The "Miteni" Case
The Miteni case: justice struck the perpetrator (little Miteni, bankrupt) and spared the industrial principals. An investigation in parts.
The parts
The opening of an investigation in parts into the largest environmental poisoning ever established in Italy.
Inside the Miteni judgment — the findings of fact against Syensqo and DuPont are right there.
Spinetta and Trissino are not two stories: they are the two mouths of a single volcano. One and the same molecule — cC6O4, which belongs to Solvay — and one and the same directing hand weld them into a single disaster, extending across almost the whole of the North. A disaster that remains invisible, because no one — starting with the Ministry of the Environment — will agree to call it by its name.
I have called the men and women of this story "guinea pigs". It is not a rhetorical flourish: it is, I fear, the exact definition. A guinea pig has not chosen, does not know, and someone else decides about its body. Here begins the count of the damage to health: the reckoning that no one has finished making.
The doses, the signals, the revolt: how much poison in the bodies, what the studies already say, and the guinea pigs who have stopped being guinea pigs. The experiment went wrong: the companies will make good in other ways, the effects on the victims remain where they occurred.
The population beyond the gates: the figures of the disaster, and the almost four thousand dead that a single study dared to count.