The ruling on the state-mafia negotiation does not tell the whole story – Alessandro Calvi

The recent appeal sentence of the trial on the so-called state-mafia negotiation has hit politics and information like a flare-up, causing a violent controversy. More than the analysis of the facts, the scene was occupied by political speculation. We even got to discuss who had won or lost among the journalists, who became almost more protagonists than the protagonists themselves. Or, in other words, they have inappropriately become news themselves.

In a country that, despite the thirty years that have elapsed since the hands-on investigation, still appears unable to elaborate its own recent past, it would have been naive to expect something different. And, indeed, the clash that opened as soon as the Palermo judges pronounced themselves appeared to be the son of the quarrelsome bipolarism that in the last three decades has produced a heavy distortion of the debate on justice and the story of judicial events.

The fact is that, however, structurally over-the-top tones make it very difficult to examine the facts and, as Giancarlo Caselli recently observed in the Fatto Quotidiano, they erase their complexity. Caselli, who in the nineties was chief prosecutor in Palermo, also intended to respond to those who objected to the judges “of wanting to reconstruct historical events in a prejudicial perspective instrumental to the identification of criminal responsibility, thus forcing historiographic interpretations”. But, beyond these kinds of issues, it is enough to look at the headlines and the television debates of these days to realize the state of things.

It is completely understandable, for example, that Marcello Dell’Utri, in the wake of the judges’ pronouncement on the matter of the negotiation, argues that “this acquittal also casts doubt on the previous sentence”, that is the one he remedied in another and different trial for external competition in a mafia association. It is a little less so when others say the same, also because the reality of the facts, purged of political speculation, continues to stubbornly tell us a whole different story.

In short, it is undeniable that Massimo Bordin was right when he wrote that “the ‘negotiation’ process is a meta-juridical event” and that “basically we are dealing with a narrative, rather than procedural, elaboration of a real theme, the relationship between the mafia and politics “. However, more than the magistrates, the account of this situation should be asked of those who in recent years, on every front, have nourished themselves with the work of the magistrates to intoxicate political life and information, favoring, even unwittingly, a distortion in the perception of issues that they are first of all judicial.

Of course, it is inevitable that the judicial plan is mixed with that of the political struggle and the journalistic report but, in intervening in any capacity, care should always be taken to remember that each of them has its own rules. And, although it may seem obvious to repeat it, it is precisely in the light of the rules of the procedural system that the facts concerning the processes should be analyzed in the first instance, in order to then be able to draw consequences also on the political level. In short, we must start from facts and norms. Otherwise the risk is to betray reality.

The intertwined relationship between some members of state bodies and people connected to the Cosa Nostra is a fact. And it is a fact that, in the activity carried out in the context of that report, no crime against the men of the state is recognizable – according to the judges of Palermo, while the opposite is true for the mafia. While waiting for the reasons for the sentence in which each element will be clarified, in order to understand the reason for this asymmetrical assessment, one can meanwhile look at the charges, i.e. what the defendants were accused of, because in any case it is about this and only about this, and least of all on the history of Italy, that the court of Palermo has ruled.

As the former magistrate Armando Spataro explained, the accusation made by the prosecutor against the defendants “is not that of having given rise to a negotiation – a crime not provided for in our criminal code – but of having everyone, in competition with each other and starting since 1992, threatened politicians and institutions, envisaging massacres and other serious crimes, to condition the regular activity of the government and other political bodies ”. And it is this last element that the judges did not consider proved beyond a reasonable doubt, at least as regards the accusations brought against the men of the state, unlike the other defendants.

On the other hand, it is possible, writes Spataro, that some officers of the carabinieri have contacted men of Cosa Nostra “to understand what were the conditions set by the criminal organization to interrupt” the long season of crimes that culminated with the massacre strategy. However, as mentioned, this conduct does not in itself constitute a complicity in the crime for which those men had been charged since, in summary, according to the judges, there was a lack of will to threaten politics and institutions and interfere with political and institutional activities. If anything, it was, and Spataro still speaks, of “politically and ethically reprehensible investigative choices and practices”.

There is, in short, a space to build a political judgment but it is elsewhere, and the reality is that sentences serve to establish personal responsibility in relation to specific and limited facts, not to reconstruct the history of an entire country. And, paradoxically, this very affair proves it to us, by keeping together the so-called negotiation and the acquittal of some of the accused, a circumstance that seems to some to be an intolerable contradiction. At the same time, however, the sentences do not even constitute the perimeter within which journalistic and historical reconstruction must necessarily be forced. Indeed, once the task of those who have to judge on certain and well-determined accusations has been exhausted, the work of those who – historians, above all – can put those facts into perspective to offer them to public opinion in all their complexity, including the shadows that the courts by their very nature cannot enlighten.