On Saturday, September 28, more than 10,000 people march in silence through the streets of Mestre, a town in Venice located in front of the lagoon, on the mainland. The march was organized after the death of Jack, nicknamed Giacomo Gobbato, 26, stabbed on the night of September 20, while defending a woman who had been assaulted, a few kilometers from the tourist center of the capital of Veneto.
Throughout the route, from the station to the city center, the neighbors, leaning on their windows, applaud the procession. After the tragedy, angry Venetians spontaneously gathered to imagine a different city together.
In recent years in Mestre, robberies and violent incidents, especially related to drug trafficking, have continued to increase. Heroin is causing havoc and its users are getting younger and younger. Venice is, along with Rome, the Italian city with the most overdose deaths. According to the Italian website Geoverdose, there have already been seven victims since the beginning of the year. Local health services have around 2,000 users treated for drug addiction, a figure that necessarily underestimates the total number of drug users.
Feeling of abandonment
At the same time, as overtourism spreads across Veneto, causing real estate speculation and rising rents, entire neighborhoods in the city are losing some of their residents. To illustrate this demographic flight with serious economic consequences, the artist Freak of Nature painted two years ago the facades of all the empty shops in the center of Mestre, almost 150 shop windows. In the deserted streets, in the abandoned buildings, where criminal organizations have intervened, the Venetians still present live with a feeling of abandonment and, sometimes, fear.
The conservative mayor, Luigi Brugnaro, a former businessman elected in 2015 with the anointing of the Northern League, has always placed security at the center of his electoral campaigns. During the summer of 2018, he organized a spectacular operation against drug trafficking, closing all streets around Mestre station to traffic, with the participation of the police and the army, supported by helicopters: 25 people were arrested.
Following the murder of Giacomo Gobbato, the elected official continued to ask the Minister of the Interior to send more and more soldiers to carry out police operations. But the purely repressive approach followed by his administration for nine years, accompanied by severe budget cuts in social services, has not produced the expected results. In recent months, a series of investigations and accusations affecting the mayor and his municipal councilors for “corruption” also seem to have further distanced the municipality from the expectations of its citizens.
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