1.

Under the headline “The Hunt Has Begun”, there’s a report here in El País about the rising wave of xenophobia in Italy. It makes particular note of the efforts of the Italian government to vilify Roma people by wildly exaggerating their involvement in crime and by tolerating violence against them.

It quotes from a report by an NGO:

In Italy a political and media campaign is underway to criminalize the Roma people and to permit violent evictions, intimidation, legal and de facto expulsions of entire families and abuses of due process.

2.

Millions of Italian immigrants arrived in Argentina in the final decades of the 19^th century and first decades of the 20^th. A further significant wave of immigrants arrived here after the Second World War. Italians, their culture, gastronomy and language have had a profound effect on the development of Argentina and signs of their presence are ubiquitous.

The last two general elections in Italy have allowed the election of 12 deputies and 6 senators to specifically represent Italians who live permanently abroad. Hundreds of thousands of Argentines with dual nationality voted in the last two general elections in Italy and during the campaigns the city of Buenos Aires was plastered with posters urging support for this or that candidate.

3.

To the best of my knowledge, there have been no protests about the treatment of Roma people in Italy outside the Italian Embassy in Buenos Aires and neither have there been repeated public comparisons of the present government of Italy with that of Mussolini. One does not see graffiti of the Italian flag besmirched by the fasces on the walls of this city and I have heard of no protests outside Italian community centres either. There have been no calls on Italo-Argentines to disassociate themselves from Berlusconi and his government and nor do I read columns in the newspapers by Italo-Argentine intellectuals pointing out what a grave error it would be to blame Argentines of Italian descent for the doings of the current Italian government.