I’m publishing a letter from a young man from Sicily addressed to the President of the Region of Sicily, Cuffaro.

“ Dear President Cuffaro,
I’m writing to you now that you have been re-elected to lead our region to look in depth at a question that I have asked you in the past. I am Benny Calasanzio, resident at S. Margherita Belice but I’m a student at Padua. I’m writing to you to express my opinion (protected by article 21) to express my total disagreement, and even more my disgust largely justified as regards your “warning to those who defame” that’s present on your Internet site www.totocuffaro.it

Honoured President, you give warning that in-depth research is being carried out on the internet aimed at finding and bringing to criminal or civil courts all those that defame you.

On this point, even though I remain firmly convinced that liberty is a good that cannot be taken away nor censored, and even though I believe that a politician must accept criticism, even harsh and of doubtful content, I could even accept your words, without sharing your opinion. What leaves me astonished and indignant is the point following your ”programme manifesto against those who defame”.
When you say that the money resulting from actions for defamation that you foresee yourself winning will be given to the families of victims of the mafia, you are offending those families and no one gives you the right to rise up as an antimafia benefactor especially considering the problems you have with the judicial system. Can I also remind you that the response to an action for defamation that is lost can also be an action for calumny.
President, the one writing to you, has had an uncle and a grandfather filled with shot from the mafia because they didn’t agree to a request to sell a small lime factory at Lucca Sicula, more than 10 years ago and they were immediately recognised as “innocent victims of the mafia”. They died because they did not give in to a mafia logic, for having rebelled, and having held on to their liberty, their refusal to compromise, their wish to continue to breathe the perfume of liberty, not the stink of the mafia pact.

President, the one writing to you, has spoken about the rule of law and trust in the system of justice from a stage, in front of schools, and children, together with Rita Borsellino during a meeting of the Antimafia Caravan, and I am convinced and I will remain so, that, the one writing to you, President, has without doubt, more right than you to say that the mafia is terrible, or at least has the reputation and the honour to say so.

My indignation is the result of your words and still more from your actions. You are on trial for favouring the mafia. The same mafia that has killed members of the Borsellino family who are much less important than the judge, they are my relatives.

Day by day, documents for the inquiry are deposited and they increase the seriousness of your position and day after day you become still more morally less adequate to have the title of President. The most recent document deposited would seem to show the existence of a mole that you placed in the prosecutors office in relation to the investigation into Campanello who repented and was helping Bernardo Provenzano).

I ask myself how, rationally and without polemics, you can turn to the families who are victims in mourning because of mafia crimes when, by referring to the current investigations, you are under investigation for crimes that it seems were helping the mafia. That is incoherent and unjust for those families and it may be legal according to the law but certainly not according to ethics and morality.

I ask you , honoured President, as regards my family, to not make us beneficiaries of those donations that you intend to make to those families that are still crying for their relatives who have been killed, by a criminal association from which the institutions should stay at a distance and should fight with every means and in every moment.

I ask you to leave us alone in our grief. Alone with those who truly and daily are doing something against the mafia. I invite the other families who share in the same grief to do likewise and to refuse any help coming from a President who before turning to us should clear up his situation in the courts to see whether or not he has been involved in crimes in favour of the mafia.

Wishing you good work, Benny Calasanzio”.