CORLEONE, Sicily – The courageous anti-Mafia priest Don Luigi Ciotti spearheaded solemn ceremonies this week recalling the 76^th anniversary of the murder of trade unionist Placido Rizzotto by a Cosa Nostra boss in this remote mountain town made famous by the Godfather movies. The ceremonies climaxed with scores of school children reading poetry dedicated to Rizzotto in Corleone’s main Garibaldi square.

 Don Luigi began the programme of events Monday by leading prayers for Rizzotto in front of his tomb in the Corleone cemetery. Before reciting the Our Father prayer Don Luigi also said “let’s pray for God to give us a good kick to go forward,” to prevent people being complacent over the Mafia. “Remember God is not a Catholic,” the priest said, “He is for everyone.”

 “True memory is commitment and responsibility,” said Don Ciotti in remarks evidently aimed at politicians and officials, “otherwise it is just the memory of rhetoric.”

 Rizzotto was abducted by a group of Mafiosi in 1948, driven to a nearby location where he was beaten and tortured before being shot and killed by Mafia boss Liccio Liggio with two bullets to the head.

 Rizzotto was one of the best known of scores of trade union leaders fighting for land to be distributed to the Sicilian peasants who were murdered by the Cosa Nostra. Liggio died in prison in 1993.

 Among trade unionists marking the anniversary were Dino Paternostro, editor of the anti-mafia newspaper Citta Nuove as well as the new quarterly newspaper AnimosaMente launched recently by the Corleone camera di lavoro. Also present was Mario Ridulfo, secretary general of the CGIL trade union federation’s Camera di Lavoro in Palermo and himself a native of Corleone.

 Ridulfo in a speech in Piazza Garibaldi noted that the struggle against the Mafia is an intergral part of the battle for development of the economy of towns like Corleone, near which “there are neither one kilometer of railway or one kilometer of motorway.”

While only 58 km from Palermo, the island capital, Corleone is reached by a narrow road spiraling through rugged mountains and with almost no public transport the town feels as if it has been stuck in a time warp. Paternostro has for decades been a leader of the townsfolk who stand up to the underworld, which has led to Cosa Nostra setting his newspaper office alight, subsequently in 2006 torching his car and embroiled him in a legal dispute over threatening remarks posted on Facebook by the late Mafia boss of bosses Toto Riina’s son in law.

After Rizzotto was murdered Liggio and the other mobsters cut his body to pieces and tied them onto a mule that was taken up a mountain at Ficuzzo near Corleone to an area riddled with sinkholes used by the Mafia as their own cemetery for their victims. The mule and the remains of Rizzotto were pushed into one sinkhole from which they were only recovered and identified as recently as 2008, after which he was given a state funeral attended by President Giorgio Napolitano, the only union activist in Italy to receive such an honour.

In an impassioned speech at a high school for technical studies in Corleone, Don Ciotti underlined that “the mafia is not a problem of just Sicily, Calabria and Campania, but a problem of the whole of Italy.”

 The priest recalled how he began life when as a child his impoverished family moved from the Veneto region to live in a slum in Turin where his father sought work, a similar story to that experienced by millions of Sicilians and other southerners who emigrated to northern Italy or abroad in search of a better life.

 Authorities need to make fighting organized crime a top priority, he added. “It can’t be regarded as just one of many problems.”

 jp