Qualla: 1989 Attack on La Tablada Barracks

1989 Attack on La Tablada Barracks: Introduction

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Argentina had spent the 1980s trying to climb out of nightmare. The generals were gone, the disappeared were being counted, and a fragile democracy was learning to stand. Then, just after dawn on 23 January 1989, a stolen truck smashed through the front gate of an army barracks in La Tablada, on the western edge of Buenos Aires, and the gunfire that followed lasted more than thirty hours. By the time it ended, thirty-nine people were dead and the barracks was a burned shell. It would prove to be the final armed uprising of Argentina's guerrilla generation, and almost everyone who died in it was Argentine, killing other Argentines, in a country that thought the killing was over.

1989 Attack on La Tablada Barracks: The Pretext and the Plan

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The attackers were roughly forty members of the Movimiento Todos por la Patria, or MTP, "All for the Fatherland," led by Enrique Gorriarán Merlo, a veteran of the older guerrilla group ERP. Their stated reason was alarming and plausible: the Carapintadas, mutinous army officers w...

1989 Attack on La Tablada Barracks: Thirty Hours of Fire

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The assault collapsed almost immediately into a siege. The army and the Buenos Aires police, some 3,600 personnel in all, surrounded the base and fought to retake it. In the course of the battle, soldiers used white phosphorus inside the compound, a weapon whose use in this way i...

1989 Attack on La Tablada Barracks: The Ones Who Did Not Fall in Battle

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The grimmest questions concern those who were not killed in the fighting at all. Survivors and one former sergeant later testified that prisoners taken alive were tortured, and that at least two captured militants, Iván Ruiz and José Díaz, were last seen in army custody and then ...

1989 Attack on La Tablada Barracks: An Act of Justice?

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Twenty surviving MTP members were tried under a hastily passed law that denied them the right of appeal, and given sentences from ten years to life; Gorriarán Merlo received life. The convictions sat uneasily even with critics of the attack, because a democracy that suspends due ...