In Castel Volturno, thousands of undocumented migrants are caught between coronavirus and the mafia.
by Elisa Oddone
On what used to be a vast complex of illegally built apartment blocks and holiday homes on the Mediterranean shore, Castel Volturno is today a run-down no-man’s-land stretching along Italy‘s ancient Via Domiziana coastal road in the southern Campania region.
Gutted houses, bars and pizzerias sit alongside abandoned restaurants and small businesses run by Italians and Africans alike, as well as a handful of Christian churches and a few Islamic centres.
Here, life unfolds along the busy dual carriageway, which bisects the city for some 30 kilometres (18 miles), and where the Neapolitan Camorra and the Nigerian mafia have been plying their business for decades, mostly busying themselves with drug trafficking and prostitution.
But alongside the mobsters, several thousand impoverished locals and migrants make up the social texture of Castel Volturno, where the coronavirus pandemic has further exposed the state of emergency in which its denizens live – even in “ordinary” times.
The city has clearly seen better days, but it now counts about 25,000 inhabitants, of which 5,000 are registered migrants and an estimated 15,000 are undocumented, mostly hailing from West African countries including Nigeria and Ghana, say officials. So far, the town has recorded a dozen COVID-19 cases and one death, and that is only among the Italian population, authorities say. The Campania region has registered more than 3,400 infections.
Read more at https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/04/italy-migrants-living-emergency-emergency-200410211703921.html
