The earthquakes are natural events, but the tragedies they generate are largely human fault. What happened in Abruzzo, is a confirmation of this assumption.
· By the early ’70 it’s known with certainty that L’Aquila city was built on an earthquake fault, that is a fracture of the mobile earth's crust. Yet since then, local authorities and scientific institutions have allowed the development of the city just above the fault, in order to support the interests and profits of building speculators, large landowners and bank institutions.
· Moreover, on this area of very high seismic risk, many buildings were constructed in violation of even normal safety standards. The builders had skimped on every things: on the quality of the iron and sand, on the cement armature, on the checks. To sum up, they have cut costs and increased profits, procuring that tens of thousands of buildings collapsed or were seriously damaged by the earthquake and more than 200 people died under the rubble.
· Finally, before the night of the strongest shock (4-5 April 2009), by several weeks in Abruzzo there were earthquakes progressively more intense; in many buildings (as in student residence of L'Aquila) had produced "strange" and alarming cracks; population, very worried, had repeatedly called the "competent authorities" just getting "reassuring answers". Prevention costs and doesn’t bring profits into the pockets of the owners and financiers, therefore anything was done in this sense.
Faced with these indisputable facts, the mass media and representatives of the institutions have pointed the finger against the "underworld infiltrations" of construction industry and against some "dishonest" contractor that didn’t respect "the rules". Certainly there was and there is still plenty of such "infiltrations", but they are not isolated cases!
The tragedy of Abruzzo was not caused by individual building speculators "too much greedy”, but from the network that links the interests of financiers, bankers (the mortgage loans: what a great deal!), large industrial, public administrators, notaries, professional associations, subcontracting companies, the great names of science. A network that builds houses and districts not according to the people welfare and the quality of buildings, but in terms of profit and maximum exploitation of workers. A network that has its greatest propagandist, its representative and its protector in Berlusconi (the italian Prime Minister) and his government.
Certainly not a benefactor government, like Berlusconi (with the help of almost all mass media) tried to present himself in front of the people and the workers of Abruzzo and of Italy! The government of Berlusconi-Bossi-Fini is the flagship and the director of the hand responsible for the deaths in Abruzzo: the full "freedom" of enterprise, ultimately the capitalist system as a whole. The same freedom and the same social system that are bringing the world into economic chaos and which are attacking the workers with layoffs, redundancy payment, the demand for new sacrifices on wages and working conditions to support the competitiveness of companies in the world market.
There is only one way to prevent future repetitions of other disasters like that of L’Aquila: the organized struggle of workers with which to impose by force on the government, on companies, on institutions and their so-called “super-experts" engineers and scientists, the adoption of real and effective measures of seismic preventions paid by companies.
In order to help the people of Abruzzo doesn’t need the “national unity” but it’s necessary to identify, expose and fight the real guilties of the tragedy, which are not to be found in "stepmother nature", but in the interests of the Berlusconi government and the employers. Just starting to build a climate of hostility and struggle against them we can prevent that the so-called "reconstruction" in Abruzzo is transformed in a further speculation for bankers, entrepreneurs and businessmen and a further worsening for the conditions of the people affected by the earthquake.