Posted on 05/07/2004 9:36:23 PM PDT by Coleus
| Friday, May 7, 2004 |
For eight years, Lori Berenson has been behind bars in a Peruvian prison, convicted of collaborating with leftist terrorists to overthrow the Peruvian government.
For eight years, her father, a professor at Montclair State University, has insisted she's innocent.
Early Thursday, Mark Berenson and his wife, Rhoda, left their Manhattan home for Costa Rica, where they hope the Inter-American Court of Human Rights will force the Peruvian government to free their daughter.
From the late 1980s to the 1990s, leftist terrorist groups, the most prominent being the Shining Path and the Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement, terrorized the Andean nation. Tens of thousands of Peruvians died. When Alberto Fujimori was elected president in 1992, he pledged to end the violence - for better or for worse.
In 1995, Lori Berenson, then 26, was arrested and tried by a secret military court, complete with hooded judges. She had been living in Peru and was renting a house in the nation's capital with members of the Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement, or MRTA, as it is known in Spanish. She said she was unaware of their political activities.
She was accused of posing as a journalist to plot an attack on the Peruvian congress. She was convicted of treason and sentenced to life in a cold prison in the Andes.
Lori Berenson's supporters have argued that Fujimori, in an effort to appear tough on terrorism, unflinchingly used the American woman as a political symbol.
In 2001, her life sentence was overturned in a civilian court. A judge ruled that Lori Berenson was guilty of collaborating with leftist guerillas, but was not an |active rebel militant. Her sentence was reduced to 20 years.
In her father's eyes, those 20 years are still too many.
"This judge was a lackey for the previous government, and he showed tremendous bias toward Lori," Mark Berenson said by telephone from his Manhattan home. "She's a person who loves humanity. She has total respect for life. When I start thinking of it, it hurts. She shouldn't be in jail one day, let alone 8½ years."
In the eyes of many Peruvians, who remember the violence of the '80s and '90s, Lori Berenson shouldn't receive special treatment because she is American.
"She was living with these people who terrorized all the people in Peru," said Jose Moore, a Paterson resident and president of the annual Peruvian Parade.
To Moore, who watched Lori Berenson's arrest on satellite television, the American woman's statement after her conviction made her guilty.
"There are no criminal terrorists in the MRTA," she said at the time. "It is a revolutionary movement."
"She said it in her own words," Moore said. "She said it in Spanish."
Lori's father, who has traveled to the Andean nation about 60 times since his daughter's imprisonment, knows the Peruvian public has little to no sympathy for her, but he won't accept it.
In his travels, his most frequently used Spanish phrase is: "I am Mark Berenson, father of Lori. Lori is not a terrorist."
"I don't feel I've ever convinced anybody," he said.
In Costa Rica this week, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights will hear testimony from Peruvian officials, as well as Rhoda Berenson, about Lori Berenson's conviction. If the court determines that Lori Berenson did not receive a fair trial in 2001, the 34-year-old woman's fate could change.
"We're very, very hopeful that justice will be served," Mark Berenson said.
From a young age, Berenson was interested in social issues. She read voraciously. While a freshman at Massachussetts Institute of Technology, professors said she thought and spoke more on the lines of a graduate student, Mark Berenson said.
She left MIT in her sophomore year, eager to see firsthand the situations she had read about. She completed her fourth semester at the University of Central America and was a personal secretary to a top Salvadoran guerilla
In 1994, she arrived in Peru. She wanted to write free lance articles for nonmainstream publications about women and poverty.
"We were concerned," Mark Berenson said. "She really wanted to work and help the people she had met."
Her first five years in prison were especially harsh; human rights organizations decried the government's treatment of her. Since her conviction in 2001, she was moved to a prison in Cajamarca, where conditions improved slightly, Mark Berenson said.
"She can see the mountains from her cell," he said. "The first six years of her incarceration, all she could see was sky. She bathes herself with a sponge in ice cold water. There's a hole in the floor for a toilet."
Reach Nicola M. White |at (973) 569-7166 or whiten@northjersey.com.
| Friday, October 3, 2003 |
LIMA, Peru - Lori Berenson, an American serving a 20-year sentence for aiding leftist rebels, married a former inmate Thursday in a prison ceremony the groom was barred from attending because he is on parole.
Anibal Apari confirmed his marriage to Berenson, 33, after receiving a phone call from her. His father stood in for him during the nuptials in the Andean town of Cajamarca, north of Lima.
"I'm married. Twenty minutes ago Lori called me and confirmed that we're husband and wife," Apari said.
The groom, 41, met Berenson while both were serving sentences for involvement with the Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement.
Apari was released from prison in June after serving 12½ years of a 15-year sentence, but was prohibited from leaving the capital, Lima, by the terms of his parole. A judge has allowed him to visit his new wife in prison next week, he said.
He has not seen Berenson since October 1998, when she was transferred to a different prison.
The wedding is Berenson's second. She was briefly married to a former Salvadoran leftist rebel when she lived in El Salvador in the early 1990s.
Berenson was convicted by a secret military court in 1996 and sentenced to life in prison for being a Tupac Amaru leader and plotting a thwarted attack on Peru's Congress.
That decision was overturned in 2000, and the following year she was convicted in a civilian court on the lesser charge of terrorist collaboration and sentenced to 20 years in prison, including time served. Berenson denies the charges.
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I thought life was a fair sentence.
In 1995, Lori Berenson, then 26, was arrested and tried by a secret military court, complete with hooded judges. She had been living in Peru and was renting a house in the nation's capital with members of the Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement, or MRTA, as it is known in Spanish. She said she was unaware of their political activities.
Even I knew about the Peruvian Shining Path, and I have never even been there.
Lori will have to think of a better lie.
She was accredited to a Marxist paper in NYC. Berenson had a cache of weapons and explosives in her yard, and they found sketches that she had made of security arrangements at the legislature. Her MRTA pals thought she could hide behind her US passport and go places they couldn't, but she drew a lot of attention and brought the whole network down. Heh.
The father is also a Marxist; so was her mother. So the basic story here is, another Red Diaper Baby doesn't like the consequences of her decisions. Waaaaaah.
d.o.l.
Criminal Number 18F
You've got to be kidding. She's about as bright as Rachel Corrie. They should give her another 20 years for stupidity. Anybody with a half a brain doesn't go abroad and think they have the right to do what this peabrain did.
I guess they expect the tin-pot-dictatorships to allow leftist students to start "Revolutionary People's Brigades" to overthrow the government without doing anything about it, like our government does here... then when they run off to some bug country to spread The Revolution and get thrown in jail, the poor little dears are just *sHOCKed*...
I just love hearing the parents wail, though. They raise this little icon of Marxist "Progressiveness" and send it off to "Find Itself" agitating in some foreign schumerhole, and prattle to all their leftist "colleagues" at the wine-and-cheese soiree' about the wonderful "work" their little dear is going for the "oppressed" in a "third-world nation", and the next thing they know, they've got to spend their vacation money on plane tickets to try to extract their little prize's posterior from a romantic revolutionary third-world *jail*...
(I better quit here, I'm enjoying this far too much...)
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