Page 109 - Supplemento 2-2016 (ENG)

Tackling Environmental Crime throUgh standardized Methodologies

Giuseppe Onufrio
Executive Director, Greenpeace Italy

I would like to thank the Carabinieri Corps and the State Forestry
Department for this invitation. I believe this is really an important occasion for
a debate also in the framework of the discussion about the Institutional reor-
ganization of CFS (State Forestry Separtment).

I want to start, just like Procuratore Pennisi, remembering the Honduran
activist Berta Cacéres, winner of the 2015 Goldman award for the environ-
ment, killed in her house in the night between the 2nd 3rd of March for defen-
ding a river from an industrial development project. I believe that there are two
categories of people who pay with their life for their civic commitment, more
than others: environmentalists and journalists, particularly in those areas of the
world where armed criminal groups and mafia often operate on behalf of third
party interests that may even be ‘legal’.

In this sense I concur with Procuratore Pennisi’s analysis in terms of the
“eco-mafia”, an issue in which Greenpeace made its own contribution in the
80s and 90s in the area of international dangerous waste trafficking, showing
that there was a grey area of operators, also financial, interfacing between legal
and illegal economy where local mafia provided their muscle. In Italy we know
about the activities of members of the mafia and the camorra in the field of
toxic waste, but there was also a network of people in countries like Switzerland
or Austria who directed international trafficking.

We all have thanked Pope Francis for the Encyclical Laudato Si’ but, as
recently stated by the Secretary of the Episcopal Conference, we cannot
applaud the Encyclical and then ignore it.

As an international organisation, Greenpeace is trying to confront cases of
environmental destruction that are happening even in those countries where
there are higher risks for those who defend the environment, also protesting
against those who use violence to input products in supply chains that end up in
our markets, possibly in the context of a fully legal economy. At the source of
these cases of environmental destruction, there a chain of violence which comes
all the way to us in the shape of raw materials, like timber; if we don’t understand

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