Lori Berenson Freed after Fifteen Years from Peru Prison:Vanam Jwala Narasimha Rao

Lori Berenson Freed after Fifteen Years from Peru Prison

Vanam Jwala Narasimha Rao

Names of women Presidents or Prime Ministers are familiar to many, whether they are controversial or elected or appointed or served briefly or just followed her mother into politics. Some of them even might have presided over world peace or provoked war.

To name few among them, Sirimavo Bandaranaike, three times Prime Minister of Sri Lanka, was the first woman in the world to hold the office of prime minister. Her daughter Chandrika Kumaratunga, was elected president in 1994 and appointed her mother as prime minister. Indira Gandhi, one of the best-known women of the 20th century, was Prime Minister of India. She was assassinated in 1984. Golda Meir was a teacher and an active Zionist. Golda Meir became Premier at age 70 on the sudden death of Levi Eshkol in 1969. The Iron Lady of British politics, Margaret Thatcher was the longest continuously served prime minister since 1827. Known as a strong leader and an "astute Parliamentary tactician”, she knew how to handle disagreement, no matter from which bench it issued.

Then the famous Soong Sisters of China created history-each one of them becoming famous on their own. The eldest was married to the richest man of China of his times, H. H. Kung. The second sister was married to Father of Modern China and first President of the Republic of China, Sun Yat-sen. She became joint President of the People's Republic of China and later Honorary President. The youngest was a prominent political leader in her own right, the wife and partner in power of the leader of the Kuomintang, and later President, Chiang Kai-shek.

Humanitarian and organizer of the American Red Cross, Clara Barton was instrumental for the Geneva treaty for the care of war wounded. Helen Keller blind and deaf raised funds for the blind and promoted social causes. Lorraine Rothman was known for her role as a women’s advocate and leader of the feminist health movement. There are many more like them.

Each one of them was great in their own way. However, remembering only them or women leaders of similar greatness and forgetting others is not justified. There are many more women world over, less known and familiar, though fought for basic human rights of oppressed and suppressed and in the process pushed in to jails and continue to serve imprisonment. Ms. Lori Berenson, a former university student from New York is one among such many, whom the world started just recognizing. Writing in “The New York Times” on Mrach2, 2011, Journalist Jennifer Egan narrated her story marvelously.

The Western South American Country Peru is a representative democratic republic. Power and authority there changed hands from President Fernando Belaunde to General Juan Velasco Alvarado and from him to General Francisco Morales Bermudez in rebel after rebel. Later under the presidency of Alberto Fujimori during 1990–2000, there were accusations of authoritarianism, corruption, and human rights violations. Alejandro Toledo was President of Peru from 2001 to 2006. Toledo came to international prominence after leading the opposition against President Alberto Fujimori. Since 2006 Alan Garcia, who last election to Toledo in 2001, is the president of Peru. The Peruvian government is directly elected, and voting is compulsory for all citizens aged 18 to 70.

Against this background, Ms. Lori Berenson, was convicted in 1996 on the allegation of collaborating with a Peruvian Marxist Rebel Group and was sentenced by a military tribunal to life. Four-and-a half year’s later, due to international pressures; her sentence was vacated and was reduced to 20 years. In May 2010, she was granted conditional Parole that she must remain in Peru while on parole. Her parole was later revoked and reinstated. Many in Peru view Ms. Berenson as a reprehensible symbol of the turmoil that afflicted the country in the 1980s and 1990s, when almost 70,000 people were killed in that period of war and rebellion.

Behind prison walls, in 2003, she married Anibal Apari, a militant whom she met while both were imprisoned. She was allowed matrimonial visits with Apari, who has been released and acting as her lawyer, even though they are now divorcing. She gave birth in 2009 to their son, Salvador, a citizen of Peru and the United States who has spent most of his life in prison with his mother. Two American presidents - Bill Clinton and George W. Bush pressed Ms. Berenson's case without securing an early release. The decision to grant parole came as a surprise. Her sentence in the natural course will end only in 2015.

Lori Berenson is a social activist. She was born in New York but spent her adult life in Central and South America. Lori Berenson believes in a world in which everyone's fundamental human rights are respected. Lori Berenson has participated in research and investigation work as well as having done secretarial, translating, writing, and editorial work. Upon detention she was writing articles for two progressive US magazines.

Berenson was first detained on November 30, 1995, when she was 26. She and another woman were pulled off a public bus after leaving the Peruvian Congress building. Berenson had journalist’s credentials and assignments from two American publications. Berenson claimed she was innocent and had no active links with "Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement" (M.R.T.A). Five weeks after her arrest, she was presented to the press. After denouncing suffering and injustice in Peru, she denied that she was a terrorist by shouting: “In the M.R.T.A. there are no criminal terrorists. It is a revolutionary movement!”

Berenson was arrested at a time when the Peruvian government, under President Alberto Fujimori had achieved a state of hyper efficiency at shutting terrorism down. Fujimori was elected in 1990, at the height of Shining Path aggression, and in 1992 he dissolved the Congress, suspended the Constitution and passed a number of laws that gave the military expanded powers to fight terrorism. Fujimori is now serving a 25-year sentence for human rights violations committed during his government’s war against the Shining Path.

Berenson was convicted of treason against the Peruvian State for being an M.R.T.A. leader and financier. She was sentenced, along with 22 others. Her parents were not allowed to be present. A few days later, she was transferred with a group of about 40 prisoners to the prison in Puno at an altitude of 12,000 feet. They were flown in a cargo plane with their heads covered, guarded by armed soldiers, and then moved onto a bus.

In 1980, when Lori was 11, three American nuns who were helping poor people were murdered in El Salvador. That made her to decide to be a nun. While in Massachusetts Institute of Technology, she worked with a professor who was doing research on the policies of granting political asylum to refugees from Nicaragua, El Salvador and Guatemala. Berenson went to El Salvador for three months with a student delegation. Back in the United States, she worked briefly for the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador, in New York and Washington.

In 1989, Berenson took the job of working for “Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front” (F.M.L.N), which is now the ruling party of El Salvador and its candidate was elected president in 2009. F.M.L.N. was an aggregate of five Marxist guerrilla groups locked in a long civil war with the oligarchy of El Salvador. When a cease-fire was declared and peace accords signed in 1992, Berenson moved to San Salvador and became the secretary of one of its commanding generals, who later became the Vice-President of El Salvador. Berenson left El Salvador in October 1994, traveled in South America and arrived in Peru in November with plans to stay.

Berenson’s life sentence was nullified in 2000 by the Fujimori government, which stated that new evidence had come to light that she was not an M.R.T.A. leader. She was granted a new civilian trial in 2001, although much of the evidence against her was the same. Throughout that three-month trial, Berenson asserted her innocence. While this time she was absolved of being a member of the M.R.T.A., she was still convicted of collaboration: renting the house for the group and entering Congress in the guise of a journalist, with the intention of assisting in a takeover. She received a new sentence of 20 years, including time served.

Today, while Berenson refuses to discuss in detail what happened during the year she spent in Peru before her arrest, she does admit that she knew her associates were M.R.T.A. members and willingly helped them to rent the house. “It might not have been intentional, but the bottom line is: I did collaborate with them,” she said. She maintained that her visits to Congress were genuine journalistic explorations.

Berenson was granted parole a second time and released from jail on November 5, 2010, two and a half months after her re-imprisonment. She and her son Salvador made a quiet return to her apartment. She was still awaiting a date for her next parole hearing. Her parents had gone back to their jobs in New York, and she was grappling with the problem of trying, without child care, to create some kind of routine. On January 24, 2011, after another hearing before three judges, Berenson’s parole was sustained. By law, she must remain in Lima until 2015, at which point she must leave the country forever. The decision is final.

In the 15 years Berenson spent in prison, her peers have moved from early adulthood into middle age. Technologically, she’s catching up, and has grown comfortable using e-mail and Skype. But at 41, she is still grappling with the fallout of youthful choices that have ended badly: her vocation; her marriage; her love of Latin America. The passion that fueled her move there seems to have left a kind of void, and beyond the need to support herself and her son, her future remains a blank.

In April 2002, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights declared that Lori Berenson was tried twice under illegal anti-terrorism laws that failed to comply with international standards and violated her rights to due process. The Commission further declared that Peru failed to demonstrate proof in its conviction of Lori Berenson and ruled that her rights be fully restored and that Peru must completely amend its illegal anti-terrorism laws. Because Peru refused to comply with the Commission's recommendations, the Commission brought Lori Berenson's case questioning the antiterrorism legislation before the Inter-American Court of Human Rights. The Commission issued a ruling in the spring of 2002. The basic conclusions of the Commission were that in neither the military trial nor the civil trial was Lori given due process.

Lori Berenson continued to express her concerns for social justice and for human rights from her prison cell. She repeatedly pointed out that trials denying due process and wrongful convictions under the illegal anti-terrorism laws were far from unusual in Peru and thousands of people have been affected. In that manner, her case is far from exceptional. In Lori Berenson's case, there were numerous due process and human rights abuses and irregularities noted during her detention, two trials and imprisonment. Lori Berenson was subjected to abusive treatment, termed "cruel, inhumane, and degrading" by several human rights organizations, but the physical and psychological abuses suffered by many others have been much worse. As in Lori Berenson's case, thousands of people condemned under these illegal anti-terrorism laws were, and are, innocent of the charges or were given disproportionately high sentences and worse, almost all have been brutally mistreated or savagely tortured during their detention. Even in the jails, not just to try to obtain information or to force self-incrimination, but as part of a state policy of hatred and revenge against the insurgents.

Lori has exhausted her judicial options in Peru. However, President has the power to investigate the case and grant a pardon or clemency. Of course, Berenson’s future won’t really be her own until her parole ends. Her capacity to absorb fear and discomfort is partly what has saved her and also most likely, what got her into trouble in the first place.

(Source: Jennifer Egan's Article in “The New York Times” and Google Search Engine)