1989 Attack On La Tablada Regiment - Convictions

Convictions

Twenty surviving members of the MTP were later convicted and given sentences ranging from 10 years to life imprisonment. They were judged under the Ley de Defensa de la Democracia (Argentina) (Defense of the Democracy Act) which deprive them of a right to appeal and to a new trial.

Enrique Gorriarán Merlo was given a life sentence, and his ex-wife, Ana María Sívori, was sentenced to 18 years of imprisonment. During the oral and public trial, Gorriarán put in question the legitimity of the process and objected the circumstances of his capture in the suburbs of Mexico in October 1995, which he called a "kidnapping" (secuestro). He was charged of being co-author of qualified illicit association, rebellion, usurpation, homicide with aggravated circumstances, aggravated illegal privation of freedom and reiterated injuries. His ex-wife Sívori was charged of co-author of qualified illicit association, and secondary participant to offenses of rebellion, doubly aggravated homicide, tentative of homicide, aggravated theft, reiterated injuries and co-author of the use of false identity documents.

Most of those convicted in the attacks were placed in a maximum security cell block on the eighteenth floor of the Caseros prison in Buenos Aires.

Finally, President Fernando de la Rúa (Alliance for Work, Justice and Education, 1999–2001) commuted the prison sentences. And two days before Néstor Kirchner's access to his functions, Interim President Eduardo Duhalde (member of the Justicialist Party) freed Gorriarán Merlo, on May 23, 2003, after 14 years of prison in high security quarters, who declared that it was "an act of justice". Gorriarán Merlo died of a cardiac arrest at the Hospital Argerich in Buenos Aires, while he was about to be operated of an abdominal aortic aneurysm, on 22 September 2006, at the age of 64.