For Peru and American Inmate, Much Is Changed

By SIMON ROMERO

BOGOTÁ, Colombia — When Lori Berenson was jailed in Peru on terrorism charges over 14 years ago, she was a fiery young leftist from New York enmeshed in a shadowy Marxist rebel group, stunning a war-weary nation with her clenched fists and defiant statements in support of revolution.

Now that Ms. Berenson, 40, has been granted parole from a women’s prison in Lima, Peru’s capital, both she and the nation that imprisoned her have changed in significant ways. Though her past still looms large, prison officials and fellow inmates now talk about her baking skills, her teaching music to cellmates and her devotion to her 1-year-old son, Salvador.

“He is my reason for living,” Ms. Berenson said in February in an interview at Pavilion A in Chorrillos Maximum Security Women’s Prison.

Peru, meanwhile, has largely vanquished its terrorist threats, except for small Maoist factions feeding off the cocaine trade in remote areas. The country now boasts a growing economy and a democracy that is still coming to terms with the mayhem unleashed by guerrillas and its own security forces in the 1980s and ’90s.

Resentment still festers over Ms. Berenson’s role in that violence, a sentiment that will be hard to avoid given that she has been ordered to remain in Peru while on parole.

Nearly 70,000 people died in 20 years of war with the nation’s rebels. And while Ms. Berenson maintains her innocence in connection with the terrorism charges, a Peruvian tribunal convicted her in 2001 of collaborating with the Túpac Amaru Revolutionary Movement by renting a safe house and scouting for the group in preparation for a foiled plot to take members of Peru’s Congress hostage.

“What indignation,” said Peru’s vice president, Luis Giampietri, after hearing of the plan for her release. “The laws here are applied with a double standard.”

Ms. Berenson, while having mellowed somewhat during her long years in prison, holds a different view, contending that the Peruvian authorities violated her right to a fair trial during closed military proceedings in 1996, and then deprived her of due process rights in another civilian trial in 2001 when she was sentenced to 20 years in prison.

Her mother still speaks of the trying months Ms. Berenson spent in solitary confinement in the late 1990s. And though Ms. Berenson has publicly apologized for appearing strident after her arrest in 1995 on a city bus in downtown Lima, she seemed despondent at times over her own health problems and the prospect of raising her son in prison or perhaps losing custody of him.

Considering that two American presidents — Bill Clinton and then George W. Bush — both pressed Ms. Berenson’s case with their Peruvian counterparts without securing an early release, the judge’s decision to grant parole came as something of a surprise.

Faced with a public uproar in Peru over Ms. Berenson’s release, Jéssica León, the judge overseeing her case, defended the decision in a statement on Wednesday, saying it was based on a psychological analysis of Ms. Berenson and reports of her good behavior in prisons over the last 14 and a half years. President Alan García said Wednesday that he respected the judge’s ruling.

Yet Ms. Berenson does not hide her leftist convictions. Through her writings, she has criticized a Peruvian trade deal with the United States and the persistent economic inequality in Peru.

“I don’t think she’d be a Tea Partier,” said her mother, Rhoda Berenson, a physicist at New York University, when asked about her daughter’s ideological evolution.

The Peruvian authorities transferred Ms. Berenson last year, while she was five months pregnant and suffering from back problems, to the Chorrillos prison in Lima from another facility in Cajamarca, in Peru’s northern highlands. She gave birth at a hospital in Lima and underwent surgery a few months later for problems related to a fractured vertebra.

Ms. Berenson, the daughter of two New York academics, dropped out of M.I.T. and roamed around Central America before surfacing in Peru in the 1990s.

After her arrest, she spent several years in an isolated prison, 12,000 feet up in the Puno region of southern Peru. That was where she met Aníbal Apari, who was also jailed on charges of collaborating with the rebels. After his release, they wed in 2003 and were allowed to have conjugal visits as is custom in Peru and other Latin American countries.

They are no longer a couple but remain “great friends,” Mr. Apari, who is also Ms. Berenson’s lawyer, said in a telephone interview from Lima. He said she planned to move into a rented apartment in the Miraflores district of the capital once she is released in the coming days, hoping to work as a translator and possibly open a business baking bread and pastries, a skill she polished during her years of incarceration in Cajamarca.

Her father, Mark Berenson, a management professor at Montclair State University in New Jersey, said he thought a wealth of opportunities awaited his daughter. “The world has changed so much since she was locked up in 1995,” he said Tuesday morning before traveling to Lima. “She hasn’t seen Facebook or had access to computers, but she has been reading a lot of books in Spanish.”

But many challenges await as well. Television crews descended on her neighbors-to-be in Lima, some of whom expressed disgust at the prospect of living near a “terrorist,” as she is still branded in Lima’s newspapers. As part of her parole, she must report every 30 days to discuss her work experiences and cannot consume alcohol. She is also expected to be barred from leaving Peru until 2015, when her sentence expires.

Ms. Berenson occupied herself in recent months by taking her son outside onto the prison’s patio and pushing his stroller around under the city’s gray sky. One of her favorite books, her mother said, was “Half a Yellow Sun,” a novel on the Biafra rebellion in Nigeria in 1967. Sometimes Ms. Berenson would play the guitar, accompanying fellow inmates on Spanish-language songs. Her friends at the prison helped her care for Salvador, especially when back pain strained her.

“Prison has helped her turn attention to a new phase in her life,” said Camille Boutron, a French sociologist whose writings focus on the inmates of Ms. Berenson’s pavilion. “Lori is a person who is always fighting for something.”

Andrea Zárate contributed reporting from Lima, Peru.

Donations can be sent to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD 21218. Ph: 410-366-1637; Email: mobuszewski [at] verizon.net

"The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles. The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their lives." Eugene Victor Debs

Baltimore Nonviolence Center

Thursday, May 27, 2010