As Italian mothers helped condemn Mitsubishi bosses for pollutants

I remember well when we received a letter from the health system inviting us to have blood tests to verify the presence of Pafas, because they had identified contamination of the groundwater. When we received the results, we saw that we had these substances in the blood. The report listed compound names that we had never heard of. I, at that moment, didn’t know what PFOA was, pfos, none of that. But it was clear that the safe limit was up to 8, and one of my children was 75, the other 85. At the time, they were 18 and 19 years old. We were completely bewildered, because we didn’t know what it meant. Worse, we only went to this test four years after the region was warned of contamination. Four years we follow with our usual life, completely ignorant of risk. Throughout this time we gave water from the tap at home, unaware that it was contaminated. Before we know the results of the exams, no one said anything. Not a warning, nothing
MARIA CRISTINA COLA

It was the result of the blood test that united the mothers, who decided to act. “We could not stand still. We decided to enter the process that was being started against Miteni and its controllers as a civilian part, to show that we ordinary people can participate and demand justice.”

Maria Cristina is a lawyer, is familiar with laws and the penal code, but other women in the group do not. Together, they faced the bureaucracy, the pressure of companies and the silence of the institutions. It was a painful path full of obstacles, but also of solidarity and hope.

“It was how to see David defeat Goliath”

She recalls that it took a lot of courage to challenge a multinational like Mitsubishi, Miteni’s controller for over a decade, and other giants that have been managing the factory. “We knew it was too small before them. When we decided to constitute ourselves as a civil part in the process, there was already an ongoing investigation thanks to the work of other associations, such as Isde, Legalmbiente and Democratic Medicine. Our merit, perhaps, was to show the ordinary people that they could also delegate everything from above.”

“They have known the contamination since the 1990s, they had internal studies, but they chose to hide the truth. We heard it in court, and it hurts to know that our health was despised.”
The Miteni factory, inaugurated in 1965, produced PFOA and pfos without any environmental control. Internal documents seized by the Environmental Police (NOE) show that the company’s management has known since the 1990s of the severity of contamination.