Tensions flare over virus-hit 'ghetto' in southern Italy

Italy sent riot police as reinforcements Friday to a council estate in the south where a cluster of coronavirus cases among Bulgarian farm workers has sparked tensions with locals.

According to AFP, about 700 people placed in lockdown this week in the complex of five blocks of flats in Mondragone -- a town north of Naples -- would remain isolated for another 15 days, the Campania region's head Vincenzo De Luca said Thursday.

Local health authorities said 43 positive cases had been identified and tests were being carried out on all the residents.

Four of the high-rises house Bulgarian workers and their families while Italian squatters occupy the fifth, De Luca said.

The estate is "one of the thousands of ghettos in Italy, where we amass more or less undocumented foreigners to make them live in more or less heinous conditions," said Corriere della Sera's editorialist Goffredo Buccini.

The Bulgarians work without contracts under a well-established system known as "caporalato", which sees them do long hours in the fields for wages well below the national minimum, Italian newspapers said.

The men earn around four euros an hour, while women earn less and minors pocket just 75 cents an hour, according to Huffington Post Italia.

It said the families were forced to pay rent under the table to the "caporali", the intermediaries who organise the daily recruitment and transport to the fields of workers, who also run the squats.

The army sent 50 soldiers in on Thursday to help secure the zone after clashes between frustrated Bulgarians who wanted to return to work to earn money for food and angry locals who blamed them for spreading the virus.

Hundreds of Bulgarians who came out to demonstrate Thursday were persuaded by police to return inside, but locals who learned they had left the Palazzi Cirio estate then turned up to hurl stones and trash cars, local media reported.

A resident at the estate was photographed throwing a chair off his balcony towards the crowd in retaliation.

The breaking of the lockdown was "unacceptable, because respect for the rules is even more imperative when there's a health risk," deputy interior minister Matteo Mauri told Radio 24.

Coronavirus tests were being offered to residents living near the estate and if 100 cases surfaced, the whole seaside town of 28,000 people would be locked down, De Luca said.

He said a few people with the virus had since slipped through the net and disappeared, but insisted surveillance of the estate would be 24 hours non stop from now on.

SS