under paramilitary control, shows how widespread their
hold was. Salvatore Mancuso himself put it in an interview
in the following way:
35 percent of the Congress was elected in
areas where there were states of the Self-
Defense groups, in those states we were the
ones collecting taxes, we delivered justice,
and we had the military and territorial control
of the region and all the people who wanted
to go into politics had to come and deal with
the political representatives we had there.
It is not difficult to imagine the effect of this extent of
paramilitary control of