Achille Lollo: farewell to a fighter

Fausto Giudice, Basta Yekfi!, 4/8/2021
Translated by Andy Barton

I have just learned, via common Brazilian comrades, of the passing of Achille Lollo, yesterday in Trevignano Romano, to whom I wish to pay tribute.

 

Achille was born in Rome on 8th May 1951. Salvatore, his father, had been a resistance fighter, a deported communist and an anti-fascist guerrilla fighter in Italy and Yugoslavia. Should Achille have been born just 30 years earlier, he too would have taken up arms against fascism. And yet more, should he have been born 130 years earlier, he would doubtless have been an Italian Redshirt, among the Garibaldini defenders of Montevideo besieged by the cruel Argentinian general Juan Manuel de Rosas.

Yet his actual biography has little to envy of the adventures of the heroes of Alexandre Dumas or Victor Hugo. He belongs to a long Italian tradition of causing trouble in every corner of the world. His 50 years of adult life played out on three stages: the suburbs of Rome, Angola and Brazil.

It all began in 1973 in Primavalle, a volatile suburb in Rome. Achille, together with some of his comrades from the operaista movement Potere Operaio, was accused of having started a fire in the apartment belonging to the local head of the fascist party, the Italian Social Movement, in which two of the fascist leader’s sons died. Achille was arrested. He denied having wanted to kill anybody; rather, his aim was to intimidate the local fascists with whom leftists were locked in an endless conflict. After two years of preventative prison, he was paroled, going on to seek refuge in Angola in 1975. Achille participated in the anti-colonial struggles together with the MPLA, the SWAPO and the ANC. In 1986, with his Angolan wife and their four children, he emigrated to Brazil. There, he was an active member of the PT (Brazilian Worker’s Party) as part of the Força Socialista tendency. Later, he would participate in the founding of the PSOL (Socialism and Liberty Party) in 2004. A few years prior, in 1994, he was arrested after an extradition request from Italy, being freed after one year in prison.

In 2005, the 18-year prison term he had been sentenced to in Italy expired, but the damages and losses he had been sentenced to pay (1 million euros) had not. This prevented Achille from owning anything (which perhaps is not such a bad thing).

In 2010, now with health problems, he returned to Italy, where he devoted himself to ecological agriculture. The irruption of COVID-19 would seriously compromise this activity. However, it was not the virus that eventually killed him: as a diabetic with cardiac problems, he was struck by pancreatic cancer, known for its aggressive development.

Achille leaves behind him an immense body of work, both written and audio-visual, primarily about Latin America, and scattered across many different media platforms. Hopefully, one day, someone will be able to draw it all together. 

 One of Achille’s last photos, with his son Achillinho