Selargius, the landfill shameful to the state

The air is unbreathable. The gate is only virtual. The imagination suggests that that area is off-limits. A mental barrier requires you to stay away. Only the firefighters come here every now and then when the flames transform into dioxin every curse that has come to earth, or rather picked up here and there with thefts and raids of all kinds. A real hell at the gates of Cagliari, in the agricultural lands of the city that calls itself metropolitan. When you cross that “gate that isn’t there”, in this area that everyone calls “nomad camp”, you realize that here the State does not exist. The map is clear, despite the haze: on the horizon the Devil’s Saddle, close by the lands of the great expropriation of the State.

Crossroads of Selargius

It all happens less than four hundred steps from the crossroads of speculation, on the road to Gerrei, in the countryside of Selargius, which has become a land of conquest for the financial energy potentates, the ones that make money in spades on the heads of Sardinia and the Sardinians. It is here that in the coming days the State will once again deploy its “firepower” to defend the great business of the “leash-cable”, the one that Terna, the electrical arm of Rome, wants to build to transfer to Sicily and Campania, the wind and photovoltaic energy that the most hardened speculators want to grind in the land of Sardinia.

Strong and weak powers

It is an all-Italian story, between strong powers and poor farmers, between citizens outraged by the devastating speculation that looms over their heads and the State that deploys all its power to stop the weak and protect the strong. It could be summarized: strong with the weak, weak with the strong. Here, in this countryside transformed into a battlefield, the last siege is being played out to try to stop a mammoth project that the energy potentates want at all costs. In the past few days there has been no history: dozens of armored vehicles, riot gear, even water jets ready to be used to disperse the farmers of Selargius, treated like dangerous black-blocks. Nothing happened, there could be no resistance. They arrived with bulldozers and heavy vehicles to raze olive trees and garrisons, in an instant they unrolled hundreds of meters of netting as if they had to militarily shield another piece of Sardinia, always at the service of multinationals.

More land to tear up

They shouted, the farmers and the garrisons, but they could do nothing in front of that military deployment, invasive and without appeal. In the next few days, from Wednesday onwards, the scenes could be repeated: the expropriations by the State are not over, more land must be taken from other citizens and farmers. No institution, obviously, is concerned with stopping a project that will be of no use to Sardinia, but will have only one objective: to allow the transfer of wind and photovoltaic energy to the Continent. An investment, if you can call it that, of 3.7 billion, to be paid also by the Sardinian citizens through the system charges to be "loaded" on the electricity bills. Too bad, however, that, according to confidential reports, almost 50% of that "renewable" energy will be dispersed in the seabed.

Proximity to hell

An undersea cable, it must be said without subterfuge, in total contrast with European regulations that require the use of solar and wind energy in “proximity” to the places where it is produced. Sardinia, in reality, is anything but in “proximity” to Sicily or Campania. Here, in “proximity” to the terminal of the Tyrrhenian Link , there is only hell. When we cross the checkpoint of this “stationary” camp for decades, no one asks you for your documents, they simply peer down at you to understand who dares to enter that jungle of illegality and poisons, pollution and blatant impunity.

Corrupt system

The entrance frames are the forbidden chronicle of a plunder that becomes a “system”, where it is difficult to imagine petty thefts and burning braziers. The scan that runs in front of the lens that imprisons the evidence leaves no room for doubt: it is a disassembly line that would make the worst money laundering organizations pale. The four wheels struggle on the dirt road, with a cemetery of car carcasses first emptied by “criminal” hands and then entrusted to the care of fire, the one that erases fingerprints and serial numbers. Unlike those expropriations of public utility, carried out a few days ago with military deployment in favor of Terna and company, here every ordinance is waste paper. The pile of cars devastated without respite is hurled across hectares of land, now impregnated with every kind of acid and poison, like the putrid air that permanently lingers over this old incinerator.

The State does not exist

Here everything seems to have harnessed forever that acrid stench of corruption that has been burning for years with impunity on the "roof" of Selargius and its surroundings. In the coming days, at the crossroads of the Selargius countryside, the deployment will once again be military. The last piece of land to be torn up for the electricity business of the energy lobbies in Sardinian soil. In the hell of poisons and pollution, however, nothing will happen. In this strip of Sardinia, on the border with speculation, the State does not exist.

Mauro Pili