From Ventimiglia
, an asphalted street overlooking the sea takes, by foot
or by bus, to Grimaldi, the last small village located right where Italy
becomes France.
The bus stops at the intersection of two roads. One of them steeps up and leads to the small centre of the village, before turning into a tortuous path up the mountain.
This is one of the beginnings of the Death Pass.
“Ah I see, you’re looking for the pass. I don’t know where it is. I see many of those, you know, extracommunitari looking for it. But I don’t know where it is” says a woman who lives there, when asked for directions. As soon as the road enters the forest, lying on the ground among rocks and grass is an endless trail of the most diverse objects, traces
of previous human movement.
There’s documents and train tickets, clothes and toothbrushes, food wraps and baby diapers. There are arrows
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spray
painted on rocks and trees, they say “don’t go there, it’s too
dangerous” or “France is the other way”. There’s an abandoned farm.jpeg?v=1677349364772)
where
some have spent a night while waiting for the dark to cross the border.
On the Death Pass, cliffs are as high as 100 mt, the road is steep and narrow, and it must be walked at night, to reduce chances of being seen by the police. Drones and helicopters monitor the mountain the Baisse de st. Paul, which leads to Col du Berceau, and police patrols the trail. Not everyone is an experienced hiker, and it’s relatively easy to get lost on this mountain, despite the directions people have left spray painted on the rock. One must keep to the right, as even though the first French city, Menton, looks close, it can’t actually be reached directly from above without risking being stuck or falling from a cliff.
Author and historian Enzo Barnabà, who lives in Grimaldi, told us that the path has been called “Passe du paradis'' (Heaven pass) due to a mistranslation of the Occitan word “Paradoux'', which actually indicates an aqueduct. This isn’t the first time that people use the path to cross the border. During the war and after racial laws were enforced by the Fascist government in Italy, the border started seeing the first mass migration waves, and identity checks were implemented. However, the nature of the border changed during Fascism as the objective of the regime was to prevent its citizens from fleeing the country. According to Barnabà, this is when a major shift in the economy of Ventimiglia happened, as people resorted to trafficking and other illegal activities. Based on his archival research, the border has changed and shifted, and seen differences in the people who crossed it, from Italian Jews to Yugoslavian refugees, Middle Easterners to Sub-Saharan Africans.
What hasn’t changed, in his opinion, is the fact that this border pass represents what he calls a “colonization of the imaginary": those who try to cross the border do so because they think that going to France is going to improve their life, which is increasingly less the case. The stakes of attempting to cross via the mountains are high. Castellar,
is a
small village perched on the heights of Menton on the French side of the
Death Path. The Italian border is about two kilometers from Castellar
and at first glance it seems that neither police posts nor patrols are
monitoring the border. However as we follow the road that ascends along
the municipal cemetery, the first signs of reinforced border
surveillance appear. The cemetery's Chapel of
Saint Sébastien
is filled
with
military equipment,
, backpacks, semi-automatic rifles, and what
appear to be folding beds leaning against the walls that can be seen. It
seems that the cemetery serves as a base camp for law enforcement
operations where a group of CRS are kept on standby to act and repel any
attempt to cross the border.
If we continue to climb along the path that encircles the Roc d'Orméa, no abnormal activity is to be reported, nor across the path that climbs up to the Passo del Corne, the pass that delimits France from Italy. There is only a white helicopter, different from those of the tourist companies, recurrently circulating along the border (observed approximately every half hour). It appears that aerial patrols are used to coordinate action with the military, and we cannot exclude the existence of other means of detection, such as presence detectors. In the whole day of our observation, we did not encounter any migrants attempting to cross, but it cannot be ruled out that they take very different paths or attempt the passage during the night.
Indeed, on Wednesday, March 8, at ten o'clock at night, the hypothesis of the presence of armed forces hidden in the mountains was clarified. There is a path from Sospel that goes up the mountains and reaches the border with the Italian border, where two paths (the one coming from Sospel and one coming from Italy) intersect and start descending to Menton (a village located on the French side of the border). On this path, one of our observers was walking with a flashlight. Upon being seen, two young armed military men came out from a bush and asked them if they were lost. They were polite and gave them directions, without checking their documents. In any case, this proves a militarization of the mountain path to Menton. We are currently not aware of the precise guard posts in the Castellar sector.
On February 23rd, 2023 a 60-year-old man from Ethiopia was declared dispersed on the Death Path; officials were alerted of his disappearance, as well as the fact that he has mobility problems. According to Barnabà, the responsible authorities for rescue services are those on the side where the person was first lost track of, which in this case was Italy. However, despite being informed, the fire brigade was unaware of this event. “It was probably my colleague from the earlier shift who took the message, I know nothing about this”, said one fireman when asked about what efforts were being deployed to get ahead on the search and rescue of the 60-year-old.
A similar occurrence was reported
by civil society actors who on May 6th, 2023
told us that
“a man got stuck on the edge of a cliff on the Death Path. After at
least 2 hours the helicopter arrived. They took a long time to figure
out whose responsibility it was (France or Italy) while the man kept
screaming in panic. We asked the firefighters if it was not possible
to use a megaphone to explain to him that the helicopter would have
arrived soon, they told us that he would not have heard and anyway
they would have arrived soon. Yes, we said, but he is in panic and he
doesn't know it….. No answer. Finally as the boy started to panic and
scream more and more a policeman with a powerful voice shouted at him
to calm down because help was on the road and he calmed down. The
French rescuers arrived at 8.25 pm, they saved him and brought him to
Menton. Journalists present on the spot said that he had been
screaming since 6 p.m.”