandoned in front of his home without an arm by his farm employer in Latina.
«As a society we should be ashamed of the Satnam Singh affair – said Scacchetti – and of the treatment his wife is undergoing, now temporarily hosted by a member of the CGIL. We, as SPI, have a duty to preserve memory, which means creating awareness of the value of legality and democratic action in a civil society. The SPI must act as a bridge between generations, clearly showing the link between the fight against illegality and the promotion of legality as a fundamental practice for improving the quality of work in our country.”
Furthermore, the figure of Calabrian Giuditta Levato stands out in the debate, also cited in the book and mentioned by Carlino as «an example of a strong and passionate trade unionist not in her words but also in her actions. She fought above all for women’s rights. She was killed because she was inconvenient.”
“Comrade, tell it, tell it to all the leaders, and to the other comrades that I died for them, that I died for everyone. I gave everything to our cause, for the farmers, for our idea; I gave myself, my youth” is her moral testament and the warning addressed to everyone to fight for rights and justice.
