THE TRUE FACE OF WELCOME IN THE SALENTO CONCENTRATION CAMP OF SAINT FOCA

‘Welcome’: this is what bureaucrats, priests and politicians call the infamous practice of locking up in concentration camps like the Regina Pacis one in Saint Foca (Salento, southern Italy) all the people waiting to be deported because they don’t fit into the immigration quota which has been fixed by the bosses. We must come out and say it: immigrants are merchandise (like everything else in our society). The bosses decide on the quantity and character of what they want to buy, political power collects information, the police does its roundups, and finally the jailers look after the prisoners in the immigration camp in order to prevent them from moving freely. These camps are surrounded by huge walls and barbed wire, with bars on the windows and cameras and guards all around. In spite of the fact that they are presented as places of welcome and solidarity, they are actually prisons for those who are to be deported from the rich western world where there is only room for the ones who are useful to its awful machinery. This is their great welcome.
Monsignor Cosmo Francesco Ruppi, archbishop of Otranto and prestigious figure in political and religious circles of Salento, is fundamental to this perverse machinery. Through his lackey father Cesare Lodeserto he controls the prison Regina Pacis in Sain Foca where men women and children whose only guilt is that they landed on the shores of southern Italy without any identity documents in order to escape from miserable living conditions are locked up: for this stupid reason alone these human beings are called ‘clandestine’. The archbishop hides himself behind a false and reassuring mask of benefactor and succeeds in gaining many common people’s confidence. The truth is that he is just an unscrupulous criminal, a very mean man who takes advantage of hundreds of human beings’ hopes and desperation. Ruppi regards them as animals for the slaughter who serve only for him to get rich as quickly as possible during their imprisonment while waiting to be sent back to their countries to face hunger, war, misery, sickness, exploitation once again … These conditions are all being created by the western world. In addition to this, we have to consider the hundreds of people who die during these so-called ‘journeys of hope’. And Ruppi and his accomplice Cesare Lodeserto, a criminal of the same category, are also morally responsible for such deaths. These two vultures, along with anyone else who does the same job as theirs, are our enemies, whereas we are side by side with the immigrants who reach our shores. We know well that capitalism is making our existence similar to that of the exploited immigrants, full of uncertainty and the impossibility to decide about our present and our future. If we share the same conditions of exploitation, we can also share the struggle against this life which is becoming more and more deprived of any freedom.
ENEMIES OF ALL BORDERS