The idea I intend to develop is the one that identifies in the figure of Peppino Impastato the paradigmatic model of the scapegoat, the sacrificial victim. In this specific case, and it is a central aspect in my interpretative hypothesis, the model embodied by Peppino Impastato is that of a sort of double scapegoat or, in other words, functional to the maintenance of control, or rather to the restoration of the status quo, by two antithetical, but to some extent complementary, forms of power: on the one hand the established political power; on the other the counter-power of the mafia gangs. Two formally antithetical, specular forces, but which, at that precise historical time, identified in Peppino Impastato an adversary, an inconvenient disturber of a balance and a system of crystallized power aimed at the economic, political and social control of the territory.
