Enrique Gorriarán Merlo Enrique Haroldo Gorriarán Merlo ( 18 October 1941 – 22 September 2006 ) was an Argentine guerrilla insurgency leader , 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 . After the fall of Isabel Perón in March 1976 , the largely defeated ERP fled the country in order to reorganize itself . 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 the Sandinista leader Daniel Ortega . In 1985 , Gorriarán Merlo founded the All For the Country Movement ( " 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 . Gorriarán Merlo was arrested in Mexico in 1995 . He was sentenced to life imprisonment in 1996 and spent eight years in the Devoto Prison . While in prison he wrote a memoir of his guerrilla years , which was 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 that he had always wanted to speak to him and apologize . Near the end of his life he publicly stated that 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 the age of 64 .