Enrique Gorriarán Merlo

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Lore & Background

Gorriarán Merlo's family was affiliated with the Radical Civic Union, but at 27 he joined the Marxist Workers Revolutionary Party (PRT) and cofounded its armed wing, the People's Revolutionary Army (ERP). He continued as a leader through the governments of Héctor José Cámpora (1973), Juan Perón, and Isabel Perón, up to the 1976 coup. Prior to joining the insurgency around 1970, he lived in Rosario, 70 km north of his birthplace, and worked for two years at the Swift meat packing plant. In an interview, he alleged that insurgent organizations gained thousands of recruits in the area at the time. There, he led the ERP's first armed attack, the capture of Police Station No. 24, in 1971. Soon after, he was captured and imprisoned in Rawson, Chubut. He was part of the group that organized the prison break during the night of 15 August 1972. Only six out of 110 made a successful escape by hijacking a commercial flight; 19 were recaptured, and 16 were executed (the Trelew massacre). The successful ones, Gorriarán Merlo among them, fled to Chile under Salvador Allende, and from there were granted safe passage to Cuba. He returned to Argentina a few months later. In January 1974, he took part in the assault on the army barracks in Azul, Buenos Aires Province, where a Lieutenant Colonel, his wife, and a conscript were killed.

Reader's Guide

After the fall of Isabel Perón's government in March 1976, the largely defeated ERP fled the country to reorganize. Gorriarán Merlo moved to Nicaragua to collaborate with the Sandinistas, and in 1980 he was involved in the assassination of the deposed Nicaraguan President, Anastasio Somoza Debayle, who was living in exile in Asunción, Paraguay. In the last years of his life, he was prohibited entry into Nicaragua, but enjoyed the support and friendship of Sandinista leader Daniel Ortega. In 1985, Gorriarán Merlo founded the Movimiento Todos por la Patria (MTP). He returned to Argentina in 1987. The MTP organized the 1989 attack on La Tablada Regiment, where 39 people were killed, among them several conscript soldiers and police officers. He was arrested in Mexico in 1995, sentenced to life imprisonment in 1996, and spent eight years in Devoto prison. While in prison, he wrote a memoir of his militant years, published in January 2003. Along with other former guerrilla leaders, he was pardoned in May 2003 by President Eduardo Duhalde. In November 2003, he went to Rosario and met the son of Stanley Sylvester, former manager of the Swift meat packing plant, who was the first person kidnapped by the ERP in 1971. Sylvester had died weeks earlier. Gorriarán Merlo claimed he had always wanted to speak to him and apologize. Near the end of his life, he publicly stated he would not choose to return to armed struggle, and tried to obtain political support to run for president in 2007. To this end, in 2005, before the legislative elections, he launched the Party for Work and Development (Partido del Trabajo y el Desarrollo) before a throng in Rosario, with the avowed goals of 'closing the gap that separates the people from politics and the rich from the poor', 'opposing neoliberalism', and supporting 'Latin American integration'. Gorriarán Merlo died of cardiac arrest at the Hospital Argerich in Buenos Aires while awaiting surgery for an abdominal aortic aneurysm on 22 September 2006, at age 64.

Did You Know?

• Gorriarán Merlo worked for two years at the Swift meat packing plant in Rosario before joining the insurgency.
• Only six out of 110 prisoners successfully escaped in the 1972 Trelew prison break; 16 were executed afterward.
• He was involved in the 1980 assassination of deposed Nicaraguan President Anastasio Somoza Debayle in Asunción, Paraguay.
• While in prison, he wrote a memoir of his militant years, published in January 2003.
• In 2005, he launched the Party for Work and Development in Rosario, aiming to run for president in 2007.

Ideological Roots and the Birth of an Armed Movement

The ERP emerged as the military arm of the PRT, a communist party born from the Trotskyist tradition. However, the organization's intellectual trajectory shifted significantly, embracing Maoist theory and the lessons of China's Cultural Revolution. This ideological cocktail—Trotskyist origins, Maoist theory, and Guevarist tactical philosophy—shaped the ERP's approach to armed struggle. The avowed aim was a communist revolution against the Argentine government in pursuit of proletarian rule.

The Samuelson Operation and Elite Corporate Targeting

The operation yielded a ransom of $12 million, a sum equivalent to over $80 million in today's currency. Beyond this single capture, Gorriarán Merlo and his comrades conducted assaults on multiple corporate offices using heavily armed commandos drawn from the ERP's elite Special Squad. The broader scale of the group's financial warfare is staggering: official Argentine publications recorded that rural guerrillas occupied 52 towns, robbed 166 banks, and extracted $76 million in ransoms for the kidnappings of 185 individuals. The Samuelson operation exemplified the ERP's strategy of targeting foreign capital as a means of financing armed revolution and demonstrating the vulnerability of multinational corporate interests operating within Argentine territory.

A Sustained Campaign of Urban Violence

The ERP's armed campaign, which began in 1969 against the Onganía dictatorship, took the form of sustained urban guerrilla warfare. In 1971, 57 policemen were killed by left-wing guerrillas, with another 38 falling in 1972. The violence extended to corporate targets: in May 1973, masked ERP gunmen opened fire on Ford executives near factory entrances, wounding two.

Political Turmoil and the Descent into State Terror

The ERP operated within a volatile political landscape. The 1969 Cordobazo—a massive general strike uniting industrial workers and university students against the Onganía regime—demonstrated the depth of popular discontent that guerrilla movements exploited. After democratic elections in 1973 brought Juan Perón back from exile, the Peronist movement fractured following the Ezeiza massacre, where a right-wing militia clashed with armed Montoneros. The ERP continued its violent campaign even under civilian rule. However, the presidential pardon and subsequent congressional amnesty delivered what was described as a profound institutional shock to Argentina's security apparatus. Embittered military and police leadership, feeling their years of counterinsurgency work erased overnight, forged a pact to abandon lawful arrests in favor of deniable abductions. This gave rise to the Triple A death squads, which established secret detention centers where suspects were tortured and executed, buried as N.N.—No Name—committing some of the worst crimes against humanity in Latin American history.

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