Telmo Pievani is a full professor at the Department of Biology of the University of Padua. After graduating in philosophy of science from the University of Milan, he specialized in the United States of America, where he conducted doctoral and post-doctoral research in Evolutionary Biology and Philosophy of Biology, under the supervision of Niles Eldredge and Ian Tattersall at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. His research and arguments are always a precious source of inspiration for me. And for the many, many people who follow him on social media. On "Lucy sui mondi" https://lucysuimondi.com/ , a "multimedia magazine that deals with real or possible worlds with words and knowledge from all continents", you can access his videos. This is scientific counter-information and therefore, in the time of fake news as a tool of power, absolutely political. The scorching heat that is suffocating Europe reminded me of one of his videos on Greenland. There has been a lot of talk about Greenland because of Trump's follies. Since "every cloud has a silver lining", at least now we know that Greenland exists!

In his video Pievani, first of all, talks about a recent study on the climate, starting from the assumption that it is useful to know where Greenland is located. We are talking about the Arctic.

The Arctic is warming at a rate 2-4 times faster than the global average. A huge amount. This phenomenon is called "Arctic amplification". The cause of this surge is the emission of greenhouse gases induced by humanity.

What does this warming produce? A great loss of ice. And therefore an enormous spill of fresh water into the Atlantic, interfering with the Gulf Stream, which as we know is fundamental for the European climate.

Side note: Oh Cyclone Harry that devastated Sicily a few months ago, causing two billion in damages, why does no one talk about you? Do they think you are nobody's child?

But let me get back to Telmo Pievani's video.

From 1992 to 2020 in Greenland 6500 BILLION tons of ice were lost! Add the five years missing from the super accurate study that was done, and you can realize the immense quantity we are talking about.

A warming trend has been found a few times over time, for example in the 1600s, but it lasted a short time. From 1650 to 1660 precisely. In any case, summer temperatures from 2000 to 2010, therefore our time, were significantly higher than those of all the previous centuries taken into consideration, that is 5. Higher by 1.5°C.

In the last 500 years therefore, half a millennium, the global warming of Greenland in our century is unprecedented.

Climate deniers, now one and the same with the white supremacists of whom Trump is the leading exponent, say that it is called "Greenland" that is "Green Land", because it is not true that it has always been largely covered by ice, but instead it was covered by forests, a green land originally, and therefore there would be no global warming phenomenon, but only a return to the normal state after a long period of "cooling".

This is one of the many pieces of nonsense that serve the narrative interested in the private accumulation of common goods, like the famous "rare earths", or the usual oil, to be transformed into wealth, money and power of the new oligarchs who dominate the West and the world.

History says quite the opposite.

When "Erik the Red", Norse chieftain and explorer, arrived there in 982, he called it that because it was summer, he landed in southern Greenland and arrived there in one of the warm sub-periods that result precisely from scientific studies on climate history.

But it is the third reason for the choice of the name that appears to me even more interesting: marketing!

Erik used an attractive name, Green Land, to attract colonists to that land so inhospitable.

Side note 2: how can one not think of the marketing on Gaza - a stretch of land 40 kilometers by 12, today composed of a single expanse of rubble under which lie thousands of dead - which in Davos had its highest point, with brochures and slides of seafront skyscrapers? Is "necro-marketing" a new market discipline?

But let's get back to Erik.

The colonists attracted by the promotion of the "Green Land" put in place by Erik the Red, stayed there only 4 centuries: too difficult were the living conditions, too cold, too extreme everything. A hostile environment, despite the marketing.

These things naturally, beyond what they tell us subjects, Trump, the Russians and the Chinese know very well.

They know that the Arctic will become navigable. They know that in a few years or decades Greenland will begin to be covered by boreal forests, and therefore that the resources it contains will be much easier to plunder.

"Erik the Red" today gives way to "Donald the Orange", who has a little more means and power.

The history of the climate, thanks to its scientific reconstruction, brings rarities to the surface, as the melting Greenland ice does: 1816 was globally "the year without a summer": also known as the year of poverty during which severe anomalies in the summer climate destroyed crops in northern Europe, in the north-east of the United States and in eastern Canada. Historian John D. Post has called it "the last great subsistence crisis in the Western world".

This disaster was caused by the eruption of the Tambora volcano on the island of Sumbawa in present-day Indonesia (then the Dutch East Indies), which occurred from April 5 to 15, 1815, an eruption that injected colossal amounts of volcanic ash into the upper layers of the atmosphere, causing a global lowering of temperature and a sudden climate change. Shut in a hotel in Geneva because of continuous rain, cold and damp, in that spectral and dark summer that seemed like the end of the world, Mary Shelley wrote "Frankenstein".

The epilogue of the novel as we know, unfolds through Victor Frankenstein's chase to capture and kill the Creature, that is the abomination to which he himself gave life. The hunt lasts for months, amidst cold and frost, until the two reach the North Pole, a destination then never discovered by man, where the monster, revealing itself to be stronger, resists the frost of the place, unlike the scientist. Victor dies of hardship. A funeral pyre is set up but during the funeral rites the ice begins to melt. The funeral pyre drifts away, a sad metaphor for human misery. Cold, frost, sick ambition, a race to see who is more monstrous than the other: but has Donald the Orange read Frankenstein?

Here is the full speech by Mark Carney in Davos [thanks to Luca Celada for the tip]

"It seems that every day we are reminded that we live in an era of great rivalry between powers, that the rules-based order is fading, that the strong can do what they want and the weak must suffer what they must.

And this aphorism of Thucydides is presented as inevitable, as the natural logic of international relations reasserting itself. And in the face of this logic, there is a strong tendency for countries to go along with it, to adapt, to avoid trouble, to hope that conformity will guarantee security.

Well, it will not. So what are our options?

In 1978, the Czech dissident Václav Havel, who later became president, wrote an essay entitled 'The Power of the Powerless,' in which he posed a simple question: how did the communist system sustain itself? And his answer began with a greengrocer. Every morning, the shopkeeper would put a sign in his shop window: 'Workers of all countries, unite!' He didn't believe it. No one did. But he puts up the sign anyway to avoid trouble, to signal his conformity, to get along. And because every shopkeeper on every street does the same, the system persists, not only through violence, but also through the participation of ordinary people in rituals that they privately know to be false. Havel called this way of living 'living within a lie.' The power of the system does not derive from its truth, but from everyone's willingness to behave as if it were true. And its fragility derives from the same source. When even one person stops behaving like that, when the greengrocer takes down his sign, the illusion begins to crack.

Friends, it is time for companies and countries to take down their signs.

For decades, countries like Canada have prospered under what we have called the international rules-based order. We have joined its institutions, we have praised its principles, we have benefited from its predictability. And thanks to that, we have been able to pursue value-based foreign policies under its protection. We knew that the history of the rules-based international order was partly false, that the strongest would exempt themselves when convenient, that trade rules were applied asymmetrically, and we knew that international law was applied with varying rigor, depending on the identity of the defendant or the victim.

This fiction was useful and American hegemony, in particular, helped provide public goods, open sea routes, a stable financial system, collective security and support for dispute resolution mechanisms.

So we put the sign in the window. We participated in the rituals and we largely avoided pointing out the gap between rhetoric and reality.

This pact no longer works.

I will be direct. We are in the middle of a rupture, not a transition.

In the last two decades, a series of financial, health, energy and geopolitical crises has laid bare the risks of extreme global integration. But more recently, the great powers have begun to use economic integration as a weapon, tariffs as leverage, financial infrastructure as a means of coercion and supply chains as vulnerabilities to be exploited. The multilateral institutions on which middle powers have relied - the WTO, the UN, the COP, the very architecture of collective problem-solving - are threatened. As a result, many countries are coming to the same conclusion: they must develop greater strategic autonomy in energy, food, critical minerals, finance and supply chains. And this impulse is understandable. A country that is unable to feed itself, fuel itself or defend itself has few options. When the rules no longer protect you, you must protect yourself.

But let us be clear about where this will lead. A world of fortresses will be poorer, more fragile and less sustainable. And there is another truth: if the great powers abandon even the fiction of rules and values to pursue their own power and interests unhindered, the benefits of transactionalism will become more difficult to replicate. Hegemonic powers cannot continue to monetize their relationships. Allies will diversify to protect themselves from uncertainty. They will buy insurance, increase options to rebuild sovereignty, a sovereignty that was once founded on rules but will increasingly be anchored in the ability to withstand pressure.

In this room we know that this is classic risk management. Risk management has a price, but the cost of strategic autonomy, of sovereignty, can also be shared. Collective investments in resilience are less expensive than building individual fortresses. Shared standards reduce fragmentation. Complementarities are a positive sum. The question for middle powers like Canada is not whether to adapt to the new reality: we must.

The question is whether we adapt simply by building higher walls or whether we can do something more ambitious.

Canada was among the first to hear the alarm bell, which led us to radically change our strategic position. Canadians know that our old reassuring beliefs, that our geography and our alliances automatically guaranteed us prosperity and security, are no longer valid. Our new approach is based on what Alexander Stubb, president of Finland, has defined as 'values-based realism.'

In other words, we aim to be both pragmatic and faithful to our principles. Bound to principles in our commitment to fundamental values, sovereignty, territorial integrity, the prohibition of the use of force except in accordance with the United Nations Charter and respect for human rights.

And pragmatic in recognizing that progress is often gradual, that interests diverge, that not all partners will share all our values.

So we are engaging broadly, strategically and with our eyes wide open. We are actively confronting the world as it is, without waiting for it to become as we would like it to be.

We are calibrating our relationships so that their depth reflects our values and we are prioritizing broad engagement to maximize our influence, given the fluidity of the world at this moment, the risks it entails and what is at stake for the future.

And we no longer rely only on the strength of our values, but also on the value of our strength.

We are building this strength within our own country. Since my government took office, we have reduced taxes on income, capital gains and business investment. We have eliminated all federal barriers to interprovincial trade. We are accelerating $1 trillion in investments in energy, artificial intelligence, critical minerals, new trade corridors and more. By the end of this decade we will double our defense spending, and we will do so in a way that strengthens our national industries. And we are rapidly diversifying abroad.

We have agreed on a comprehensive strategic partnership with the EU, which includes joining SAFE, the European agreement on procurement in the defense sector. We have signed 12 other trade and security agreements on four continents in six months.

In recent days we have concluded new strategic partnerships with China and Qatar. We are negotiating free trade agreements with India, ASEAN, Thailand, the Philippines and Mercosur.

We are also doing something else: to help solve global problems, we are pursuing a variable geometry. In other words, different coalitions for different issues based on common values and interests.

So, as far as Ukraine is concerned, we are a key member of the Coalition of the Willing and one of the largest per capita contributors to its defense and security.

As for Arctic sovereignty, we stand firmly with Greenland and Denmark and fully support their unique right to determine the future of Greenland. Our commitment to Article 5 of NATO is unwavering, so we are working with our NATO allies, including the eight Nordic-Baltic, to further secure the northern and western flanks of the alliance, including through unprecedented investments by Canada in over-the-horizon radar, submarines, aircraft and troops on the ground, that is, troops on the ice.

Canada firmly opposes tariffs on Greenland and calls for targeted negotiations to achieve our common goals of security and prosperity in the Arctic.

As for plurilateral trade, we are promoting efforts to build a bridge between the Trans-Pacific Partnership and the European Union, which would create a new trade bloc of 1.5 billion people in the critical minerals sector.

We are forming buyers' clubs anchored in the G7 so that the world can diversify its supply, avoiding concentration of supply. And as for artificial intelligence, we are cooperating with democracies that share our vision to ensure that in the end we will not be forced to choose between hegemons and hyperscalers.

This is not naive multilateralism, nor is it relying on their institutions. It is about building coalitions that work on specific issues with partners who share enough common ground to act together. In some cases, it will be the vast majority of nations. What is being created is a dense network of connections between trade, investment and culture, on which we can draw for future challenges and opportunities.

Our view is that middle powers must act together because, if we are not at the negotiating table, we will end up on the menu.

But I would also say that the great powers can afford, for now, to act alone. They have the market size, the military capability and the power necessary to dictate the conditions. Middle powers do not. But when we negotiate only bilaterally with a hegemon, we negotiate from a position of weakness. We accept what we are offered. We compete with each other to be the most accommodating.

This is not sovereignty. It is the exercise of sovereignty by accepting subordination.

In a world of rivalry between great powers, intermediate countries have a choice: compete with each other for favors or join together to create a third way with impact. We should not allow the rise of strongman power to prevent us from seeing that the power of legitimacy, integrity and rules will remain strong if we choose to exercise it together.

Which brings me back to Havel. What does it mean for middle powers to live in truth?

First, it means calling reality by its name. Stop invoking an international rules-based order as if it still worked as advertised. Call it what it is: a system that intensifies rivalry between great powers, in which the most powerful pursue their own interests using economic integration as a means of coercion.

It means acting consistently, applying the same standards to allies and rivals. When middle powers criticize economic intimidation from one side but remain silent when it comes from the other, we are keeping the sign in the window.

It means building what we say we believe in, rather than waiting for the old order to be restored. It means creating institutions and agreements that work as described and it means reducing the leverage that allows coercion.

This means building a strong domestic economy. That should be the immediate priority of every government.

And diversification internationally is not just economic prudence, it is a material basis for an honest foreign policy, because countries earn the right to take principled positions by reducing their vulnerability to retaliation.

So, Canada. Canada has what the world wants. We are an energy superpower. We possess vast reserves of critical minerals. We have the most educated population in the world. Our pension funds are among the largest and most sophisticated investors in the world. In other words, we have talent capital. We also have a government with immense fiscal capacity to act decisively.

And we have the values that many others aspire to.

Canada is a pluralistic society that works. Our public square is noisy, diverse and free. Canadians remain committed to sustainability. We are a stable and reliable partner in a world that is anything but, a partner that builds and values long-term relationships.

And we also have something else: we have awareness of what is happening and the determination to act accordingly. We understand that this rupture requires more than just adaptation. It requires honesty about the world as it is.

We are taking the sign out of the window.

We know that the old order will not return. We should not mourn it. Nostalgia is not a strategy, but we believe that from the fracture we can build something bigger, better, stronger, more just. This is the task of the middle powers, the countries that have the most to lose from a world of fortresses and the most to gain from genuine cooperation.

The powerful have their power. But we also have something: the ability to stop pretending, to call things by their name, to build our strength at home and to act together.

This is Canada's way. We choose it openly and with confidence, and it is a path open to any country willing to walk it with us."

"Thank you very much."

Of the three B-29s, the one carrying the bomb was the one piloted by Paul Tibbets, thirty years old, married for seven years to a Lucy Wingate, two children. The bomb was Little Boy. Tibbets was considered the best pilot in the United States. His mother's name was Enola Gay Haggard. Tibbets had named the plane 'Enola Gay'.

When he reached Hiroshima, Tibbets ordered the bombardier, Major Thomas Ferebee, to proceed ('it's yours'). Ferebee moved into the transparent nose of the aircraft, in front of and lower than the pilots. From there he could see well what was below. He pressed his forehead against the Norden bombsight, entered the wind speed and altitude, aligned the crosshairs of the sight on the Aioi Bridge, pressed the release button. The bridge was in the center of Hiroshima, a strange T-shaped bridge. Little Boy weighed four tons. The B-29, suddenly lighter, jolted upward. Tibbets executed an extremely tight one-hundred-and-fifty-five-degree turn, to take the B-29 as far away as possible. The cloud produced by the bomb would have otherwise hit them too. They had forty-three seconds.

Inside the bomb there was a steel barrel one meter and eighty centimeters long. At one end of the barrel was the block of uranium-235, behind which some ordinary gunpowder had been placed. At the other end a second block of uranium-235. At five hundred and eighty meters of altitude an altimetric sensor gave the impulse. The gunpowder exploded, the first block shot against the second block. It was 8:15 in the morning.

The explosion was a half dud. The kilos of uranium in the bomb were sixty-four. Of these, less than one kilo was transformed into energy. All the rest was disintegrated by the explosion. That one kilo was enough.

On the ground seventy thousand human beings were instantly vaporized. Of those seventy thousand human beings some left testimony of themselves in the form of black silhouettes on the walls. Another seventy thousand human beings died in the following days from radiation."

…"There you have your homes like the nests of water birds in some way. For now it appears as mainland, now as islands, so that you would think they are the Cyclades, where the appearance of the places is seen to suddenly change.

In a similar way, the dwellings appear scattered across the sea over very wide expanses, and they are not the work of nature, but of the care of men.

For in those places the consistency of the soil is made more solid by interweaving flexible branches and they do not hesitate to oppose this fragile defense to the waves of the sea; this, evidently, when the shallow shore fails to repel the force of the waves, and these remain without strength because they are not supported by the help of depth.

Thus there is only one thing in abundance for the inhabitants, who feed themselves solely on fish. There poverty lives together with wealth in the same way. A single food nourishes all, similar houses shelter all.

They know no envy for their house and in this way he who has less avoids the vice to which the world is known to be subject.

All your effort is devoted to the production of salt: you turn the rollers instead of the plough and the scythes: from this comes all your profit since in this you also possess the things you do not have. There, in a way, a coin is minted that allows you to live. Every wave is at the service of your craft. Someone may perhaps not seek gold, but there is no one who does not desire to have salt, and rightly so, since every food that tastes good owes it to this.

Therefore diligently repair the boats which you keep tied to the walls of your houses like animals..."

Amid all this heated debate over Ceuta, what strikes me is the utter indifference toward the dead and the suffering of other human beings. Coming from the fascist-like right represented by Musk—a hideous mask of what a man can become—this is no surprise. But a general desensitization to death affects us all. It is the product of a “functional anthropological mutation.” Death and the pain of others should no longer affect us. We’ll only feel our own when it comes. But perhaps not, because we’ll already be dead while still alive, like Musk’s zombies.

As the death toll continues to rise relentlessly—“the body count,” as LA ICE-T rapped forty years ago—the mosaic of accounts regarding what happened in Ceuta is taking shape. No one will speak their names, those of the sixty or one hundred who died in that stretch of sea where the waters of the Atlantic mix with those of the Mediterranean.

According to the prevailing theory, it therefore appears to have been one of the most unscrupulous “hybrid war” operations conducted by Morocco against Spain, and the motives could range from retaliation for the ties between Sánchez and Algeria to other, “geopolitically” larger issues—from Spain’s stance on Gaza to its position within NATO, which opposes the handful of tyrants who hold Europe and the West in their grip.

Other analyses, however, point to what happened as the result of intense, cyclical pressure exerted by thousands of poor people—from Morocco and Algeria, many of them very young but also entire families—on the border crossings leading to the Spanish enclave in North Africa. Witnesses report that amid curses against poverty in Morocco and shouts of joy (“Gracias” and “Viva España”), a kilometers-long procession made its way from Fnideq and the surrounding mountains toward Ceuta.

In Fnideq, Ceuta’s Moroccan sister city, the procession—during the night of July 30–31—clashed with police, military personnel, water cannons, and units firing tear gas. The Moroccan deportation buses—which, as in previous days, were ready to transport intercepted migrants to Western Sahara to abandon them there without food, cell phones, or money—were set ablaze. Many fled to the nearby mountains, then continued from there toward Ceuta.

The two accounts—one that attributes the events to the deliberate use of migrants as a tool for attack and political negotiation between states, and the other that instead attributes what happened to subjective factors, the result of difficult living conditions in Morocco for populations in rural areas, and a migrant population originating from neighboring Algeria but also including sub-Saharan migrants in transit—seem to be in direct contrast to one another, but in reality, they are not. Both can be true.

No “hybrid warfare” operation of this kind would be possible without the genuine will—whether desperate or conscious—of tens of thousands of real, flesh-and-blood people; moreover, the exploitation of this will by states is nothing new. On the other hand, it is highly unlikely that 60,000 people could reach one of the most heavily guarded places in the world within 24 hours. In 2022, neither the Moroccan armed forces nor the Civil Guard had any qualms about opening fire on 10,000 people, killing 27 of them.

There are also three aspects worth highlighting:

1. Sánchez spoke of “trafficking mafias.” But it is now crystal clear that the biggest human traffickers are the authorities of the states with which both the Spanish and Italian governments—and the entire European Union—have entered into “contracts.” They have accustomed these authorities to the mechanism of money in exchange for the detention—whether in concentration camps or through elimination by killing or deportation into the desert—of women, men, and children who must not reach European shores. But whoever enters into this type of contract with the largest human traffickers in the Mediterranean is, in turn, a major trafficker.

2. The embarrassing blunder of our own homegrown fascist supremacists—who didn’t know that Ceuta is in Morocco and not in Spain, sealed by the ridiculous suspension of the Schengen Agreement decreed by the mother of all MAGAs—reminds us, however, that there are two Spanish enclaves on Moroccan soil, a legacy of the colonial era. Shouldn’t they be returned to Morocco?

3. Looking at the social makeup of Ceuta’s Mediterranean population, the diversity stands out: the poor, but not only them. Families, but not only them. Migrants who have traveled halfway across Africa, but not only them. Many very young people from Morocco, for example, who were likely key figures months ago in that “Generation Z” movement demanding more democracy, more welfare, fewer weapons, and less spending on the king’s prestige. They are our “No King” neighbors. Do we recognize them?

Ceuta perhaps helps us break with “traditions”: those of the usual propagandistic narrative of power, but also our own traditions as we fight against it. Ceuta is not just poverty, flight from war, and misery. It is also the assertion of new generations inhabiting the Mediterranean. If it is not to be a mass grave—as “the Europe that isn’t there” condemns it to be—then it becomes, once again in history, the generative epicenter of a new idea of Europe: one that is neither a subsystem of a new, Magi-inspired, neo-Nazi West, nor a subsystem of a new Middle East squeezed between the Saudi petro-monarchies and the Islamic fundamentalism of the Ayatollahs. Those young people in Ceuta are offering us a new alliance of meaning, free from traditions, one capable of daring to dream of a free Europe and a Mediterranean full of life—not death and barbed wire.

When established narratives and traditions break down, for a while we enter a storm of meanings and signifiers. Of multiple realities. Of contradictions that seem to take over like high waves crashing over the bow. For now, we need a compass: no one should have to die just to move forward. No one should be deported and locked up in a camp like in Libya. No one. And this is the struggle we must wage immediately. To walk while asking questions.

Ceuta, a Spanish enclave facing the Strait of Gibraltar from the Moroccan shore, is a small strip of border territory. So is Melilla. A comparison can be made with Lampedusa, even though in these cases we are not talking about islands surrounded by sea on every side. But the effect provoked by a mass of thousands of people pouring all at once into these small spaces is the distorted effect of a biblical exodus. Which does not exist. The numbers tell us, according to IOM data, that arrivals by sea and by land in Europe this year have decreased by 40%. The Lampedusa effect distracts from the fact that these crises are cyclical and involve numbers that do not differ much, if not by decreasing, year after year. As of July 26, 2,900 people had entered Ceuta.

They represent 18% of arrivals in Spain by sea and by land, excluding the Canary route.

Obviously, the objective condition in the immediate term would require intervention of assistance and safeguarding of human life: something that cannot be ensured given, for example, the capacity of the CETI, a hotspot like that of Lampedusa, which has a capacity of 500 places. The rapid transfer to other places in Spain is imperative not only to guarantee everyone the ability to exercise their right to seek asylum, but also to avoid situations of very serious violation of human rights which should, always, be at the center of any crisis management strategy, at sea as on land.

For Italy it is certainly not like that: the request for suspension of Schengen, for which the Italian ambassador in Spain was immediately summoned by the Iberian government, is instead part of a strategy of speculative use of the situation, to feed the imaginary of the invasion, which does not exist, and to attack the Spanish government over the regularization of migrant workers enacted just a few months ago. Jackals, as we know, feed on carrion, but those that belong to the animal kingdom in doing so perform an act of cleansing that is healthy for everyone. Jackals that belong instead to the kingdom of politics feed on carrion but increase the moral filth that surrounds us.

The jackal-like exploitation in the propagandistic use of situations, often tragic and with a toll of innocent dead involving migrant people, is a constant that concerns both shores: about Libya and Tunisia we know everything, about Morocco much less. But there are those who say that this sudden yielding of the Moroccan police forces in letting themselves be passed by a few thousand human beings, who opened the way for a 20,000-person march 5 km long towards Ceuta, is linked to a political friction with the Sanchez government, and in particular to the visit to Algeria. But how can we not consider the fact that relations between the American administration and the Moroccan monarchy are excellent: lately the Spanish government has not "behaved well" with the master-father from across the Atlantic, and we are not talking about the slap of the World Cup, but about Israel and Iran. Jackals also inhabit geopolitics.

There is no "invasion", but of course, precisely in the days of the celebrations of the 27th year of the King's ascension to the throne, designed to consecrate the new course of a "modern, enlightened and free-market monarchy", this event happens. From this point of view too, a singular coincidence. Could it be that there are internal enemies of King Mohammed VI who wanted to ruin the party?

In any case, jackals of every stripe aside, what must most interest those who see the human being and not the "clandestine" (an adjective invented and used indiscriminately by those who produce clandestinity), is the subjective and collective willingness to measure oneself against the enterprise of breaking the forced confinement. A condition, "Harraga", that concerns millions of people in the world and is global. In the case of the multitude of Ceuta it concerns the Mediterranean: a historical, political, cultural, religious space, artificially wounded by the deadly policies of the border regime. The struggle is not between those who think of a Mediterranean without borders and one with borders. But about porosity, about the right to mobility and crossing, about the claim to the usability of the Mediterranean for all its inhabitants and not only for a part. It would be a mistake to think of a homogeneity of condition of the Mediterranean multitude in movement. There are families who exercise the right to be able to treat their sick children, others to seek better places to work. There is a multitude of young people from that "Generation Z" that mobilized last autumn in Morocco, to ask for more resources for education and health, more welfare and less warfare. Harshly repressed by the police apparatuses, as in "tout le monde".

There are those who set out on the road arriving from other neighboring countries, like Algeria, where the situation, including the economic one, is certainly not that of a rising Morocco. All of these different neighbors of ours, inhabitants like us of the Mediterranean, have a passport that does not guarantee them the ability to move and travel in the Mediterranean, or they don't have one at all. The visa device does not apply in the same way to the inhabitants of the Mediterranean.

In 2024 (most recent available data) 80,000 young people emigrated from Italy. If they had all done it together heading for Ventimiglia to cross into France, anyone would have spoken of an invasion and a biblical exodus. But it doesn't happen, because their passport, or identity card, allows them to move. From 2011 to 2024, 630,000 young Italians have left elsewhere, most of them in Europe.

The Mediterranean multitude of Ceuta reminds us that if rights are only for some and not for all, they are called privileges. And against a system of privileges, organized to increase and not decrease inequalities in this world, it is right to fight.

Welcome, protection, care for the Mediterranean multitudes. No to the violence of the confinement regime. No to the organization of the exploitation of the workforce by means of illegalization.

A thought for the innocent dead of Ceuta, sons and daughters of the Mediterranean. Like us.

Every year Sicily burns. One can't help but wonder how this recurring and infernal condemnation can be considered, every year, an emergency. And how one can, every year, be caught by surprise, never have sufficient forces and means, blame every time the lack of maintenance work on the territory, and so on. This year, with extremely high temperatures announced well in advance, it all really sounds like a farce, the one that follows the tragedy already staged with numerous reruns. Not even the sirens sounding incessantly, day and night, are a novelty in Palermo. And you can't tell those of the armored cars from those of the ambulances, or the firefighters. But even within a habitual emergency, with its sirens, the acrid smoke that hovers spreading dioxins from the burning landfill of Bellolampo, events happen that still shock: the lady who died inside the elevator blocked by the blackout caused by the fires and the heat, the people who died burned and asphyxiated in their own homes, surrounded by flames that no one could put out in time. And the destruction of the Church of Santa Maria di Gesù, with its seven hundred years of history, so dear to the people of Palermo. It is the church of the "Black Saint", Saint Benedict the Moor, one of the "minor" patrons of the city, which has just renewed for the 399th time its devotion, last July 14th, to the "Santuzza", Saint Rosalia, undisputed lady of the Panormite faith. But the fact that this time the relics, guarded with great care by the Franciscan friars since 1589, of the Black Saint, have burned, has made the many who rushed as soon as the news spread weep and despair. The smoke from the fires after a while thins out, pushed by the sirocco wind that turns to libeccio, the fire that besieges the city from the mountains sooner or later calms down, but when will the sense of ill omen for having let a saint burn go away? You immediately want to go under the large mural of Saint Benedict, commissioned by Mediterraneo Antirazzista and painted by the artist Igor Scalisi Palminteri, in Ballarò. And to look for that story of the "slave saint", which a professor at the University, Giovanna Fiume, has written about. Under the mural and with her pages scrolling, perhaps the sense of guilt for this outrage to the saint, may diminish. Saint Benedict the Moor, however, is used to insults and offenses. Because he, and this makes the popular devotion that literally raised him to the altars of sainthood even more extraordinary, was a slave. And black, Ethiopian like Saint Anthony. A slave, son of slaves. "O scavuzzu" for the people, who softened with the diminutive that stigma that would never have allowed him, according to canon law and the culture of the time, to be a saint. And not even to belong to a religious order, in this case the Franciscan one. But Benedict the Moor, born in San Fratello in the province of Messina in 1524 to two Africans, Cristofalo, slave of the House of Manasseri, and Diana, slave of the Larcan family, contributed to breaking laws, customs, habits and to forcing the Holy Roman Church to change its approach towards a system, that of slavery, which was not only accepted, but also supported. No "negro" slave was worthy then, for the guardians of the faith, to represent the *cives christiani*. The overlap between juridical and confessional law led to the exclusion from civil and religious life of figures considered "infamous", that is, who had a bad reputation. Wrongdoers and criminals, heretics, poor people of ill repute. Added to these were those considered "physically" incomplete: slaves, servants, minors, women. The role of the "Slave Saint" from Palermo, in the revolution that led Franciscanism to become a language capable of opposing and countering over the centuries the logics of social exclusion that dominated society, is extremely strong. Benedict is black, but he is also a slave, as what his first hagiographer, Daca, writes in 1611, "Nacque negro e schiavo... siguiendo la condicion de su madre nacio negro y esclavo". *Fructus sequitur ventrem*, and therefore the mother transmits the condition of slavery to her son, as if the chains were anticipated by the umbilical cord. But Benedict the Moor, a black and illiterate slave, seems to be the concrete testimony of the thousand instruments with which divine grace equips itself. As, moreover, prophesies, after having met him in San Fratello, Gerolamo Lanza, a hermit of Saint Francis and already considered a saint. Benedict is twenty-one years old. He is working around his master's oxen, while as usual some reapers mock him, make fun of him. The hermit reproaches them and reveals the prophecy: "You all make fun of this little slave but in a few years you will hear of his fame." Benedict followed Gerolamo, and thus began his life as a hermit, first on the mountains of Santa Domenica, not far from San Fratello, then at La Mancusa, between Partinico and Carini, and finally on Monte Pellegrino, above Palermo. Although he dedicates his life to serving even in the long years of the convent of Santa Maria di Gesù, he works as a cook and devotes himself to the humblest tasks, his fame grows among the people. And among the black slaves. He is soon considered a living saint, the object of continuous requests for healings. After his death, in 1589, he begins to be depicted, and it is precisely his story and these images that begin to spread from Palermo to across the Atlantic, to the Americas. The faithful of Palermo, even before any indication came from Rome, take his mortal remains and transfer them from the common cemetery of the convent, inside the Church, as is done with already canonized saints. The cult of the slave saint in a few decades is present throughout Europe and beyond the Atlantic. In 1715 the Church, as part of the long process for his recognition as Blessed and then Saint, started a sort of census of the forms of worship of Benedict, and the results are extraordinary and inexplicable. For example in Cordoba, in Spain, on the occasion of the procession for Corpus Domini, the statue of Benedict precedes that of Saint Francis. In Pernambuco in Brazil it is recorded that "an immense people who all acclaim Saint Benedict". In Mexico City, in the great procession of blacks that takes place on Holy Monday and Tuesday, Saint Benedict is venerated. Confraternities named after him were born, but this extraordinary "contagion" of the cult of the Slave Saint, has to do with multiple factors: first of all slavery, Mediterranean and of the "new world", which after the forced deportations of human beings to force them to work, transforms into Afro-descent, with a new social subject that organizes itself to free itself from chains and stigma. The "conversion" to Christianity is a powerful weapon in the hands of slaves and their descendants, precisely because it puts into crisis those who have used Christianity to reproduce injustice and exclusion. The Franciscan process of breaking with the Church of the learned and the wise, has to do with an evangelization different from that imagined to inferiorize blacks. It is used on the contrary: to include and as a means of social mobility. The belonging of slaves to confraternities creates a political space of identity, of resistance to inhuman exploitation, and to subjugation to the dominant white culture. It is a fundamental piece of the "cosciencia negra", which translates into concrete practices against the most extreme forms of slavery, to the point of becoming the basis for projects of subversion and escape. Saint Benedict the Moor is one of the symbols, even today, of the necessary exodus from this land of the Pharaohs. Of the vision of another world where what they tell us is impossible, becomes possible. Honor to you great black and slave saint. May your ashes, today freed into the air of Palermo, always travel the world and cultivate the forbidden thought of freedom.

Father Antonio Spadaro, one of those who was truly very close to him, defines the earthly passage of this pope "who came from the end of the world" as a "trauma". It is the definition that comes closest to the sense of a loss that remains. A trauma, when it happens, explodes in all its disruptive, irreducible nature. No one can know how, no one in the end can fully explain why. But certainly, a trauma does not ask permission to manifest itself. It just does.

In ancient Greek, the original meaning of "trauma" does not indicate only the injury itself, the "wound", but "the impetuous event that produces it". Francis is an impetuous event, for the Church, shaken to its foundations from an anesthetic torpor dear to the power of the "kingdom of men", and for the world, which has once again become something to be crossed and changed "materialistically", not simply to be passively accepted while trusting in a comfortable final forgiveness. The "trauma" does not pass, therefore, just as Francis does not pass.

At his funeral, I observed the gathering of the powerful standing beside that coffin, on the parvis of St. Peter's. Scanning their faces and their biographies, I imagined that many were thinking they had "finally buried him". They were all there. Those who had called him "a dirty communist", those who had painted him as a "usurper", an "antichrist", the "devil". And also those who had "kindly mocked" him, as one does with a somewhat ridiculous character who talks about things that don't exist, naive and exaggerated. There were those according to whom popes and all the women and men of the church "talk about souls, not about politics" — a little formula used even these days, to try to neutralize Pope Leo's positions against the war and the handful of tyrants who use it to devastate the world. All of them, I thought, in any case "traumatized" by his passing.

But trauma does not only have the characteristics of the uncontrollable unforeseen of a moment: trauma shapes itself on what it strikes, it changes form and nature, it becomes a presence dissolved in the air and in consciences, in a time that can no longer even be measured. The Francis trauma is situated in time that does not exist, as St. Augustine says. Francis is, and will be.

I have had the truly great privilege of being able to know him. He gave me the gift of letting me participate in the Synod, and when I asked him if it wasn't "too much" given my biography — I had Don Mattia Ferrari send him the entire collection of chronicles concerning me from before the G8 up to the present day — he replied with a message that I keep, handwritten as always, not only confirming that choice, but using incredible words to motivate it.

I lived with him and with Don Mattia, for years, a Gospel in which "immanence and transcendence" could not be separated. Every time, prayer and concrete action. One to nourish the other. How to search within ourselves for the reasons, the meaning of our being in this world? And how to help that brother, that sister, tortured and raped with the complicity of the Italian government, escape from a Libyan lager? How to accustom our soul, our conscience, to come to terms with human fragility even when you feel like you are touching the sky with a finger? And how to support the civil rescue ships at sea, against every attempt at criminalization by institutions that organize the omission of rescue as a form of pushing back women, men and children?

With Francis I lived life fully, between inspiration and conspiracy for good, between fragility and challenge to the power of the "kingdom of men". Living like this, thanks to him, gave me the greatest demonstration of how what is spiritual and what is material are inseparable, and part of every human being. They are constituent power, opposed to power. The spiritual and the material find their greatest expression in the struggle for a more just world for everyone, in the journey that makes us cross this world not as tourists and not even as slaves, but in the manner of seekers and discoverers.

"Passion", whether it has the characteristics of joy, or that which springs from profound pain like that of the Christ going towards the cross, is the highest product of being one single thing of immanence and transcendence. This is what Francis taught me, and continues to teach me. What greater joy can there be than to help a prisoner escape from a lager? What greater joy can happen to us than to embrace a brother or sister who is hunted, pursued by the death decided for them "by the handful of tyrants"? What greater joy in realizing one's own infinite fragility, weakness, inferiority compared to the powerful, and precisely because of this, and precisely with this, to challenge their injustices and wickedness?

"Evil", as Madeline Delbrêl said, and I talked about it so much with Francis, is "absence of good". Evil is fought by producing, organizing, conspiring for good. Care, rescue, protection: revolutionary practices in this world devastated by hatred, suffering, injustice, inequality made into a system.

It is true, as Pope Leo says, that the handful of tyrants devastates the world, but a multitude of brothers and sisters "holds it together". Francis, a great reformer because he was convinced that the first to "convert" must be the Church, is at the origin of a new political theology. One that knows how to free itself from "Christendom" as faithful to the power of the "kingdom of men" as it is a serial betrayer of the Gospel, and that enacts Christianity as "trauma" for the world, heresy for the power of money, and a form of life for multitudes who are not willing to resign themselves.

The problem is not believing or not believing in God. The problem is to continue searching. To walk while questioning. And Francis walks with us.

The first, also in order of importance, is certainly the El-Hisri trial at the International Criminal Court. The accomplice of Almasri, head of the Mitiga camp, captured in Germany and physically present in The Hague, has been committed to trial, finally opening the way to a historic trial. In fact, under accusation, the obscure plots that have characterized, at least since 2017, the relations between Italy and Libya on migration policies also risk ending up. The shameful and unspeakable partnership stipulated with criminal militias that have been rampaging in Libya since after the "regime change" war wanted by the convicted Sarkozy - unleashed it seems more for the 143 tons of gold with which Gaddafi wanted to create the pan-African currency that would have ousted the African franc, a colonial currency, than for "human rights" - could finally be unveiled with names and surnames, circumstances, proof of the atrocities that certainly cannot be attributed only to the human scoundrels who committed them on the ground.

Even the "godfathers" of that pact, signed in 2017, which has at its center the blocking of human beings in exchange for money and privileges for the bosses, risk ending up under the magnifying glass of the public prosecutors of the International Criminal Court. The Italian government, or rather the "task force" formed by officials and technicians who, under political orders, take care of strategic analyses on Libya and prepare the moves that the shaky Libyan "institutions" then make, from the establishment of the fake SAR zone (the first in the world without a Place of Safety) to the late Libyan arrest order for Almasri, to attempt to cover up his exfiltration from Italy instead of what "saved" him from international justice, is monitoring the situation reportedly with some concern.

It is clear that that trial for crimes against humanity, celebrated in the heart of Europe, looks too much like a new "Nuremberg" and risks becoming the epicenter of a political and reputational earthquake for Italy and also for the President of the European Union Ursula Von der Leyen, complicit with Giorgia Meloni in aggressive policies against human rights. But not only: the victims, thousands and thousands, who have suffered suffering, torture, slavery, rape in Libya because of a systematic and preordained plan that has always had as its objective the creation of an "iron curtain" from Tripoli to Benghazi, orchestrated to prevent by inhumane means refugees and asylum seekers from reaching the southern coasts of Europe by crossing the Mediterranean, the victims could receive a strong message: justice is possible. Even after years, even if you are not important or rich, even if you have to denounce powerful people, ministers, governments, high ranks, you can get justice. On the other hand, this is one of the main reasons that forces the judges of the International Criminal Court to live under heavy protection: it is the "best democracies in the world" that would like to take them out, starting with the White House. But Italy is a master of the history of judges who take risks when they touch politics: it is remembered at every anniversary of the killing of judges Falcone and Borsellino.

But The Hague is not the only worry for those who deal with "reasons of State". A month ago, the ECHR, the European Court of Human Rights, delivered to the Italian government the communication of the formal acquisition of two appeals against Italy presented by two victims of the torturer Almasri. Italy has already been referred to the Assembly of States for the operation on Almasri, which had as its objective not to allow the international trial to open by subtracting a first-rate defendant. But then, since the Devil makes the pots but not the lids, El-Hisri happened to be in Germany. One butcher was enough to be able to open a trial. The "task force" has therefore suggested and prepared the appeal to the Court presented by Almasri himself: the meetings between General Caravelli (AISE) and Al-Siddiq Ahmad al-Sour, Attorney General of Tripoli, must not have been just an opportunity to taste dates and mint tea: his office is dealing with the Almasri problem. The core of the strategy is to question the "legitimacy of the Court's measure, due to a defect of jurisdiction". It is also the substance of the appeal presented by Almasri against the international arrest warrant for his crimes. "These are facts that concern Libya, they are a national question, not an international one" - they suggested he say.

At the ECHR, however, for now, the issue is only at the preliminary stage: the task force must worry about sending a brief that the Court needs to assess whether there are grounds to accept the appeal and put under accusation not the butchers, but the owners of the butchery.

Great concerns therefore, alongside the undoubted successes: Meloni rejoices for having contributed in a decisive way to the proliferation in the Mediterranean of new internment camps not seen since colonial times, but she has to keep an eye on this annoying international law that disturbs the African campaign. Piantedosi, Minister of the Interior, gloats over the drop in landings of women, men and children. Forty percent less. He says nothing about the consequent 155% increase in deaths at sea, and therefore it cannot be said whether he also gloats over this. But against all this governmental joy for so many "conquests of civilization", from the destruction of the right of asylum to the neutralization of the Hamburg and Geneva Conventions, there are also failures, which are beginning to arrive in rapid succession, of the administrative instruments of punishment used against those who rescue lives at sea.

The Piantedosi Decree against rescue ships is about to be buried by dozens of sentences that recognize each time its total pretextual nature and illegitimacy. It will not be long before the arbitrary and illegal detentions carried out by the government against the ships of the civilian fleet turn into just as many claims for moral and material damages, so that it would finally be the State that economically subsidizes civilian rescue at sea. There could be nothing worse for the Ministry of the Interior.

And then in the meantime there is the trial for the Cutro massacre, which sooner or later, hearing after hearing, will return to make people talk about it. The defendants are officers of the Coast Guard and the Guardia di Finanza, not exactly a good look for "the legality that institutions represent" as that great legalist Minister Salvini said, while the corpses of one of the worst failures to provide assistance in history were being returned by the sea onto the beach.

The strategic "task force", however, is also at work on this, in search of new strategies to prevent rescue ships from operating to save as many lives as they can. A new security decree, yet another one - but a government that makes dozens of security decrees, how much insecurity does it transmit? - that of the "naval blockade" has also caused the United Nations to take a position, warning about the risks of a measure against international law.

The government's attempt is to use the favorable wind of the European migration pact, to equip itself with new instruments of reprisal and impediment of civilian rescue at sea. With these new powers, the government will be able to "temporarily close the borders" to those ships that, due to alarms such as terrorism and pandemics, had shipwrecked migrants on board.

But from well-informed circles - it appears that experts have also been put to work on something more audacious: finding a "legal" way to have NGO ships seized by Libyan militias in international waters. The plan under study, which would also involve the Libyan General Prosecutor's Office, foresees these phases: construction of criminal offenses created artificially, through the staging of so-called "runaway boats", fast boats that flank the rescue ships and "unload" a few dozen migrants at a time and then leave returning to Libya. The staging serves to represent the "contiguity" between NGO ships and traffickers.

The second phase is the opening, following the reports of the so-called "Libyan coast guard", at the Tripoli court, of a file concerning the "continuation of the crime of trafficking in human beings" carried out on Libyan soil, in international waters by the rescue ships. To do this, an attempt will be made, it is said, to refer to the 2000 UN anti-trafficking directive and subsequent ones. The reports of the so-called "Libyan coast guard" after each case of staging of the "runaway boats", are also sent to the NCC structure of the Ministry of the Interior, and to Frontex. The judicial police of the ports assigned in Italy for the subsequent disembarkation of the shipwrecked persons acquire them and submit them to the competent magistrate. Who could immediately open, in Italy, a file for Article 12 - facilitation of illegal immigration - against the ship's captain.

But the "innovative" point is not this, but the Libyan side: on the basis of the prosecution of a crime, started on Libyan national soil and "continued" in international waters, the attempt is to legitimize a coercive intervention with an order given to the ship's command, to head to Tripoli "for judicial verifications". Upon the refusal of the ship's captain, who has responsibility for his crew and the safety of the rescued people, the procedure under study is that of rules of engagement that also provide for the use of firearms in terms of "deterrence". This is the most delicate part of the plan: the training of Libyan personnel, who do double duty between the criminal activities of the militias and as "officials" of the Libyan government, does not yet give an adequate level of security. To the Italians, not the Libyans. But on this, says the well-informed source, they are working. Quite a job.

Twenty-five years later, we live in a world where borders kill, wars multiply, racism is written into law, solidarity is criminalized, and those who save lives at sea are put on trial. We have been told there is no alternative—that this is the only world possible and the only way to live in it. But whenever human dignity, justice, and peace are at stake, we must choose which side we stand on. We made that choice a long time ago, and we choose to renew it every single day.

We stand with those who cross. With those who defy walls, barbed wire, and the camps that scar the borders. With those who refuse to accept that the Mediterranean should be a mass grave, or that freedom of movement should be a privilege reserved for the few.

That is why Genoa is still here. Because it was never only about exposing the injustice of the world; it was about building, one struggle at a time, another possible world. That possibility belongs neither to the past nor to the future. It exists beyond time. It lives in the struggles of every present, in people's lives and dreams, in the hopes and aspirations of those who refuse, with their own bodies, to surrender to despair. It lives in networks of solidarity between human beings, in civilian rescue ships at sea, and in every act that breaks the logic of death and injustice imposed by borders.

On land and at sea, we are new, yet we remain who we have always been.

Today I felt the urgent need to go and look for those memories. Because another person died in the middle of the street, in Bologna, because he could no longer breathe. His name was Abderraim Fakir, and he died while two police officers were on top of him, to handcuff him.

I can’t breath

Two minutes. 120 seconds. When water enters your mouth, it’s because your brain needs oxygen—it’s “hungry.” The epiglottis is closed; it has to protect your lungs from that cold, salty liquid that engulfs everything once your head goes under, too. The last breath you take before going under is the last thing you bring with you from the world above. Adrenaline—whether you want it or not—not only makes your arms and legs thrash but also forces you to take that deep breath, to fill yourself with as much oxygen as possible before holding your breath. You take in everything you can, for the last time, from the world above. The last shred of salvation available: 120 seconds of life. You will have lived 23 years, 7 months, 22 days + 120 seconds. The descent is slow but relentless. Tachycardia grips your chest. The atria and ventricles of your heart feel as if they’re about to tear apart. The rhythm is like a hailstorm of fists pounding you from inside your sternum. A life spent with a heart rate below 120 beats per minute, and now you’re already at 400. The contrast lies between the screams, despair, fear, and chaos unfolding inside you—in your body, in your brain—and the silent calm of the outside world. Yet your heart is pounding so hard it feels as though it will shatter everything. Its four chambers, which until now had functioned in unison, have lost all synchrony. Now they’re going haywire. Each one is doing its own thing. They want to escape that body, just as one abandons a sinking ship. The right atrium, the left atrium, the ventricles, the valves—everything’s gone haywire. The brain is in a panic and issuing contradictory orders: breathe, don’t breathe. You have to go up, but instead, the more you move, the more you keep slipping down, down into the blue. Open your epiglottis—no, keep it closed. It’s the brain that needs oxygen the most, but even as it keeps issuing orders from the hypothalamus, it seems to already know exactly what will happen in a moment. Even deeper, slowly. Nausea; your blood pressure drops rapidly. And that cold—it’s actually getting worse. Your legs—have you already lost them? You can’t feel them anymore. As if there were a clean cut from the waist down. Exhaustion. The exhaustion is a relief, coming on like an overwhelming need for sleep. Deeper and deeper. Your eyes, which earlier seemed as if they were about to burst from their sockets, now sink back in, partly due to the water pressure growing stronger. It increases with every meter of depth. Your eyelids droop, almost closing. The last vivid image your eyes have captured is the black silhouette of the boat up there, many meters above. Now there are no more colors. Everything is black, everything is black. Water is pouring in. Through every orifice. Through the nose, the mouth, the ears. It fills the lungs, easily overcoming the resistance of the remaining air. The water goes in search of the air, snatching it away as if in a hunt with rigged rules. That body now belongs to it. The last bubbles of air—growing smaller and smaller, fewer and fewer—are abandoning him. I wonder if, by adding up all those breaths preserved inside all those tiny, shiny, perfect spheres rising upward, you’d get 120 seconds of breath. Tiny spheres of life that burst upon reaching the surface, releasing their contents into the air that those still above will breathe.

“Knee-to-neck move.” That’s what they call it at the police academy—the “maneuver” of the knee on the neck. Once the suspect is on the ground, you have to throw yourself onto his head with your full body weight. It’s better if there are two of you. Immobilizing the arms by rotating the shoulders backward is essential. The suspect might struggle and manage to grab your weapon or throw you off. Handcuffs behind the back. Place your knee on the neck, pressing the face into the ground. During the operation, strike the sides at kidney level with fists or a baton. The effectiveness of the maneuver depends on cutting off the suspect’s breath. In the face-down position, the diaphragm is compressed, reducing its ability to contract and store air by 80 percent. The lungs, too, due to the pressure exerted by the officer’s body weight, are compressed and their function is significantly reduced. However, if the maneuver is performed by a single officer, it is recommended to brace against the ground with one knee and position the center of gravity over the other knee, which is placed on the subject’s neck, between the base of the skull and the torso. In this way, the convulsions resulting from the lack of air will not cause the officer to lose balance, and he will remain firmly in control of the hold. If two officers are present, the second officer must continue to strike the suspect’s sides with repeated, deep blows. It is preferable not to use kicks, as these would displace the body and cause the colleague performing the neck restraint to lose their balance. Use the issued baton by gripping it with both hands at the handle: one hand should wrap around the baton just below the tip to control the direction of the strike, while the other hand should cup over the top like a “hat” to apply force to the blow. A blow to the flanks, aimed at the soft tissue of the flank near the kidneys, must be delivered with the tip of the issued baton using a downward motion, while maintaining a firm grip on the baton at all times. When performing this maneuver, the officer must position themselves over the suspect’s pelvis or in the area of the lower limbs to prevent the suspect from lifting themselves up. After the first repeated series of strikes, and if the lower limbs are motionless, the officer may apply additional pressure to the back at the level of the rib cage to encourage the detained person to exhale any remaining air. If only one officer is present, the priority remains the neck restraint, which must be followed by twisting the suspect’s arms behind their back to handcuff them. However, it is always advisable to apply handcuffs before placing the suspect in a prone position on the ground and before beginning the neck restraint. The effectiveness of the neutralization maneuver can be verified by: the discharge of saliva and vomit from the suspect’s mouth; the release of urine caused by the relaxation of the sphincters due to progressive loss of consciousness; tremors and stiffening of the lower limbs; and the suspect’s loss of consciousness. These phases are usually preceded by the phrase “I can’t breathe.”

They inject the sedative into a vein in my hand. My thoughts are now all jumbled together, as if they’re trying to rush out before the darkness sets in. I stare at that scratch running along the metal edge of the cabinet next to the bed. I know everything about that scratch, except its origin. It’s burned itself into my eyes from staring at it so much, and it will be the last thing I see of the waking world. Even if I’d wanted to, with my head stuck in this position—face down for two days—I wouldn’t have been able to see much else. With my eyes closed, I still see the scratch. Now I feel the urge to go back and look at the black dot on the ceiling, next to the neon light. Before, when I was turned that way, that was my only company. Sixteen days of a black dot. The clear plastic helmet, with oxygen rushing in, would sometimes cause a reflection, making the dot appear double. By moving my head slowly and keeping my eyelids half-closed, the split dot would turn into a black line. I’d start at one end and reach the other, tracing a pencil line with my eyes. Like a Zen exercise, to try to ease that burning sensation in my back. Deep inside my back. Repeating that sort of game with my eyes and head a hundred, a thousand times, it lessened the pain. “Dot, shift, connection, contact.” Precise words I repeated, like a prayer as I ran my fingers through a rosary. With each syllable, the millimeter-precise downward movement of my eyelids, like when the sun is blinding you and you have to help your pupils close. My sun was the neon light. The longer I could see the black line before starting over, the more it seemed as though the burning sensation was muffled. Those knives I felt piercing the tips of my lungs would stop, and then they’d come out, like pistons in a compression chamber. As soon as I stopped my mental chant, they’d start up again, from within. Self-hypnosis. Trance. At first, it had been even harder: feeling like you’re running out of breath, left with just a wisp of air even when you open your mouth, inhaling as if before holding your breath and feeling that you have only a wisp, that it’s not enough, and then you try again, but it’s as if you’ve already filled up, yet at the same time you can’t expel anything. Oxygen. Pumped into that helmet. Relief, but you have to get used to recognizing it. The feeling of suffocation doesn’t go away, but you learn to live with the fear that the next moment might be your last. It felt as if my lungs were boiling inside my ribcage. The sharp pain came from behind and lodged itself in the center of my chest. It felt as if I could hear pieces breaking off and scattering around inside my body. Acute bilateral pneumonia. The chief of staff, almost pressing his helmet against mine so I could hear him, explained that it was my antibodies’ reaction that was causing all that chaos. It was every man for himself in there. And it burned like a war zone. The antibodies were going to kill me, not that damned virus. They were basically staging a Stalingrad-style battle: “You want to take over our cells? Well, we’ll burn everything down—we’ll wipe the slate clean before you even get here. That way, you’ll have nothing to colonize. Nothing alive, at least.” The scratch on the locker is now the only thing I can still see. I’m leaving. Who knows if I’ll come back. But I can’t bring myself to think about what I’ve done in my life, about what I might actually leave behind. A scratch—I’m leaving nothing but a scratch.

The families are gathered at the Mercado Central, in the heart of the Barrio Latino, a large building full of murals that stands between Lake Street and Bloomington Avenue. Inside, in the largest hall, one of the "restitution and listening" meetings is taking place, through which organized communities collect the stories of the victims of the days of the civil war willed by the White House.

"We found ourselves in the middle of a war, unarmed, and without knowing why," explains Marcos, who together with his wife runs a burrito stand inside the Mercado.

The Mercado Central is twenty-five years old. It was set up by 40 migrant families, helped by the Church of the Sacred Heart, a suburban parish that at the time was the only one to have opened its doors to those newcomers from various parts of Mexico. "We hoped we could regularize our status, become American citizens. We have been here for thirty years, others even for forty. We worked hard, raised our children here, paid taxes, health insurance, attended courses to learn English and the Constitution by heart. But nothing, they wanted to keep us only as irregulars." While Julio speaks, our “Bossi-Fini Law” comes to mind, the law that for decades has prevented even in Italy migrant people from being able to regularize their status. Laws that produce "clandestines" are the common and indispensable trait of all policies against "clandestines," at every latitude.

The Mercado, a collection of shops selling everything, small Mexican food kitchens, a supermarket, has on the upper floor the offices of various associations, including "Unidos," the main organized community that deals with support for "undocumented" workers, for their student children, for families who do not have health insurance. What are called here "organized communities" are project-based articulations of the neighborhood community. Everything starts from the neighborhood, from the "barrio," "neighborhood." In the main urban centers of a state, neighborhoods are as big as cities. Here everything is enormously larger. And each state has its own identity, autonomy, composition and also predominant language. In California English is rarely used, and it's "mucho gusto" and not "nice to meet you" when people meet. In Colorado instead, or in Pennsylvania, the opposite.

The neighborhood, the "vicinity" with the assaults by ICE, are concepts that today are experiencing a new life. But it is not only the dimensions, the distances, that determine the epicenter of civil society self-organization on this scale, delivering to the metropolitan level only convergences in extraordinary and limited moments. Here one better understands what it means when an American speaks of "subsidiarity": the "minimal state" is concretized through the absence of services, starting from the most fundamental ones like health care or school. In this welfare desert, oases of neighborhood community organization grow that fill voids otherwise unsustainable for the majority of citizens. The imposition of the market and private business, which dominates everything like the "towers" of downtown that signal from afar where the money is, has produced as a bottom-up response an extraordinary aptitude to organize in a solidaristic and cooperative way, as a community. The sense of community is inversely proportional to the height of the houses that populate the neighborhoods. Taking a few steps along the Stone Arch Bridge, where buildings with luxurious ultra-modern apartments disturb the passage of the Mississippi, is very useful to understand: here there is no sign of community, or of neighborhood spirit. Rich and anonymous lives flow each on its own and in competition with one another. Busy making money hand over fist in order to spend money hand over fist. Often zero-sum existences.

Walking on the wide sidewalks of the streets that move away from the center, the houses all become low, single-family, wooden, with the patio at the entrance. A few American flags, but many signs with "ICE OUT" planted outside, or posted on the windows facing the entrance. You understand that it is the neighborhood, the community, that is speaking.

"We communicate among ourselves with Signal, the messaging app that is more difficult for them to intercept," says Patrizia, white, mother of three, who is part of the community of the Church of the Ascension, North Minneapolis. There too a meeting with families, to listen to stories of resistance to the squads of the "migra." "Each neighborhood has its own Signal network, with it information is disseminated that comes from the lookouts, who control from morning to night the movements of ICE cars. If someone has to move they ask on the network: free streets are reported, and that's how for example I was able to accompany my son's girlfriend, who is Ecuadorian, to the hospital for a dressing."

Each neighborhood communicates with the other through the active surveillance network. The community organizes food distribution during ICE raids, which force people to stay locked in their homes. "We collect groceries for families here next to the Church," says Father Dole, "then we go and distribute them ourselves, we white people, who attract less attention and don't risk being stopped."

Just as the absence of welfare, structural in the American system, has favored "community subsidiarity" to build services accessible to the community, so too life under military occupation by an aggressive and hostile army come from outside has turned ordinary citizens into experts in "community resistance" techniques. Facing a war without accepting war as a response plan. "They commit violence, they incarcerate our neighbors, they mistreat people, they kill. We respond with solidarity among ourselves, helping, doing good. We do not obey orders that would want us to be indifferent spectators."

From San Diego to Seattle, from Houston to Denver, from Pittsburgh to Minneapolis, we have known another America. One that fights, that does not surrender, that invents new ways to escape the grip of a power that can only be despotic and perpetually at war. I look at the big window that Emilia was pointing to: I seem to see Greg Bovino, dressed in his Nazi coat, but behind him are the Carabinieri of the Tuscania battalion in riot gear. Bloomington has an overpass. It looks like the one in Via Tolemaide in Genoa 2001 and further down there is the memorial to Alex Pretti, and it looks like Piazza Alimonda, where they killed Carlo Giuliani. After all we come from Seattle, from that November 30, 1999 against the Millennium Round summit of the WTO. But also from before, from January 1, 1994 in San Cristobal with the Zapatistas. But perhaps from before, from before. And now here in Minneapolis, right today when there is the first march of the three days, the one with the migrants. Time does not exist. There are lives, passions, ideas of another possible world, better for everyone. They are new, but they are the ones that have always been.

The trial for the Cutro massacre is underway, and on the defendants’ bench are officers of the Guardia di Finanza and the Coast Guard, but above all the government and its directives. We are talking about one hundred dead, many of them children. The El-Hisri case at the International Criminal Court is confirmed, and it will be a historic trial that could drag in members of the Italian intelligence services and, hopefully, also members of the government, who would have to answer for complicity with the torturers of the Libyan detention camp in Mitiga, the one run by the head of Tripoli’s judicial police, Almasri, protected and shielded from arrest by Italy. The summer of shipwrecks, all avoidable if there were a genuine institutional sea rescue service instead of the sabotage of the existing civilian one, has already begun with its death toll. Pope Leo, from Lampedusa on July 4, spoke very clearly: there are those responsible for these tens of thousands of deaths that have turned the Mediterranean into one of the most dangerous borders in the world. They are those who made political decisions and those who failed to make them.

All of these things must have pushed the circles of “dirty work” to set up yet another judicial frame-up, so as to divert public attention from the above and create a smokescreen, of tear gas—which they like so much—to cover up the horrific crimes that characterize the war-on-migrants policies. It happens in the USA but it also happens in Italy and in Europe. We were informed that this operation would start soon. We too have well-informed sources. On June 1, so almost two months before the start of the frame-up against Sea Watch, I wrote and published this: “from well-informed circles — it would appear that the experts of what is defined as the 'Libya operation task force' have also been put to work on something more audacious: finding a 'legal' way to have NGO ships seized by Libyan militias in international waters. The plan under study, which would also involve the Libyan Attorney General’s Office, provides for these phases: construction of artificially created offenses, through the staging of so-called 'runaway boats,' fast boats that pull alongside rescue ships and 'unload' a few dozen migrants at a time and then leave, returning to Libya. The staging serves to represent the 'proximity' between NGO ships and traffickers. The second phase is the opening, following reports from the so-called 'Libyan coast guard,' at the Tripoli court, of a file concerning the 'continuation of the crime of human trafficking' carried out on Libyan soil, in international waters by the rescue ships. To do this, it is said, an attempt will be made to refer to the 2000 UN anti-trafficking directive and subsequent ones. The reports of the so-called 'Libyan coast guard' after each case of staging the 'runaway boats' are also sent to the NCC structure of the Interior Ministry, and to Frontex. The judicial police of the ports assigned in Italy for the subsequent disembarkation of the shipwrecked acquire them and submit them to the competent magistrate. Who could immediately open, in Italy, a file for Article 12 — aiding and abetting illegal immigration — against the ship’s captain. But the 'innovative' point is not this, but the Libyan side: on the basis of prosecuting a crime, begun on Libyan national soil and 'continued' in international waters, the attempt is to legitimize a coercive intervention with an order issued to the command of the ships to head to Tripoli 'for judicial verifications.' Upon the refusal of the ship’s captain, who is responsible for his crew and the safety of the rescued people, the procedure under study involves rules of engagement that also include the use of firearms in terms of 'deterrence.' This is the most delicate part of the plan: the training of Libyan personnel, who work both for the criminal activities of the militias and the 'official' ones for the Libyan government, would not yet provide an adequate level of security.”

Everything according to script, here comes the operation against Sea Watch and the Civil Fleet: the usual newspaper at the service of the services, and everything as indicated two months ago by our source.

Minneapolis, July 15

They killed him while he was in his car with his three-year-old daughter beside him. He was 26 years old, Juan Sebastian Guerrero, with a work permit, health insurance and, like millions here, he had started all the paperwork to obtain citizenship. He had a house, a car, a family, was up to date with his taxes and had no criminal record. The American Dream can only be dreamed if you stay alive, though. For the little girl who saw her father executed, we hope her young age allows her to live without the nightmare — the American Nightmare.

But who are these ICE criminals that many people here are starting to call “Gestapo”? Who can shoot point-blank at unarmed people, without them offering any resistance? Who can, as seen in the videos of Lorenzo Salgado’s execution that took place a few days earlier in Houston, handcuff a dying man lying on the ground covered in blood? Who can raid a school parking lot and violently seize kids about to enter class?

Ex-military who served in Iraq and Afghanistan, ex-convicts accused or convicted of violence, especially sexual violence, ex-cops expelled for acts of racial hatred. The most funded federal agency in the U.S. has recruited twenty thousand of them.

They took the “scum.” Like Vannacci, one italian new entry in the politics show, would want to do.

It’s not the “dirty dozen,” but the scum of humanity. “The Dirty Dozen” by E.M. Nathanson, brought to film in 1967 by Aldrich, is not “scum.” The dirty dozen carry out an operation against the Nazis, before the Normandy landings. They fight a stronger power, they fight a ruthless and exterminating army. Not innocent, unarmed, more fragile people.

The “scum,” on the other hand, is what shoots a mother like Renee Good in the face, or back home assaults teenagers with baseball bats and metal bars like in Genoa, “because they are children of migrants,” or bullies a person who is unwell for the cameras, like in San Benedetto del Tronto. Scum is cowardly, it always strikes when it knows it can get away with it. The dirty dozen risk their lives in a “mission impossible,” against those who not only have the strength to defend themselves, but have a hundred times more than they do.

The Dirty Dozen is the story of a moral redemption, while the deeds of the scum are only the affirmation of moral decay.

The “scum” in the world, not only here in the States, is often recruited by the established power. Who recruited Almasri in Libya, to stop women, men and children in the Mitiga detention camp, allowing him to rape, torture, kill? The same ones who helped him escape arrest and evade the justice of the International Criminal Court.

Who does Putin send to die and kill in Ukraine? Among many who are forced, also the “scum” who torture and kill by vocation. It happens to the Ukrainians too: among many who only want to defend themselves from an invading army that bombs cities, there is plenty of “scum” willing to do the worst things. It happens in all wars, which are the ideal environment for every kind of “scum.” And who in Iran hangs, tortures, cuts into pieces the opponents who dare to protest — how much “scum” must they have trained for the job of “executioner”? And Israel, how could it commit the abomination against Palestinian children, against an entire people, without “scum” at its service, whether soldiers or settlers? And Hamas, how could it have done October 7 against defenseless people without available “scum”? And in Sudan, millions dead from a genocide that no one names, or like the one in Tigray, so forgotten by us that we are so sensitive we seem to treat them as “liquid genocides,” which we can drink without chewing.

How much “scum” is at work in the world, person against person, to inflict pain, to enjoy blood, to feed on cruelty against someone who begs you — how much is put to service in the planning of extermination for entire populations?

You become scum, you are not born scum. You enlist, you train to become scum. The Dirty Dozen, on the other hand, is made up of people who had something good inside them, imprisoned by wrong and lost lives. When someone instead becomes scum, they can only confirm their rottenness, their cynicism, their cowardice placed at the service of the powerful of the moment. Whoever dissolved little Giuseppe Di Matteo in acid, in San Giuseppe Jato in Sicily, after 776 days of torture, is scum.

When the then French Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy went to Argenteuil in October 2005, a working-class neighborhood on the outskirts of Paris, during an altercation with residents, he called the young people « Vous en avez assez de cette bande de racailles ? On va vous en débarrasser » — “Had enough of this scum? We’ll get rid of them for you.” Sarkozy, lying, wanted to attribute this definition to an entire social group. But it was the racist scum inside his police and his electorate that he was trying to organize and motivate. And us, back home, with the invention of the “maranza” (the term coined to refer to second-generation young people in Italy, which labels them as criminals by nature) — aren’t we doing the same? Scum is recruited and organized always on the basis of constructing a perfect enemy. Different enough to be represented as “non-human.” “Alien,” as they say here in the States. That’s how someone who goes to Mass every Sunday can drown hundreds of children in the Mediterranean. Ask the Minister. Only if he considers them “non-human.” Or “not human enough.”

The possibility of becoming scum, or of remaining so if we are, we all have. People like Vannacci know it. They know that this scum that is in us dwells above all in the everyman, that human being without qualities described so well by Musil, or investigated so deeply by Hannah Arendt in “The Banality of Evil.” The job of this “general of ours” is the exact opposite of that of General Worden and Major John Reisman in “The Dirty Dozen.” In that suicide mission, men condemned to death, “scum” for what they had done, become heroes of the best humanity again. And I don’t think that number, 12, was chosen at random.

Our homegrown general, instead, does the opposite operation: he summons the available scum to go after the weakest, because mass deportations and concentration camps like the CPRs are for this purpose, as here in the U.S.: no mechanism of power or illegality is affected, no “security” is produced. Only the innocent pay. After all, that beach bully had also said it: the world upside down.

Now I’m in Minneapolis. I’m going to the George Floyd memorial. “I can’t breathe” George whispered before dying at the hands of one of the “scum.” And after, here in Minneapolis, Renee Good and Alex Pretty. Always the scum in action, enlisted in a new army, ICE. And these are also the days of Genoa.

I have met on this long journey many “dirty dozens.” People willing to change their lives that were already quietly framed in the “normality” of work, of making money to pay off student debt or the house mortgage, to dedicate themselves to an impossible mission: to oppose scum and its violence, to oppose hatred and injustice. Other dirty dozens I met in the fields in California, in the suburbs of Los Angeles, in the Latino barrio of Oakland. And others in the parishes of San Diego, or in the Monastery of St. Joseph in Pittsburgh. Many dirty dozens and that castle of hatred and oppression, defended by scum, to be blown up.

Mission impossible, so we will succeed.

All Over the World.

That son had been taken from them, but since those who did it wore a uniform, there wasn’t a single court in Colombia that ever found them guilty.

Sisto Turra, that father, was a wonderful and refined person. Head of orthopedics and a university professor, he was someone outside the mold. With that glass of whisky in hand, surrounded by a cloud of smoke from a cigarette that was always lit. A character out of a Jean-Claude Izzo or Massimo Carlotto novel, with that calm, slurred way of speaking, and those blue eyes that pierced right through you.

Giacomo’s killers, never suspended from duty, who knows how many other crimes they may have committed. Mario Paciolla, also killed in Colombia, and Giulio Regeni, tortured to death by Al Sisi’s men in Egypt, are there to tell us every day how much “raison d’État,” in its various forms and latitudes, can degrade justice to ensure that the uniformed henchmen of horror get away with it.

Impunity for the “servants of the State” concerns every continent — a historically rooted global plague. It spares no one, not even those countries, like ours, that flaunt their high rate of democracy. Let alone Colombia. And yet the news of the Colombian state’s admission of guilt, instead of slipping away like fresh water, has reactivated a particular circuit of memory, a word-of-mouth made up of fragments of stories among those of us who were there back then, thirty years ago. Perhaps only today, with this distance of time, can we truly understand what happened inside us, and outside of us, after that murder.

Because Giacomo was a brother, a friend, a comrade in a thousand battles, and when he was taken from us, our lives changed. There is more beneath this story, and it is the power that love can assume for a person who stands by your side and then, suddenly, is no longer there.

When the news of his death reached us, in those first days of September, we were petrified. Giacomo was one of those presences — at the Pedro social center, in the squares, in university collectives, at Radio Sherwood parties — that you noticed right away. Outside every schema of classic militancy, he played as a creative of disruption, a true artist of unconventional relationships. A precious “irregular,” one of those who, in a community of destiny and project such as we felt we were, bring a powerful added value.

GIACOMO WAS GIACOMO. One capable of putting himself at the head of the march, between us and the riot police in full gear, with a drum “because demonstrations with only slogans are sad.” In that extraordinary season of our lives, straddling the 1990s that we lived always running — sometimes pursued and other times pursuing — these precious stones revealed themselves, making our way of life in struggle a treasure. There were many of them, men and women, and each one has forever marked our path.

Without Giacomo, we would have had to prepare ourselves for a heavy void.

His sudden, unjust, violent, unacceptable disappearance from our individual and collective dimension caused a chasm that we absolutely had to fill with something. We knew without saying it that rage, which was abundant, would fill nothing, because in the end it is a poisonous and volatile gas. The meaning of that very strong bond between us instead had the substance of love. We loved him deeply, each in our own way, that comrade, that brotherly friend.

The assembly of the management committee of the Pedro social center — back then it was called that — decided quickly. The Colombian authorities had dismissed the case as a “cocaine overdose.” In Padua, in Italy, the news had bounced around in the usual way, and that truth was also convenient for many. After all, he was still one from Pedro, one of the collectives. One from the squares. After all, a hothead. After all, wasted youth. After all, he could have stayed home. The specter of “better to leave everything as it is,” which in that city has never stopped hovering, appeared in the newspapers and in bar chatter.

But we decided, in that assembly, that it would not go like that. We had to leave, go to Colombia, do the “counter-investigation.” We had learned that term from our comrades of the 1970s. And then, the older ones among us had lived it with the story of Pedro, Pietro Maria Walter Greco, killed by agents of Digos and Sisde on March 9, ten years earlier, in 1985. We got confirmation that it was not an accident but torture and murder from Sisto Turra, Giacomo’s father.

He had gone to Colombia, they had shown him an unrecognizable body, massacred, broken — like the voice with which he was telling us about it, there in the middle of the Pedro assembly. A few days later, Sisto and I were in Rome, summoned to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The news that we wanted to leave for Colombia had reached the government too. “They’ll kill you.” “You protect us, we’re going anyway.” I had spoken with the people from il manifesto. “You write from there, we’ll publish you.” And then with the Mattino di Padova, and with them too there was an agreement.

THE OFFICIAL at the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs had made us promise that we would stay at the house of one of their agents in Bogotá. So, once we arrived, we met Colonel Piero Innocenti, who was there on an anti-narcotics and anti-terrorism mission, attached to the Italian embassy. “Pleased to meet you, I’m Colonel Innocenti.” “Pleased to meet you, we’re from the occupied Pedro social center in Padua.” In Bogotá, in a fortified house, three people from a social center, an officer of the Italian police, and armed guards at the door. But we wanted to talk, to go and see, to write the truth.

Armored cars, secret meetings with a courageous judge held inside a Russian restaurant. And then with Gabriel García Márquez in Cartagena, where he told us that his journalism school would follow the case. And eating in the Chinese restaurant where Giacomo had been seized by the police, meeting the owner of the residence where he was staying. And with one of the witnesses, threatened and beaten by the police precisely because he wanted to tell what really happened. The phone calls from hotels back home, to Pedro, to update everyone. And the articles, every evening, to send to il manifesto, a national daily, and to the Mattino di Padova, the local newspaper of our city.

They were three incredible weeks. A thousand things, the craziest, enough to write a book. It was as if we had gone to get our Giacomo back and by the hand we had taken him away from that place of death and lies. It must have been he who protected us, because really, thinking about it now, going there to challenge the Colombian police was a crazy undertaking. But we have fed on that healthy madness all this time, to avoid succumbing every time power shows you its most ferocious face.

“We are an army of dreamers, that’s why we are invincible,” Subcomandante Marcos taught us at that time. And that’s exactly how it was. And Giacomo, all of us together, we brought him home.

Quel figlio gli era stato portato via, ma siccome quelli che lo avevano barbaramente ucciso indossavano la divisa, non c’è stato uno straccio di tribunale in Colombia che li abbia mai giudicati colpevoli.

Sisto Turra, quel padre, era una persona meravigliosa e raffinata. Primario di ortopedia e professore universitario, era uno fuori dagli schemi. Con quel bicchiere di whisky in mano, in mezzo ad una nuvola di fumo di sigaretta sempre accesa. Un personaggio dei romanzi di Jean Claude Izzo o di Massimo Carlotto, con quel parlare calmo, impastato, e quegli occhi azzurri che bucavano.

Gli assassini di Giacomo, mai sospesi dal servizio, chissà quanti altri crimini possono avere commesso. Mario Paciolla, ucciso anche lui in Colombia, e Giulio Regeni, seviziato fino alla morte dagli uomini di Al Sisi in Egitto, stanno lì a dirci, ogni giorno, quanto la «ragion di Stato», nelle sue varie declinazioni e latitudini, possa degradare la giustizia per garantire ai manovali dell’orrore in divisa di farla franca.

L’impunità per i «servitori dello Stato» riguarda tutti i continenti, una piaga globale storicamente determinata. Non risparmia nessuno, nemmeno quei paesi, come i nostri, che sbandierano il loro alto tasso di democrazia. Figurarsi la Colombia. Eppure la notizia della ammissione di colpa dello stato colombiano , invece di scivolare via come acqua fresca, ha riattivato un circuito di memoria particolare, un passaparola fatto di pezzi di racconto tra quelli di noi che c’erano allora, trent’anni fa. Forse solo oggi, con questa distanza di tempo, riusciamo a comprendere davvero ciò che accadde in noi, e fuori di noi, in seguito a quell’omicidio.

Perché Giacomo era un fratello, un amico, un compagno di mille battaglie e quando ce l’hanno portato via, è cambiata la nostra vita. C’è dell’altro, sotto questa storia, ed è la potenza che può assumere l’amore per una persona che sta al tuo fianco e che poi, di colpo, non c’è più.

Quando ci raggiunse la notizia della sua morte, in quei primi giorni di settembre di trent’anni fa, eravamo impietriti. Giacomo era una di quelle presenze, al centro sociale Pedro, nelle piazze, nei collettivi universitari, alle feste di Radio Sherwood, che si avvertivano subito. Fuori da ogni schema della classica militanza, giocava da creativo dello spiazzamento, un vero artista delle relazioni non convenzionali. Un «irregolare» prezioso, di quelli che in una comunità di destino e di progetto quale ci sentivamo, portano un valore aggiunto potente.

GIACOMO ERA GIACOMO. Uno capace di mettersi in testa al corteo, tra noi e la celere in tenuta antisommossa con un tamburo «perché le manifestazioni solo con gli slogan sono tristi». In quella straordinaria stagione della nostra vita, a cavallo degli Anni 90 che abbiamo percorso sempre correndo, a volte inseguiti e altre inseguendo, si palesavano queste pietre preziose che rendevano un tesoro quella nostra forma di vita in lotta. Sono stati tanti e tante, ed ognuno ha segnato per sempre il nostro cammino.
Senza Giacomo, avremmo dovuto prepararci ad un vuoto pesante.

La sua improvvisa, ingiusta, violenta, inaccettabile sparizione dalla nostra dimensione individuale e collettiva, provocava una voragine, che dovevamo per forza riempire di qualcosa. Sapevamo senza dircelo che la rabbia, che abbondava, non avrebbe riempito niente, perché alla fine è un gas venefico e volatile. Il senso di quel legame fortissimo che c’era tra noi invece aveva la sostanza dell’amore. Lo amavamo profondamente, ognuno alla sua maniera, quel compagno, quell’amico fraterno.

L’assemblea del comitato di gestione del centro sociale Pedro, allora si chiamava così, decise in fretta. Le autorità colombiane avevano liquidato il caso come «overdose di cocaina». A Padova, in Italia, la notizia era rimbalzata in maniera classica e quella verità faceva anche comodo a molti. In fin dei conti era pur sempre uno del Pedro, uno dei collettivi. Uno delle piazze. In fin dei conti una testa calda. In fin dei conti gioventù bruciata. In fin dei conti poteva stare a casa. Lo spettro del «meglio lasciare tutto come sta», che in quella città non ha mai smesso di aleggiare, appariva sui giornali e nelle chiacchiere da bar.

Ma noi decidemmo, in quella assemblea, che non sarebbe andata così. Dovevamo partire, andare in Colombia, fare la «controinchiesta». Quel termine l’avevamo imparato dai nostri compagni e compagne degli Anni 70. E poi, i più vecchi tra noi, l’avevano vissuto con la storia di Pedro, Pietro Maria Walter Greco, ucciso da agenti della Digos e del Sisde il 9 marzo di dieci anni prima, nel 1985. Le conferme che non si trattava di un incidente ma di tortura ed assassinio le avemmo da Sisto Turra, il padre di Giacomo.

Era andato in Colombia, gli avevano mostrato un corpo irriconoscibile, massacrato, spezzato come la voce con la quale ce lo stava raccontando, lì in mezzo all’assemblea del Pedro. Pochi giorni dopo, io e Sisto eravamo a Roma, convocati al Ministero degli Esteri. La notizia che saremmo partiti per la Colombia era giunta anche al governo. «Vi ammazzano». «Proteggeteci voi, noi comunque andiamo». Avevo parlato con quelli del manifesto, un quotidiano nazionale “di movimento “. «Tu scrivi da lì, ti pubblichiamo noi». E poi con il Mattino di Padova, giornale locale della nostra città, e anche con loro l’accordo c’era.

IL FUNZIONARIO del Ministero degli Esteri italiano, si era fatto promettere che saremmo andati a stare in una casa di un loro agente, a Bogotà. Così, una volta arrivati, conoscemmo il colonnello Piero Innocenti, che era lì in missione antinarcos e antiterrorismo, aggregato all’ambasciata italiana. «Piacere sono il colonnello Innocenti». «Piacere siamo del centro sociale occupato Pedro di Padova». A Bogotà, in una casa blindata, tre di un centro sociale, un ufficiale della polizia italiana e le guardie armate alla porta. Ma noi volevamo parlare, andare a vedere, scrivere la verità.

Auto blindate, colloqui segreti con una giudice coraggiosa fatti dentro un ristorante russo. E poi da Gabriel Garcia Marquez a Cartagena, dove ci disse che la sua scuola di giornalismo avrebbe seguito il caso. E a mangiare nel ristorante cinese dove Giacomo era stato sequestrato dalla polizia, a incontrare la padrona del Residence dove alloggiava. E con uno dei testimoni, minacciato e picchiato dalla polizia proprio perché voleva raccontare com’era andata veramente. Le telefonate dagli hotel a casa, al Pedro, per aggiornare tutti. E gli articoli, ogni sera, da inviare al manifesto, e al Mattino di Padova.

Furono tre settimane incredibili. Mille cose, le più pazzesche, da scriverci un libro. Era come se fossimo andati a riprenderci il nostro Giacomo e per mano lo avessimo portato via da quel luogo di morte e bugie. Sarà stato lui a proteggerci, perché davvero, a pensarci ora, andare lì a sfidare la polizia colombiana fu una impresa folle. Ma ci siamo nutriti in tutto questo tempo di quella sana follia, per evitare di soccombere ogni volta che il potere ti mostra il suo volto più feroce.

«Siamo un esercito di sognatori, per questo siamo invincibili» ci insegnava il subcomandante Marcos a quel tempo. Ed è stato proprio così. E Giacomo, tutti e tutte insieme, l’abbiamo riportato a casa.

This is certainly the Fourth of July of the World Cup, and the caravans of Mexican flags filling the streets of California make that obvious. After all, in a population of 39 million, 15 million of whom are of Hispanic origin, who else could they root for if not their “homeland” of origin? But there is no doubt that this Fourth of July is, above all, about migrants.

Pope Leo, with a formidable one-two punch—between the brief July 2 speech for the presentation of the “Liberty Medal” and the homily delivered yesterday from Lampedusa—demolished the idea of an “independence” of inhumanity, based on the power of a “handful of tyrants,” as he had already said, versus all the rest of the world. The pontiff’s decision not to accept the White House’s official invitation to attend the government ceremony and instead to be in Lampedusa, following in his predecessor’s footsteps, seemed a direct, unequivocal response to the deportations, roundups, and killings of migrants that blight this era in America. Pope Leo’s words on the occasion of the National Constitution Center’s “Liberty Medal” award are those of an American, a “son of the nation.” He asserts his right, as an American first and as head of the universal Church second, to speak the truth that the techno-plutocratic power that has seized our time is afraid to admit: “it is migrants who have shaped the nation’s future.” For Pope Leo, “a nation’s moral greatness is shown above all in its capacity to protect and cherish the life of everyone, especially the most vulnerable and those whose value is called into question.” America is Great Again only if it accepts its truth: it was and is a country that became “great” by opening its doors to successive waves of immigrants, who literally built it together with their families.

Independence, then, can only be born and celebrated in truth and against falsehood: it is on the basis of lies, of denial of reality, that ICE squads arrest, assault, and terrorize a segment of citizens who have earned, through blood, sweat, and tears, every right to be on equal footing with everyone else. The Liberty Medal speech will be powerful inspiration for all the parishes that, together with civil society, are animating the “Rapid Response Networks” that organized communities have set up against arrests and deportations. A system of self-defense against raids, of mutual care and protection for families, of safe places for children and families at risk of arrest, of mutual aid for those who must stay hidden.

To this American side is added the European one, with the homily from Lampedusa, as if to say that what is happening is a global phenomenon, not attributable solely to the madness of an isolated dictator. “The dead in this sea are victims both of decisions made and of decisions not made.” Still truth—stinging, direct, without mincing words. It is not fate, it is not “the bad guys” who are responsible, and it is not the sea. It is those who make political decisions, like the recent European Union Migration Pact on deportations and the camps they call CPRs, and those who do not make them—those who pretend not to see what is happening in Libya or Tunisia, and continue to finance, with public money, criminal systems of pushback and detention of women, men, and children, all our brothers and sisters, our own children.

Pope Leo’s speech is far broader, in all its radicality. The concreteness of things blends with the spirituality of the Gospel word. It is disarmed and disarming theology. The Samaritan, someone who by definition didn’t even have the right to speak, an “illegal,” faced with the death and suffering of a human being, does what neither the priest nor the Levite does. That is, he sees and he stops, he acts, he gives aid. For those who have decided in recent years to defy the will of governments and have continued to rescue at sea, to welcome, to put human rights at the center and not the facile rhetoric of political propaganda, it is a great recognition and an invitation to continue. “We have entered a millennium in which we must give spiritual, cultural, juridical, political, and economic form to the civilization of love. Let the enormity of the pain we observe make us grasp the radical nature of this calling.”

Europe, Pope Leo says, has the numbers to do it. From the top it will not be able to do so except through its own independence first and foremost from Trump and from the technocratic supremacism of war and dehumanization. From below it is already doing it, practicing solidarity at sea and on land, whatever the cost.

“Like the Samaritan, we can change program and direction.”

Luca Casarini from Houston, Texas

Dialysis patients sit almost reclining in their treatment stations and, while the machines quietly do their work, they can watch their own television screens, mounted on adjustable mechanical arms that can be moved into position. Everything is as spotless as a spaceship, including the state-of-the-art treatment stations themselves.

The Harris Health Dialysis Center is a cutting-edge hospital. But not only because of the quality of its facilities, its staff, or its equipment. It is at the forefront because here, people are not asked for documents or proof of health insurance before they are admitted for treatment.

It is an exception of which the organized community of TMO (The Metropolitan Organization of Houston), here in the fourth most populous city in the United States, is rightly proud.

Most of the patients treated here are migrants, men and women who work in the fields. They are undocumented and, of course, have no health insurance.

To give an idea: during our journey, one of us needed a blood glucose test—the ordinary finger prick with a glucometer that any diabetic routinely performs at home. It was done at the Medical Surgery clinic in the Houston Airport.

The cost?

Three hundred and fifty dollars.

Even with health insurance, it would still have cost seventy-five.

"People here who have no insurance go to the hospital only when they are about to die—or they are brought in already dead. Imagine what it is like now, with ICE agents lying in wait outside emergency rooms..."

The speaker is the young physician who directs the nephrology program at the Harris Health Center.

"Most of our patients arrive from their own countries—Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras—with kidneys that are already destroyed. It is the consequence of working in the fields, exposed to dangerous and carcinogenic chemicals. Back home, there are no laws that protect people's health through prevention."

He goes on, drawing a striking paradox.

"Here, on the other hand, the laws exist—but these people do not exist in the eyes of the State, even though they work and pay taxes just like everyone else. They are 'undocumented,' or 'Aliens,' as they are classified by the Department of Homeland Security. And those who do have documents but cannot afford health insurance exist only if they can pay. So the laws protecting public health do exist—but they apply only to some. If you are poor, whether or not you have documents, prevention simply does not exist for you. You can only die."

So it is possible to live within the paradox of prevention, which is typical of advanced societies. Here, you almost have to hide to smoke a cigarette because the prevention of lung cancer has become culturally hegemonic. Yet prevention itself is selective.

The "Aliens," the undocumented, are considered so foreign that they are given a name worthy of space invaders. But the poor without health insurance live under the very same condition. Perhaps, in the end, all poor people are "Aliens," regardless of whether they possess the right documents.

"This is the only hospital in this county—Harris County—where people rejected everywhere else can come and receive treatment."

This cutting-edge hospital, a concrete example of another vision of the world and of what it means to be human, exists thanks to the extraordinary mobilization of organized civil society and many other institutions—from churches to other religious congregations, from labor organizations to cultural associations—which fought and succeeded in securing public funding for this facility.

Public funding covers roughly one-third of its enormous operating costs—around two and a half billion dollars. The remaining two-thirds come from private donations and grants dedicated to promoting public health, provided by philanthropic foundations.

The mobilization that made this institution possible—"an institution built from below," as Elisabeth describes it—was led by the organized community of TMO. Elisabeth is also part of the Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF), which represents many similar organizations across the country and has eighty years of history.

It is, in practice, one of the clearest examples of resistance both to the neoliberal privatization of the right to healthcare and to the Trump administration's politics of fear directed against migrant communities.

An extraordinary form of counter-power, in the middle of one of the wealthiest areas in the United States—and, precisely for that reason, one of the places where millions of people are subjected to the harshest discrimination.

The very people whose work has helped create that wealth, generation after generation.

Late that morning, while we are gathered listening to the stories of members of organized communities from different parts of Texas—from El Paso to Austin—the news arrives and chills us.

Not far from where we are, on the outskirts of Dabney Street, at the end of a grid of streets in a poor barrio between Lockwood and East Cavalcade, a migrant has been killed by ICE while on his way to work.

We all stand up, and together we say a prayer for yet another victim.

His name was Lorenzo Salgado Araujo. He had lived here with his family for many years. He was on his way to work when a series of gunshots fatally wounded him.

The Department of Homeland Security released a statement saying that the agent fired because "the targeted individual failed to comply with ICE officers' commands and intended to use his vehicle as a weapon."

The same explanation was given after the killing of Renee Good in Minneapolis.

Meanwhile, videos from the surveillance cameras, which seem to be everywhere, are already circulating online. They show only a van moving slowly with the traffic, and then a vehicle approaching from the opposite direction, from which the fatal shots are fired.

But above all, the footage that follows shows Lorenzo Salgado dying while an ICE officer handcuffs him behind his back.

"It is something horrible. It is a crime. He was simply going to work. He hadn't committed any crime," says one of his neighbors, almost in tears.

Texas holds the record for the number of people arrested by ICE despite having no criminal charges against them. They number in the tens of thousands. They spend months in privately run detention centers before they are allowed to return to their families—or they are deported, either to other states or outside the country altogether.

This is what Houston is like.

It is as though a stargate suddenly opens before you at every street corner.

Every day, you move from unimaginable wealth to absolute poverty. From downtown office buildings as large as an airport to wooden shacks held together more by layers of paint than by nails.

Here in Houston, you move from humid heat so oppressive it takes your breath away to hurricanes that, within five minutes, leave every street under water.

From a state-of-the-art hospital where undocumented people can finally receive treatment...

...to ICE shooting you in the face while you are on your way to work.

A battle after another.