citizenship is served –

Rita Cavallaro and Dario Martini

06 maggio 2024

The citizenship trick that is hidden in what appear to be possible thefts of a dead person’s identity. This is the trick, being examined by inspectors, thanks to which more and more foreigners are able to obtain citizenship by blood and the related Italian passport. A system, the one that emerges from the investigations at the Italian Consulate in Venezuela, which originates from deception, fishing from the registry archives for men actually born in our country, who came into the world in the second half of the nineteenth century in small towns who, if asked for checks will confirm the real existence of that birth certificate, registered at the registry office with the name and date indicated by the aspiring descendants. Once the identity has been obtained from the alleged ancestor, forgery professionals come into play, preparing the documents to take to the Italian consulates in their countries to demonstrate that they have the right to be Italian. And it doesn’t matter that none of the applicants have a local surname, because in support there are documents, packaged ad hoc, which state, in black and white, how the surname has been lost in the meanders of the generations, due to almost all female descendants .

The Caracas practices would reveal the trick of the Italian-Venezuelans, who would have developed a documentary staging, in which various subjects would be involved, including lawyers, translators and compliant administrative officials. A system that would hide behind the module called “Family tree for citizenship reconstructions”, a scheme that would summarize the Italian descent in support of the recognition of “jure sanguinis” citizenship. The ancestor, who in the majority of cases found was born after 1850 in small Italian municipalities, from Tuscany (as in Marciana), to Abruzzo up to Lazio, magically appears thirty years later in Caracas, where, an act of marriage, ties him to a Venezuelan woman. From their union a son is born, who still has the Italian surname but which he will soon lose. In fact, his wife gives birth to a daughter.

At that point, the fruit of subsequent marriages will all be women, the last of whom will possess the right marriage certificate, with the father of the citizenship applicant. A system that would emerge from dozens of practices sifted by the Inspectorate of the Farnesina, which activated the investigations following the complaint of the Fratelli d’Italia deputy, Andrea Di Giuseppe, who, last January, presented a complaint to the Rome Prosecutor’s Office, asking to ascertain the alleged round of buying and selling of citizenships at the Italian consulate in Caracas. A headquarters which, according to the Italian consul general in Venezuela, Nicola Occhipinti, is considered “the best consulate in the world”, as the diplomat said on 23 March 2023, in an interview with Ansa in which, in addition to having highlighted the great results obtained in terms of speed, efficiency and transparency of consular services thanks to technological modernization, he argued that «the productivity of the consulate is monstrous, all appointments are made via email with responses within 24 hours and the renewal Passport processing in Caracas is done in three days, while inside the country it is done in 15 days without having to come to the capital”, declared Occhipinti. Now the Farnesina inspectors intend to shed light on whether, in the face of such rapidity, all the necessary checks have been carried out in order to issue Italian citizenships by descent.