[Thousands of wildfires tear through southern Italy every year, fueled by scorching temperatures and hot, dry sirocco winds. While hot, dry winds prime the land for Italy’s ferocious fires, it’s humans who start them. More than half are set intentionally, officials say, for reasons ranging from land clearing to personal vendettas.
The Mafia is “weaponizing” fire in the region for control and financial gain, said UC Berkeley researcher Lauren Pearson. The way mafias operate – in the shadows and with high levels of control over communities – means hard data linking them to fires is fiendishly hard to pin down, Pearson told CNN. But evidence points to a clear connection between organized crime and wildfires, according to her recent study.
Southern Italy has always had wildfires, but recent summers have been devastating. Sicily endured more than 8,000 fires in 2021 as temperatures spiked to 120 degrees Fahrenheit. The regional Anti-Mafia Commission conducted an investigation into the potential criminal causes behind them, finding perfect fire weather combined with inaccessible forested terrain helped set the stage for fast, uncontrollable fires. But criminal activities “constitute the most dangerous factor,” its report said.
Fires are set by seasonal workers eager to prolong firefighting contracts, farmers who want to clear forest for grazing, protestors or people with vendettas. But even when the Mafia is not directly responsible, it’s unimaginable anyone would deliberately start a fire in Mafia-controlled territory without its permission, said Laura Biffi, who works for the environmental non-profit Legambiente.
The Mafia’s use of fires tends to have two main aims: power and profit. Fire is money, said Sergio Nazzaro, a journalist and former spokesman for the president of the Anti-Mafia Parliamentary Commission. It creates an emergency that has to be solved and profits for the companies that step in. There are contracts for firefighting, clean-up operations and rebuilding. The Mafia is a multilayered criminal enterprise, he said, that goes “from the labor force that sets the fire to the concession to build on burned land.”
There is also evidence Mafia organizations may be using fire to procure land to broker deals for solar and wind infrastructure, with the hope of tapping into clean-energy transition funds, Pearson said. One farmer, whose testimony appears in the Anti-Mafia Commission report, spoke of being approached by solar panel companies after his land had been burned.
The Italian Mafia “are masters at figuring out how to illegally garner new funds,” Pearson said. As well as using fire for financial gain, experts say it also fits with the Mafia’s culture of violence. It’s a weapon of “intimidation and terror,” Pearson said, “a way to declare that the land is still theirs.”
Deliberate fire setting is very hard to tackle. Proving a fire was started by arson is easy and the motivation is often implicitly obvious, Nazzaro said. “The real problem is identifying the perpetrators and especially the principals.”
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