Recent arrests and confiscations for 5 million euro to organized crime in Calabria, have shown that the organization is still very strong and powerful, and that decision making is confined to a small group, an organism called the “Province”, that seems to meet quite regularly, or in extraordinary conventions. A small number of people decides what to do , and how to do it, and is effective world wide.
The ‘ndrangheta bosses met in the heart of Locride, a country tormented by centuries of organized crime wars.
In this land, on October 16 2005, Francesco Fortugno, doctor and vice president of Calabria Regional Council.
In those days, thousands of students demonstrated in the streets of Locri protesting against the politician’s murder and against ‘ndgrangheta.
Kerry Kennedy, our honorary president, visited Locri to dialogue with the students, just weeks after the Fortugne murder, in a meeting at the presence also of local authorities.
“I was deeply moved by the determination of the students from Locride whom I met, children 14, 15, 16 years old who took to the streets with enormous banners risking themselves in order to create a more just and peaceful future”, she said recently in an interview.
Countries like Calabria, where young people fight and dream to create for themselves an alternative life to organized crime, are rich and fertile to welcome information and documentation on human rights and mainly legality. Calabria was the first Italian region, right then in that meeting in Locri, to sustain the Robert F. Kennedy Foundation of Europe in its human rights education project. And the support is still there after more than four years.
On May 21, Kerry Kennedy, Robert Kennedy’s seventh daughter, will return to Calabria: she will participate in the Gutenberg Project, invited to meet and dialogue with students on the “Speak truth To Power” educational project.
The projects consists of a booklet, on human rights and legality, distributed to 21.000 Calabrian students in the 2009-2010 scholastic year, and of a training for teachers.
Related links:
Educational package
Kerry Kennedy
Gutenberg Project (in italian)
