Four immigrants were burnt alive in Amendolara, southern Italy, by their slave-masters, because they demanded to be paid for the work they were doing by picking strawberries. The episode has shocked the country and has cast light on the existence of slave camps in Italy, run by immigration rackets, which everybody knows but keeps quiet about. Thousands of immigrants pay astronomical amounts of money to the racket in order to reach Europe, where they are inserted into an illegal slave-labor system, where they are either paid miserably or not at all.
Police have arrested the two slave-masters, Pakistani citizens, thanks to camera records showing them pouring gasoline in a van, throwing a cigarette lighter, and locking the van, where the carbonized corpses of the four immigrants, three Afghans and a Pakistani, were found later. The youngest victim was 19, the oldest one was 29. A fifth immigrant succeeded in escaping through a window and reported to the police. The immigrants had regular green cards.
Thousands of immigrants live in shacks and are driven by their masters to the field in the early morning and brought back in the evening. That is how agricultural producers keep costs down in order to survive in the free-market system.
