An international protest against the Prime Minister of Italy came all the way to Albuquerque on Saturday.

Vito Sparacello and Sergio
Tassoni, who are both UNM students from Italy, organized the event in Albuquerque and got attention from passersby as they rallied outside the UNM Bookstore. They said protests happening at the same time in Rome were expected to attract more than a million people.

Sparacello said he took part in the protest because Silvio Berlusconi, the Italian Prime Minister, is corrupt.

“The problem is that this is a mafia guy,” Sparacello said. “Nobody knows how he got (his) money. He makes laws to avoid trials and he had (about) 16 trials. And now he has just two, because he changed the laws to basically make his crime not crime anymore.”
Tassoni said the protests were organized worldwide using the Internet. A Facebook page promoting the event listed dozens of cities in Italy and around the world where protests were being held, he said.

“This thing is huge,” he said. “Everywhere there are Italians in the world, they are trying to do something.”

One other aspect of the protest made creative use of the Internet, Tassoni and Sparacello said. They said people from around the world spent Saturday logging on to the Italian government’s Web site, in an attempt to overload the servers and shut down the site.

Sparacello said the Internet was the only option for organizing the protests, because Berlusconi owns most of the major media outlets in Italy. According to fliers distributed by Sparacello and Tassoni, Berlusconi privately owns three of the national television networks in Italy and controls the other three because they are state-run.

“Basically, the problem is that, in Italy, this guy owns all the media,” he said. “So basically, the problem in Italy is that this guy controls the mind of the people.”

Berlusconi has remained in government since 1994 because he controls the media outlets and therefore is able to convince many people to vote for him, Sparacello said.

“This guy made this, changing the laws,” he said. “He’s using democracy to deconstruct democracy.”

According to The New York Times, Berlusconi denies the charges and said the opposition to him is driven by “communists.”

Sparacello said the protests against Berlusconi are nonpartisan and do not support any political party. He said the purpose of the protests is simply to bring attention to the abuses of power perpetrated by Berlusconi’s administration.
“Left wing, right wing, this is not the point. The point is monopoly,” Sparacello said. “You cannot stand a situation like this.”

Tassoni said the goal of the protests in Albuquerque is to raise awareness of world events in the UNM community. Many UNM students have very little “sense of what’s happening outside of the U.S., and sometimes not even a sense of what is happening inside the U.S.,” he said.

Tassoni said he wants people to “at least read, and try to find real news, preferably not in the newspapers.”