In 2008, in Crotone in Calabria, a police operation called Black Mountains revealed the presence of arsenic, zinc, lead, indium, germanium and mercury originating from an industrial plant. Instead of being disposed of in a landfill, these substances were used in construction: 350,000 tons of toxic materials were used to build public housing, private homes, a harbour dock, roads and, worst of all, three schoolyards in Crotone and Cutro. Medical tests performed on 290 students from various schools detected high serum concentrations of zinc, cadmium, nickel, arsenic, uranium and lead.

For ecomafias, finding land and pits where they can dump and hide stuff is always critical. When digging to construct buildings, foundations become ideal places in which to conceal garbage. For the Camorra anything that’s empty becomes a space to fill.

Often, eco-bales are stored on the lands of farmworkers and small growers. The Camorra buys the acreage from the farmers at expedient rates, far below market price, then rents it to the state for millions of euros a year. There are actual intermediaries who handle the purchase and selling of these lands: as soon as they know where the eco-bales should be stored, the intermediaries go to the landowners and buy the tract at bargain prices, especially when dealing with people who need money immediately, like farmers afflicted with cancer or burdened with debt, or families with children to marry off.

I have always wondered how a farmer can sell his land to have toxins dumped there. I’m from the South and, as every southerner knows, the cultivation of fruit is sacred in the South, it’s one of our strengths. We have always exported lemons, apples, pears, peaches and almonds throughout the world. So how is it possible that the growers themselves and the landowners have betrayed us like that, by selling some of their land to have it become a receptacle for poisons? The truth is that they were duped. In the 1980s and 1990s the big supermarket chains forced them to keep the price of fruits and vegetables down, threatening that otherwise they would go to Spain or Greece to buy them. Unable to cope with the competition, growers were forced to sell a portion of their land to the clans, who began using it for illegal waste dumping. With that money the farmers were able to continue growing peaches, pears, lemons and annurca apples: they could continue doing their job. But that path resulted in calamity: they sold out, and the government left them on their own.