‘Letizia Battaglia made sure people dared to talk about the mafia’ | Columns & Opinion

“Thanks to one brave woman with only a camera, the Sicilians dared to stand up to the terror.”

The first time I did a report on the mafia in Sicily was two years after an earthquake in the early 1980s. Money had been collected in the Netherlands for new houses for the population and we were curious whether those houses were already there after those two years. Not so: the residents were still in containers and the money had disappeared in the pockets of mafia bosses. We saw half-finished highways, without beginning and end, that had been built with money from the European Union. Same story: the rest of the highway was in the pockets of the mobster.