The Minister of Territorial Policy and Democratic Memory, announced this Sunday at a rally in the Canary Islands that suffers from cancer and will undergo surgical intervention at the end of April. “It is operable and I will remain active,” Torres said, “with optimism and the firmness that it will go well, and it will go well,” he said. The 58 -year -old minister has made this announcement during his speech at the Insular Congress of the PSOE of Gran Canaria held this weekend in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria. His words were received with a sound applause of several minutes as a sample of support.
His team points out that Torres, who was a regional president of the Canary Islands in the previous legislature, will be intervened “shortly.” These same sources announce that it will continue “with its agenda, although less intense.” “It will continue in the ministry and politics,” they add. Sources from this department have thanked the messages of support and indicated, about the disease, that “everything is going well” and “has a solution.”
Formation philologist, Torres is Minister of Territorial Policy and Democratic Memory, since November 2023. Since then, he has combined this position with an active work in immigration management in the islands, in which last week occurred and allow the derivation of more than 4,000 of the almost 6,000 unaccompanied migrant minors that protect the archipelago.
In recent months, Torres has been in the media focus by the Koldo casein which alleged irregularities are investigated in the purchase of masks in the worst of the pandemic for different public administrations, including the Canarian government, of which he was president. In the course of this judicial investigation, one of the main ones involved in the plot, the businessman and commissioner Víctor de Aldama, said that he had rented for a night of November 2018 an apartment on the street of Atocha in Madrid through a tourist rental platform so that he had “meetings of diverse nature” together with the former minister José Luis Ábalos, charged in the case, and the advisor of this, and the advisor of this Garcia. Aldama accompanied these accusations with the delivery in the Supreme Court, where the case is investigated for the condition of Afore of Ábalos, receipts of the payments of that rent. Torres appeared on February 18 at the headquarters of his department to flatly deny these accusations. To do this, he wielded three certificates issued by the airlines that showed that the night in which he, according to the commissioner, was on that floor, was actually in the Canary Islands. “There is an intention to stain my honor and name, and also my image as a political position and, therefore, a political purpose,” he lamented.
In 2019, Torres became the first non -nationalist president of the Canary Islands, after forming the so -called Flower Pact with Podemos, Nueva Canarias and the Gomera Socialist Group. He had a difficult mandate, marked by the first pandemic, several virulent forest fires, the La Palma volcano or the mediator case, in which the corruption plot is investigated that supposedly paid around 100,000 euros to receive, without success according to the investigations in progress, deals of favor of the island government. The collapse of Podemos prevented him from reissueing this pact in 2023, and the agreement between Canarian coalition and the Popular Party, second and third force of the archipelago, respectively, sent him to the opposition. Before passing through regional policy, he was mayor of Arucas (38,000 inhabitants, in northern Gran Canaria) between 2003 and 2007, deputy of Congress, and professor of the Secondary Education Institute of Arucas until 1999.
