New riot police reinforcements were sent to a locality in southern Italy on Friday, where the appearance of a coronavirus outbreak among foreign workers has for several days been causing tension with the local population.
Some 700 people, mostly Bulgarians employed in the agricultural sector, have been confined since Monday to Mondragone, a locality 60 km northwest of Naples, after the discovery of 43 cases of contamination with Covid-19 among them, according to the President of the Campania region, Vincenzo de Luca.
Illegally occupying a complex of five buildings, they were ordered to remain confined to the site for a fortnight, while screening tests are underway throughout the neighborhood.
On Thursday morning, a group of dozens of people broke through the confinement cord for a protest march in the city, causing tension and scuffles with residents, who threw stones at them.
Several vehicles belonging to Bulgarian residents were damaged, their windows broken by Italian residents who displayed their foreign license plates like a trophy, according to images broadcast by Italian television. Another vehicle was set on fire overnight from Thursday to Friday.
Military reinforcements
The police intervened to turn them back, while around fifty soldiers arrived in the evening as reinforcements to delimit and enforce a containment zone.
“No one should leave these buildings for 15 days. The area will be controlled 24 hours a day by the police, the gendarmes and the army,” Di Luca told local press.
“If there are a lot of positive cases, I will quarantine the city,” he warned.
The confined area is a block of four rectangular ocher buildings, squatted mainly by Bulgarians, many of whom are in an irregular situation, but also by Italian families.
This subdivision “is one of the thousands of ghettos in Italy where foreigners are piled up more or less in order,” an editorial in the daily Corriere della Serra wrote on Friday.
Its occupants wish to return to their work on farms in the region to earn money, while the local population accuses them of helping to spread the coronavirus.
Friday morning, after moments of tension during the night, in front of the “red zone” delimited by the police, “a group of citizens was monitoring” the place, according to the AGI agency.
“Thanks to thank you”
“I will be there on Tuesday to try to find out how to help citizens and even the police to do their jobs,” said League president and far-right leader Matteo Salvini.
“These Bulgarian workers are part of this proletariat forced to thank you, without rights, often without contract or security,” wrote for his part the left writer Roberto Saviano, in La Repubblica.
“It is easy in this case to say that those who spread the disease are foreigners, invaders, immigrants (…). But it would have been the same if it had been Italians living in these conditions”, a he stressed.
The first country affected outside China, and long the epicenter of the disease in Europe, Italy has paid a heavy price for the epidemic, with 34,644 deaths and 239,410 people infected to date.
The disease seems today under control, if one believes the figures of the health authorities, with between 18 to 30 deaths per day this beginning of week, and a reduced number of contaminations.
Several sources of contamination have nevertheless appeared in the last three weeks in the peninsula, including two in Rome and one in Bologna (center) in a delivery company. For the past week alone, ten new outbreaks have been identified, according to Italian media.
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