Portella Della Ginestra Massacre - Conspiracy Theories

Conspiracy Theories

While some historians see the massacre as a conspiracy of the Mafia, anti-communist political forces – the Christian-Democratic party in particular – and American intelligence services in the wake of the Cold War, others consider the bloodbath as the culmination of local struggles for land rights and land reform in the area of Piana degli Albanesi and San Giuseppe Jato. Just as at the end of World War I, the post-war period saw an increase of violence between landowners backed by the Mafia and left-wing peasant movements. A few weeks before the massacre, the local Mafia boss of Piana, Francesco Cuccia, and others had asked landowners for money to "put an end to the communists once and for all." They made clear that they were ready to go beyond the traditional acts of Mafia violence that had been used against the socialist peasant movement before the rise of fascism in the early 1920s when six socialist militants had been killed in Piana.

"Without the consent of the Mafia in Piana degli Albanesi, San Giuseppe Jato and San Cipirello, Giuliano could not have shot at Portella della Ginestra," according to the historian Francesco Renda. Renda, among others, was an eyewitness of the massacre. That May morning he was supposed to speak at Portella. "But I got a bit late and before my eyes this horrific tragedy happened." Renda recalls that immediately after the massacre, the peasants of Piana wanted their own justice, threatening to kill the mafiosi of their county. "I convinced them,” Renda remembered, "that that would have been the provocation needed to outlaw the Communists."