Good Luck Lolo

Print PDF

An article from today's National Post about how the Canadian State tried to capture a former Roma (gypsy) guerilla, who had suffered ten days of torture at the hands of Franco's secret police, and deport him, presumably to Spain where the "post-fascist" State has expressed its desire to prosecute him him...

According to "United Nationa Human Rights Committee" document on the net, Torres lived in Toulouse, France from a very young age. From 1974 to 1977 he served time in prison for acts of sabotage committed against Spanish property in France. In 1979 - when Spain was just beginning it's transition to bourgeois democracy - he returned to Spain. On March 19th 1984 he was arrested by the special ervices of the Spanish Guardia Civil, which was still rife with fascists, and detained for ten days - this is presumably when he was tortured. He then went into exile, first in France,then Finland, and then Canada.

Good luck Lolo. And fuck the RCMP.

Terror suspect lived in B.C. as 'Lolo' the singer
Still At Large
Stewart Bell, National Post
Published: Friday, September 28, 2007

A Spanish man described by Canadian immigration officials as a former left-wing terrorist lived for a decade in B.C. as "Lolo," singer of a flamenco band called Los Canasteros.

Mario Ines Torres was being deported from Canada for terrorism last year when immigration officials in Vancouver lost track of him and issued a warrant for his arrest.

He has still not been found, but before he vanished he was a regular at a Vancouver tapas bar, where he sang and played guitar, and also performed at the Vancouver Folk Festival.

"When I sing, I am just a transport for the voice of my ancestors. I didn't choose to sing, they chose me," Lolo says on the band's Internet page, which says the band is named after the "Gypsies of Southern Spain."

"He's actually a very nice fellow," said Mark Bellini, manager of Kino Cafe, where Mr. Torres performed.

"He's very spiritual and a very down-to-earth kind of guy. Whatever his past was, I don't know.

"I know he hasn't been in Canada for quite a while," Mr. Bellini said.

The biography of Lolo on the Los Canasteros Web page describes how "migrant farm work and long periods of isolation in the mountains increased his empathy of human suffering and emotion, the underlying essence of flamenco music."

But according to Canadian immigration documents, his past also includes many years as a violent leftist and member of GARI, the International Revolutionary Action Group, and other radical groups.

In the 1970s, Mr. Torres allegedly kidnapped a bank director in France, planted two car bombs in Belgium, stole explosives and was caught in a Paris apartment with three handguns as he was preparing to rob a bank.

After being deported from Finland, he entered Canada and worked as a flamenco singer at Kino Cafe, which was then run by Margaret Moon.

He eventually married Ms. Moon, and they moved to an organic farm in remote D'Arcy, B.C.

"The last time I talked to him he had just finished getting his licence to be a butcher," Mr. Bellini said. He raised livestock at the farm and sold it in nearby Whistler. "He was selling to high-end restaurants."

Mr. Torres was returning to B.C. from Mexico in April, 2005, when he was stopped at the border. During an interview at the Pacific Region Enforcement Centre of the Canada Border Services Agency, he admitted he had been involved with GARI.

"He stated he had been a member of the organization known as the Group D'Action Revolutionnaire Internationalist (GARI) from 1974 to 1975," immigration officer Joanne Jesmer wrote in a report dated June 7, 2007.

"He stated that this organization conducted armed bank robberies to 'expropriate money from banks' and used explosives to destroy power lines to immobilize industry."

He also said he was "good friends" with Jean-Marc Rouillan, a former GARI member serving a life sentence for the 1987 murder of the CEO of French automaker Renault.

Mr. Torres has been wanted since he failed to appear for his own deportation hearing in Vancouver in January, 2006. "He's somewhere in Latin America as far as I know," said Robert Lee, a Roma author who met Mr. Torres. "I doubt if he's in Canada."

The RCMP took a renewed interest in Mr. Torres in June, when counterterrorism investigators found a photograph of him with two wanted members of the Basque terror group ETA.

The picture was taken in 2005 at Mr. Torres' isolated B.C. farm. The two suspected ETA members, Victor Bilbao and Ivan Sancho, have been arrested since the photo was taken.

Despite his alleged past as a terrorist, Mr. Torres was well-known in flamenco music circles and was even featured in a National Film Board documentary about ethnic Roma in Canada.

"The Roma were fighting against the fascists," he says in the film.

"I was 10 days and 10 nights under torture. Some people ask me today, 'Why you don't have kids now?' Well, because 10 days and 10 nights with electricity on your genitals makes you sterile."