1947
May 1
MASSACRE OF PORTELLA DELLA GINESTRA
On May 1, 1947, about 2000 workers and peasants from Piana degli Albanesi, San Giuseppe Jato, and San Cipirello in the province of Palermo gathered in the plain of Portella della Ginestra (between the Pizzuto and Kometa mountains) to celebrate Labor Day, celebrate the victory of the Popular Front (the PCI-PSI alliance, which had won the regional elections on April 20 with 32% of the vote against the Christian Democracy’s 20%), and to protest against large estates and in favor of occupying uncultivated lands.
The location was chosen because some decades earlier, Nicola Barbato, one of the symbolic figures of Sicilian socialism, had given speeches there. The demonstration focused on the hoped-for agrarian reform and was preceded by the occupation of uncultivated lands in October 1944, which was legalized by Fausto Gullo (PCI), Minister of Agriculture in the Badoglio Government. Gullo sought to address widespread poverty and allowed the occupation of unused lands through various decrees, imposing a different distribution of crops that favored farmers more than the landowners, compared to the prevailing customs in Sicily. This was seen as a potential social upheaval that would alter the political balances in the region, which were also managed by the mafia.
The massacre was organized the day before following a letter received by Salvatore Giuliano, which he immediately burned. Giuliano and his men then went to the promontory overlooking the valley.
On May 1, around 10 in the morning, while waiting for the official speaker Girolamo Li Causi (PCI), a shoemaker from San Giuseppe Jato, Giacomo Schirò, the local socialist secretary, decided to entertain the crowd. A few minutes into his speech, Salvatore Giuliano and his gang began firing machine guns at the demonstrators from Monte Pelavet: initially, the shots were mistaken for the traditional fireworks of the celebration, then terror seized the crowd. The bursts lasted about fifteen minutes, leaving 11 dead and about thirty injured on the ground.
This is the list of the 11 victims as reported in the Memorial of the massacre:
Killed instantly:
Margherita Clesceri, Giorgio Cusenza, Castrense Intravaia, Vincenza La Fata, Serafino Lascari, Giovanni Megna, Francesco Vicari
Died a few days later from injuries:
Vito Allotta, Giuseppe Di Maggio, Filippo Di Salvo, Giovanni Grifò.
In fact, other victims were counted, who died subsequently:
Provvidenza Greco, Vincenza Spina, Vincenzo La Rocca,
An additional victim, Vita Dorangricchia, died nine months later from injuries sustained that day. Among the dead of May 1, there is also the guard Emanuele Busellini, killed by Giuliano’s gang bandits whom he had encountered along the road to the massacre site.
Reactions
In the month following the Portella della Ginestra massacre, there were machine gun and hand grenade attacks on PCI headquarters in Monreale, Carini, Cinisi, Terrasini, Borgetto, Partinico, San Giuseppe Jato, and San Cipirello, causing one death and numerous injuries in total: leaflets signed by the bandit Salvatore Giuliano were left at the attack sites, urging the population to rebel against communism.
Just as the mafia had vowed revenge against Fascism, which had severely struck it with Prefect Cesare Mori, so, in the immediate post-war period, it reacted in alliance with the Freemasonry, large landowners, and separatists to the renewal demands of the new political entities to ensure the maintenance of the status quo, exploiting the fame of the bandit Giuliano, who found himself just a pawn in a much more complex plot than he could imagine.
The first reaction to the massacre was a general strike called by the CGIL, which accused the large landowners of wanting to “suppress workers’ organizations in blood.” The chief police inspector in Sicily, Ettore Messana, instead, dismissed the incident as a localized episode of a local character.
On May 2, 1947, the Minister of the Interior, the Christian Democrat Mario Scelba, intervened at the Constituent Assembly, reading the inspector’s telegram and immediately accusing Salvatore Giuliano and his gang as the sole perpetrators of the massacre.
Testimonies and Sentences
In the weeks and days following the massacre, numerous testimonies allowed investigators to reconstruct the dynamics of the shooting: the encirclement of the crowd and the use of unconventional and war weapons demonstrated that it was a real military action studied in every detail, which went beyond Giuliano and his gang’s capabilities.
In particular, the use of grenades (omitted in the report by the Carabinieri marshals Calandra, Lo Bianco, and Santucci) allowed the crowd to be dispersed, enabling the commandos to operate more easily against the demonstration leaders: indeed, if all those war weapons had been intended solely for the crowd, the final death toll would have been higher.
Despite this, the Viterbo (1952) and Rome (1956) sentences identified only Salvatore Giuliano and his gang as the massacre’s culprits, ignoring many testimonies (including those of four hunters from Giuliano’s gang, captured on the Pelavet rocks the same day of the massacre) that pointed to other accomplices. In particular, they associated the investigations with those of the Massacre against the Labor Chambers in the province of Palermo, also carried out by Giuliano’s gang on June 22 of the same year, denying the existence of instigators.
A Political Massacre
In 1948 Salvatore Giuliano wrote a letter to L’Unità, in which he stated the political purpose of the massacre and made a series of allusions to his relationships with well-known political figures, including Mario Scelba. After that letter, many members of the gang were captured, until on July 5, 1950, Giuliano was found dead in the courtyard of a lawyer’s house in Castelvetrano: a statement from the Ministry of the Interior officially announced that he had been killed in a shootout with a Carabinieri unit under Captain Antonino Perenze the previous night.
Doubts about the official version emerged in an article by journalist Tommaso Besozzi in L’Europeo, entitled “The only sure thing is that he is dead,” in which he highlighted the inconsistencies in the Carabinieri’s version of the bandit’s death and identified Salvatore Giuliano’s killer as his lieutenant Gaspare Pisciotta, who shortly before Giuliano’s death had secretly become an informant for Colonel Luca.
At the trial for the Portella della Ginestra massacre held in Viterbo, Pisciotta confessed to the murder of Giuliano and also accused deputies Bernardo Mattarella, Gianfranco Alliata, Tommaso Leone Marchesano, and Mario Scelba of being the political instigators of the massacre, stating: “We loyally and selflessly served the separatists, the monarchists, the Christian Democrats, and all those belonging to such parties who are in Rome with high positions, while we have been dumped in prison. Bandits, mafiosi, and Carabinieri were the same thing.”
As revealed by Pisciotta’s statements at the trial, he killed Giuliano in his sleep in the house in Castelvetrano where he was hiding, and the body would have then been transported to the house’s courtyard, where Colonel Luca and Captain Perenze’s men staged a shootout while Pisciotta fled.
On February 9, 1954, Pisciotta was poisoned in the Ucciardone prison with a strychnine-laced coffee before he could testify about the Portella della Ginestra massacre to Prosecutor Pietro Scaglione.