Willy's Homicide: The Face of Racism in Italy

Written by: Luca Iposi​

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​Colleferro, Rome- September 6th, 2020. It is around 2.30am when Willy Monteiro Duarte, a 21-year-old teenager born from his Cape Verdean parents in Italy, was hanging out with some friends when he notices an ongoing fight.
 
Four men- Gabriele and his brother Marco Bianchi, Francesco Belleggia and Mario Pincarelli, all between the ages of 22 and 26 had started a fight with one of Willy’s classmates, Zurma. Willy decides to go over and try to break the fight but gets caught in the middle of it, while Zurma manages to run away the four men keep beating him up while his friends watch helpless. The two Bianchi brothers are experts in martial arts, so Willy has no chance to defend himself and the last few hits come while he screams, “Stop, stop, stop! I can’t breathe anymore,” until he was not able to get up anymore. The four men leave him on the ground, incapable of breathing, and at 5am Willy’s death is ruled by local authorities.
 
During the investigation, some racist comments left online by the Bianchi brothers resurface, including many with the use of the n-word and the police adds racism as one of the motives for Willy’s homicide, but it is most likely to be excluded since Willy wasn’t the four men’s target.
 
Three of the four men are not imprisoned and in isolation while the fourth is in house arrest.
Whether the reason behind the beating and homicide is racist or not this case has brought up the racist face of Italy.
 
One of the guilty men’s parents came out to his son’s defence saying they hadn’t done anything wrong, they’d “[…] just killed an immigrant”, as well as a 23-year-old student from Treviso who referred to the killers as “heroes” for “killing a chimpanzee”.
 
These are just a few examples of racist tweets that have appeared online following Willy’s tragic death where people clearly expressed that, since Willy was black and his parents were immigrants, his life did not matter that much.
 
This happens in the same Italy where right-wing politicians blame African immigrants for the increasing numbers of Covid-19 and say the government is moving them from one refugee camp to the other to spread the virus throughout all of the country.
In the same Italy where Lega (one of the main parties in Italy) asks the local administration of Bergamo, Northern Italy, to forbid immigrants from using busses during certain times of the day to leave more room on said busses for students.
 
The same Italy where people think a black person’s life has so little value that they would rather them drown in the Mediterranean Sea than must welcome them in their country.
 
Willy was murdered in a horrible way and had no faults in what happened other than wanting to help a friend and some people were only able to say was attack the victim for the colour of his skin.
 
The racism in Italy has become impossible to hide and deny and that’s why we need the Black Lives Matter movement to be relevant now more than ever.