Girolamo Li Causi (1 January 1896 – 14 April 1977) was an Italian politician and a leader of the Italian Communist Party who was a prominent figure in the struggle for land reform and against the Mafia in Sicily. He labelled large estates (the latifondi) Sicily's central problem.
Political activist
Li Causi was born in Termini Imerese, a town in the province of Palermo on the northern coast of Sicily. The son of a shoemaker, he graduated with an economics degree from the University of Venice in northern Italy. As a student, he joined the Italian Socialist Party (Partito Socialista Italiano; PSI).
Forced to leave Venice by the Fascists after Mussolini's March on Rome in October 1922, he went to Rome and then Milan, where he helped organise the Third Internationalist faction of the PSI. In the summer of 1924 he joined the Communist Party of Italy (Partito Comunista d'Italia; PCdI), becoming part of the editorial staff of the Communist newspaper l'Unità and the magazine Pagine rosse. After the failed assassination attempt on the fascist prime minister Benito Mussolini in September 1926, the PCdI was outlawed and the publication of l'Unità suppressed. A clandestine edition resumed on the first day of 1927 in which Li Causi was actively involved.
Resisting fascism
Li Causi became the PCdI interregional secretary in Piedmont and Liguria, where he succeeded in producing clandestine copies of l'Unità and in helping organise rice workers' strikes in Piedmont. He fled to Paris in mid-1927, but was arrested on 10 May 1928 in Pisa during one of his clandestine return trips. Li Causi was sentenced to 20 years and nine months in prison. In 1937, as the result of a political amnesty, he was released from prison and banished to the penal colony on the island of Ponza. When Mussolini was forced to resign on 25 July 1943 Li Causi stayed in the penal colony on the island of Ventotene, 40 kilometres to the east of Ponza.
After his release, he went north to join the resistance against the German occupation and remaining Italian fascists. By this time the PCdI had been renamed as the Italian Communist Party (Partito Comunista Italiano; PCI), and shortly thereafter Li Causi was made the party's representative on the National Liberation Committee for Upper Italy in Milan, where he was active in producing l'Unità clandestinely and in organising the resistance. Li Causi became a member of the national directorate of the PCI that was reinstated on 29 August 1943 in Rome.
Back to Sicily
The PCI directorate sent Li Causi to Sicily to reinforce the party with an experienced leader. He arrived in Palermo on 10 August 1944. Although the PCI – traditionally weak in Sicily – included a separatist faction, Li Causi successfully urged the Communists to maintain a strong anti-separatist stance, and by late 1944 Communists and separatists were doing battle in the streets.
Li Causi's arrival in Sicily marked a change in Communist fortunes on the island. He worked to curb dissension, prevent violence, and block Sicilian separatism while supporting autonomy. Li Causi believed that Sicilians would benefit from autonomy. Separatism, which represented a "vague sentimental attitude" that the island's reactionaries supported, would only cause harm. Li Causi became the main rival of separatist leader Finocchiaro Aprile and the most consistent enemy of separatism.
The Villalba attack
On 16 September 1944 Li Causi and the local socialist leader Michele Pantaleone, as leaders of the Blocco del popolo in Sicily, gave a speech to landless peasants at an election rally in Villalba, the personal fiefdom of Mafia boss Calogero Vizzini. In the morning tensions rose when Christian Democrat mayor Beniamino Farina – a relative of Vizzini as well as his successor as mayor – angered local Communists by ordering all hammer-and-sickle signs to be taken down from buildings along the road on which Li Causi would travel into town. When his supporters protested, they were intimidated by separatists and thugs.