For background information on the Ejército Revolucionario del Pueblo (ERP), please find attached the following documents:

-Revolutionary and Dissident Movements, (London: Longman Publishing Group, 1988), pp. 16-17;

-Latin American Political Movements, (London: Longman Publishing Group, 1986), pp. 10-11.

The World Encyclopedia of Political Systems, (London: Longman Publishing Group, 1982), p. 31, describes the ERP as a Marxist-Leninist organization, while the Encyclopedia of the Third World, (New York: Facts on File, Inc., 1982), p. 86, describes it as a Trotskyite organization. The latter reports a splinter group was formed under the name ERP-22 de Agosto, and indicates two top ERP leaders, Roberto Santucho and Enrique Gorriaran, were killed in 1976.

One source reports that in the 1970's the ERP engaged in a series of violent actions which included bombings, kidnappings and assaults on police and military installations. [ Argentina: The military juntas and human rights, (London: Amnesty International, 1985), p. 2.] In February 1975, the Argentine government mounted military and police operations in the northern province of Tucum n, a mountainous region described as the heartland of the ERP, whose guerrillas reportedly hoped to use as a rural base from which to launch a revolution. [ Ibid, p. 3.] This anti-subversive campaign could be considered the beginning of the "dirty war" which concluded five years later, as disappearances were, according to Amnesty International, reported there in a large scale for the first time. [ Ibid.]

According to another source, [ Truth and partial justice in Argentina, (Washington: Americas Watch, August 1987), p. 4.] by the mid-1970's the ERP had "achieved impressive growth" and "posed a serious challenge to the capacity of the armed and security forces to maintain order", although far from being able to overthrow the government by force of arms.

There was no indication of the continued existence of the Ejercito Revolucionario del Pueblo (People's Revolutionary Army, ERP), one of the major guerrilla groups of the 1970s, until a bomb attack against the home of the intelligence chief of the Second Army Corps at Rosario in 1987. [ Revolutionary and Dissident Movements, (London: Longman Publishing Group, 1988), p. 17.] One of the ERP's former leaders has been reported as the possible mastermind of the guerrilla attack on La Tablada military school in Buenos Aires in the beginning of 1989. [ "Identifying the La Tablada raiders", in Latin American Weekly Report (London, Latin American Newsletters), 20 April 1989, pp. 6-7.]