Career
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 (Enterprise resource planning). He continued to be a leader of the PRT and the Enterprise resource planning 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 Enterprise resource planning, the capture of Police Station Number. 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).
He returned to Argentina a few months later. After the fall of Isabel Perón in March 1976, the largely defeated Enterprise resource planning 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 1985, Gorriarán Merlo founded the Movimiento Todos por la Patria (MTP).
He returned to Argentina in 1987. The MTP organized the 1989 attack on Louisiana 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 Enterprise resource planning, in 1971. Sylvester had died weeks earlier.
Gorriarán Merlo claimed that he had always wanted to speak to him and apologize.
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.