Enrique Gorriarán Merlo

Enrique Haroldo Gorriarán Merlo (18 October 1941 – 22 September 2006) was an Argentine guerrilla, born in San Nicolás de los Arroyos, Buenos Aires Province.

His family was affiliated with the Radical Civic Union, but at the age of 27 Gorriarán Merlo joined the Trotskyist Workers Revolutionary Party (PRT), and then cofounded its armed wing, the People's Revolutionary Army (ERP). He continued to be a leader of the PRT and the ERP through to the beginning of the Argentine Dirty War, spanning the governments of Héctor José Cámpora (1973), Juan Perón, and Isabel Martínez de Perón, the last of which was cut short by the coup that started the National Reorganization Process (1976).

Prior to joining the insurgency around 1970, he lived in Rosario, 70 km from his birthplace, and worked for two years in the Swift meat packing plant. In an interview he alleged that insurgent organizations gained thousands of recruits in the area at the time. There, Gorriarán Merlo led the first armed attack by ERP, the capture of Police Station No. 24, in 1971.

Soon afterwards, he was captured and imprisoned in Rawson, Chubut. He was part of the group of insurgents that organized the prison break that occurred during the night of 15 August 1972. Only six out of 110 were able to make a successful escape; 19 were recaptured and 16 were executed (see Trelew massacre). The successful ones, Gorriarán Merlo among them, fled to Chile, at that time under the Socialist administration of 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 attack on the army barracks in Azul, Buenos Aires Province, where a Lieutenant Colonel and his wife were killed.

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