The unrest spread this Wednesday in Italy due to the death of an indian laborer irregularly employed on an agricultural holding in the Lazio region (center), to which his bosses left him on the street last Monday after suffering a work accident with a machine that amputated his arm.

The victim, a 31-year-old migrant named Satnam Singh, worked on a vegetable farm in the town of Latina and died this Wednesday in a hospital in Rome due to the severity of his injuries, after being abandoned outside his house on Monday with his arm amputated, according to media reports. The case has created scandal and new complaints against the so-called ‘caporalato’, a common system in Italy’s agricultural sector that consists of employing migrants as cheap labor through foremen who select workers and keep part of the money. that the boss offers as daily wages.

According to the media, this reality is exactly what Satnam Singh suffered, despite be prohibited: In 2011, a new law was passed against the recruitment of workers, which stipulates jail time and fines for anyone who collects labor to offer it to third parties under conditions of exploitation, but it is still common in the countryside.

According to the local press, the Indian worker lost an entire arm and his lower limbs. were crushed after being dragged by a plastic packaging machine used for greenhouse crops. Instead of being taken to a hospital, the farm’s businessmen allegedly They put Singh on a minibus who left him in front of his house without being attended to, which aggravated his poor condition.

The Undersecretary of the Ministry of Labor, Claudio Durigonexpressed his desire for justice to “clarify” this incident as soon as possible: “The case of the Indian day laborer abandoned in Latina in very serious conditions after an accident cannot be tolerated in any way” he said in a statement. “Singh was literally thrown to the ground, abandoned on the asphalt, bleeding and unconscious,” along with a harvest box loaded with his severed arm, according to the newspaper Il Messaggero.

After that, the businessman who employed him is being investigated for homicide and negligence. In turn, the mayor of Latina, Matilde Celentano, announced that her city council will be presented as a civil accusation in the judicial procedure. For its part, Coldiretti, a leading organization of Italian farmers, assured that “what happened is an intolerable tragedy“, urged “to keep our guard very high against the phenomenon of ‘caporalato'” and to adopt “severe sanctions and rigorous controls” to put an end to “illegal work and exploitation.”

For its part, the CGIL union, the largest union in the country, considered the death of the Indian worker as “dramatic” and denounced that it happened “in a context of total exploitation“. The main opposition force, the center-left Democratic Party (PD), expressed concern about what it sees as an “agromafioso system.”

It is a framework “in which extreme exploitation and violence towards workers, often of foreign origin, are the modern version of old slavery practices to be dismantled“concluded the head of PD Labor, Maria Cecilia Guerra.

Cases of migrant exploitation in Italy are common both in agriculture and in other sectors. In April, Ten people were arrested for exploiting 67 migrants in Tuscany (center). The case involved six farm owners who provided employment using foremen in charge of the selection, transportation and daily control of employees.