Rita Borsellino: Fearless anti-mafia campaigner who sought to rid Sicily and Italy of Cosa Nostra

After her brother was murdered in the 1990s, her determined opposition to the mob earned her an impromptu home visit from Silvio Berlusconi – but she didn’t let him in

After the murder of her brother, a prosecuting magistrate, Borsellino became a defiant public critic of the mafiosi, notably through her work in the NGO Libera (AFP/Getty)

Rita Borsellino was one of the most prominent women in Sicilian public life. Born in Palermo just weeks after the end of the Second World War and trained as a pharmacist, she would devote the last third of her life to a cause as noble as it was dangerous: ridding Sicily, and Italy, of mafia power. She died there, aged 73, following a long illness.

If Cosa Nostra had for decades maintained its grip on her island through terrorist violence and blackmail, Borsellino dared to stand up against it. Her public campaign, including in the NGO Libera, sought to prove that Sicily was not doomed to remain under Cosa Nostra control forever.

The origins of Borsellino’s campaign owed much to her brother Paolo, a member of Sicily’s “Antimafia pool” of prosecuting magistrates.

The pool’s founder Rocco Chinnici was murdered by Mafiosi in 1983, followed by Paolo’s close friend Giovanni Falcone in May 1992. The pool’s collective structure, galvanised by the “Maxi Trial” which started in 1986 – the biggest trial in history, laying charges against 475 mafiosi – meant that each member committed to continuing its work. Yet in July 1992 Paolo was himself killed by a car bomb close to the family home on the Via d’Amelio. Five policemen from his escort also died in the blast.

After her brother’s death Borsellino became a defiant public critic of the mafiosi, notably through her work in the NGO Libera, founded by priest Don Luigi Ciotti. She, together with the Arci association, was the force behind its “Antimafia Caravan”, which travelled around the continent to broadcast its message.

This was not just a campaign against violence but also a programme for social renewal. This drew in particular on Libera’s experience using a 1996 law allowing associations to take over confiscated mafia property. In the very areas where Cosa Nostra activity has been suppressed, Libera has formed its own cooperatives, enshrining workers’ rights and environmental protection, for instance in its 1,400 hectares of former mafia-run farmland.

Borsellino’s campaign also took a more directly political turn. She was not simply willing to join hands with anyone who claimed to support her cause or wanted to bathe in its aura of respectability.

In 1994, as new prime minister Silvio Berlusconi visited Borsellino’s hometown, he sought her aid in conferring legitimacy on his government. As she recalled, “he was visiting Palermo and came to ring at the entryphone of the house on Via d’Amelio”, on the same street where her brother was killed. “But after a moment’s hesitation I told Berlusconi that I couldn’t let him in. He insisted, and asked me over the entryphone: ‘What can we do to beat the mafia?’ I replied: ‘Everything, because you’re in government.’ From then on, I didn’t hear from him again.”

The role of the mafia had, indeed, become intensely political. Berlusconi had ridden to the rescue of the right at the 1994 elections, after the old Socialist and Christian-Democratic parties had been destroyed by the “Clean Hands” trials of the previous two years.

More than half of all MPs had come under investigation in this sweeping kickbacks scandal; Berlusconi had supplanted the old parties and yet was himself implicated in the affairs that had felled them. After the collapse of the great postwar parties, the courts and corruption allegations would play an increasing role in the political arena over subsequent decades, helping to preparing the way for the rise of the Five Star Movement at the end of the 2000s.

Borsellino’s own politics were very different, however. Indeed, while her brother had been associated with the post-fascists as a young man and combined his campaign for legality with a broader hard-right politics, Borsellino was herself definitely of the left. A feminist, in 2005 she won the primaries to be the centre-left Union coalition candidate for the presidency of the Sicilian region, with the backing of the continuity-communist parties, the Greens and the anti-corruption Italy of Values party.

Defeated in the final vote, she would again stand in the Sinistra Arcobaleno or Rainbow Left federation of radical left parties in 2008, before ultimately joining the Democratic Party and becoming an MEP in 2009.

If Italy’s politics today look especially dark, Cosa Nostra’s power to terrorise Sicilians is not what it once was. A crackdown following the murders of Paolo Borsellino and Giovanni Falcone led to the capture of il capo dei capi Salvatore Riina in 1993; if his associates retaliated with further terror killings, this represented only the ferocity of a gravely wounded animal.

The legal crackdown and Sicilians’ increasing refusal to pay protection money have weakened the mafia families. Yet they still bear a diffuse influence, not so much imposing terror as buying political influence through less spectacular forms of corruption.

After her brother’s murder, Rita Borsellino campaigned against violence, but also stressed the need to break out of the cycle of criminality itself, and the social problems from which it emerged. She reflected on the fate of those “condemned to prison from childhood, because of their name, their family, their social situation – because their path is already set”. Her work, she said, was to make sure their path was not set, to “work for change, to approach them and to propose something new”. Her work helped trace out that alternative: a different path that remains to be built.

Rita Borsellino, politician and anti-mafia campaigner, born 2 June 1945, died 15 August 2018