Jesse Walker, Reason - Palermo, the largest city in Sicily, is at the heart of mafia country. In the past, trade association surveys have shown that about 80 percent of the town's shops were paying pizzo. But now more than 900 Sicilian firms, a majority of them in Palermo, are publicly refusing to give money to the mob, thanks to one of the most remarkable social movements to emerge in the last decade. Addiopizzo—Italian for "Goodbye, protection money"—is resisting the racketeers with tactics you're more likely to associate with Gandhi or the Arab Spring than a campaign against organized crime. The store mentioned on that tapped telephone call was affiliated with Addiopizzo, and the mafiosi didn't think that trying to collect from it would be worth the inevitable trouble.
I read about that wiretap in Curtailing Corruption, a recent study by Shaazka Beyerle of the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict. While most of the literature on civil resistance looks at nonviolent movements to topple dictators or kick out occupying armies, Beyerle's book shines a light on campaigns to end various kinds of corruption. Here you can read about a 30-million-strong protest in Turkey against organized crime's penetration of the state. Or a movement in Uganda that monitors and reports abusive cops. Or a group in India that prints zero-rupee notes, so that when an official demands a bribe a citizen can give him a bill worth precisely nothing. ... But the Addiopizzo story is especially interesting, because it shows how tactics devised for struggles against states can be adapted to a fight against private criminals.
The story begins in 2004, when seven friends were discussing the possibility of opening a pub. When one mentioned the shakedowns they'd soon be facing, the conversation turned to the ugliness of the extortion system, and soon the group was brainstorming ways to protest La Cosa Nostra's stranglehold on Sicily.
... The turning point came when the owner of a rural pub decided not to pay pizzo and as a result started to lose fearful customers. Addiopizzo started organizing outings to his bar every Saturday night, both to show their support and to keep cash flowing his way. The villagers started returning to the pub, and the mob, faced with mass defiance, decided to leave the place alone.
This evolved into a formal strategy: a reverse boycott of businesses that publicly promised not to pay protection money. Addiopizzo assembled a list of 3,500 people who had agreed to patronize places that rejected pizzo. With that in hand, the group was able to convince several enterprises to take a no-pizzo pledge and to put up an orange sticker advertising their stance. ...
MORE
No comments:
Post a Comment