Lori Berenson

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Image:LoriBerenson.jpg Lori Helene Berenson (born November 13, 1969) is a U.S. citizen currently serving a 20-year prison term in Peru for terrorism-related crimes. In Spanish-language news reports and her trial documents, because of Spanish naming practices, she is often referred to as Lori Berenson Mejía or Lori Berenson Kobeloff.

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Background

Berenson was born in New York City to Rhoda Kobeloff Berenson (now a retired community college physics professor) and Mark Berenson (a professor of statistics now at Montclair State University in New Jersey). While in college at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, she visited El Salvador with a group of Quakers. She dropped out of MIT in the early 1990s to work with organizations like CISPES (Churches In Solidarity with the People of El Salvador) and then spent several years teaching English and doing translation and secretarial work for various left-wing or human rights organizations in Nicaragua and El Salvador. During the run-up to the 1992 signing of the Chapultepec Peace Accords, she worked as an aide to Leonel González, then a top leader of the FMLN left-wing guerrilla group and now a member of the Salvadoran legislative assembly.

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Arrest

On November 30, 1995, Berenson was arrested on a public bus in downtown Lima, Peru. She was accused of collaborating with the Túpac Amaru Revolutionary Movement (MRTA) guerrilla organization, which had been officially classified as a terrorist group by the government. Although not published at the time, she was credentialed as a journalist for two obscure left-leaning U.S. magazines and accompanied by her photographer, Nancy Gilvonio. Gilvonio was actually the wife of Néstor Cerpa, the MRTA second-in-command &mdash, although Berenson claims she was unaware of this connection. Berenson had entered the main Congress building several times during 1995 to gather information. She had provided the information she collected to the MRTA including detailed information on the floor plans of Congress, its security and members, and renting an apartment and a house for them to use

The arrest of the two women happened hours before an all-night siege of the MRTA safe house, in which three MRTA guerrillas and one police officer died and 14 guerrillas were captured. The safe house was found to contain an "arsenal of weapons."[1] Diagrams, notes, weapons, police and military uniforms found at the safe house suggested that the group was planning to seize members of Congress and trade them for captured guerrillas. Police seized from that safe house a floor plan of Congress drawn by Berenson.

On January 8, 1996, the DINCOTE (División Nacional Contra el Terrorismo, which has been characterised by some as a secret police agency), National Counter Terrorist Division hosted a news event in which they showed Berenson to the press. At the event, she appeared defiant and stated that the MRTA was not a criminal terrorist organization but instead a "revolutionary movement". Her statement, given in Spanish, was as follows:

I am to be condemned for my concern for the conditions of hunger and misery that exist in this country. Here nobody can deny that in Peru there is much injustice. There is an institutionalized violence that has killed the people's finest sons and has condemned children to die of hunger. If it is a crime to worry about the subhuman conditions in which the majority of this population lives, then I will accept my punishment. But this is not a love of violence. This is not to be a criminal terrorist because in the MRTA there are no criminal terrorists. It is a revolutionary movement. I love this people. I love this people and although this love is going to make — cost — me years in prison, I will never stop loving, and never will lose the hope and confidence that there will be a new day of justice in Peru.

Berenson’s carefully crafted defense of MRTA combined with the strident tone of her statement led many in Peru to view her as a MRTA radical. However, Berenson has claimed that DINCOTE told her she needed to shout because there were no microphones on the stage and told her she had to be brief with her statement.

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Trials

Using anti-terrorism legislation enacted during a state of emergency declared by President Alberto Fujimori, Berenson was tried in a closed courtoom by a military tribunal. The proceedings were conducted by a military judge who wore a hood and spoke through a voice distortion apparatus to conceal his identity. Peruvian judges often concealed their identities to protect themselves from MRTA reprisal killings. On January 11, 1996, six weeks after her arrest and three days after her presentation to the media, she was sentenced to life in prison for "treason against the fatherland" (traición a la patria) (despite her not being a Peruvian citizen). An appeal lodged against the conviction was dismissed on January 30. Berenson's lawyers argued that she had no prior knowledge of the planned attack, and that she believed that the information she gathered for an article on the Peruvian Congress would be used by the rebels to form a political party.

In 2000 many of Peru's anti-terrorism laws were declared unconstitutional and about 2,000 cases were overturned and retrials in civilian courts ordered. Berenson's case was heard anew by a civilian court on August 28, 2000. On June 20, 2001, she was sentenced to 20 years, with consideration given for time already served under her prior conviction, for the lesser crime of "collaboration with a terrorist organization". If her current prison sentence stands, it will keep her behind bars until 2015, after which she is to be deported from Peru upon release.

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Efforts to free Berenson

In 1998, Amnesty International issued a press release declaring Berenson to be a political prisoner. Amnesty criticized the Peruvian anti-terrorism legislation, stating that, "it is unacceptable for hundreds of political prisoners like Berenson not to be able to exercise their basic human right to a fair and public hearing by an independent and impartial tribunal."

On July 21, 1999, the United States House of Representatives voted against an amendment to express the sense of Congress that the U.S. should increase support to democracy and human rights activists in Peru, and that it should use all diplomatic means to get the government of Peru to release Berenson. The vote failed 189 to 234. (H.Amdt. 330 to the original H.R. 2415 in the first session of the 106th United States Congress.)

In 1996, an apparent effort was made to free Berenson by less conventional means, as the MRTA seized the Japanese Ambassador's residence in Lima, and issued a list of prisoners they demanded be released in exchange for the release of their hostages. Berenson was third on the list. The Peruvian special forces ended the standoff in raid which killed all the MRTA inside. [2]

When U.S. President George W. Bush traveled to Peru in April 2002 to meet with President Alejandro Toledo, some pressed him to search for a humanitarian solution to Berenson's situation, but Bush's ongoing prosecution of a "war on terror" left little likelihood of his arguing on behalf of a U.S. citizen convicted of terrorism abroad, especially one with divergent political views from his Administration.

In 2002, Inter-American Commission on Human Rights of the Organization of American States ruled unanimously, 7 - 0, to condemn the system under which Lori was twice tried. Alleging violations of the American Convention on Human Rights, to which Peru is a party, Berenson's case was referred to the Inter-American Court of Human Rights. A seven-hour hearing was held at the court's headquarers in San José, Costa Rica, on May 7, 2004, at which her lawyers, her mother, and representatives of the Peruvian state gave evidence and argued their positions. Her defense team, led by Ramsey Clark, a former U.S. attorney general and now an attorney for the deposed dictator of Iraq, argued that she should be released because her trials failed to meet international standards for due process, including the argument that she was tried twice for the same crime.

On November 25 2004 the Inter-American Court issued a judgment upholding the conviction and sentence, ruling (inter alia) that:

  1. The Peruvian state had violated Berenson's fundamental right to physical integrity and humane treatment through the detention conditions in which she was held at Yanamayo during the early years of her imprisonment.
  2. Her right to a fair trial and to basic judicial guarantees (including the freedom from ex post facto laws) had been violated by the 1996 proceedings before the "faceless" military courts.
  3. Peru was in breach of Article 2 of the American Convention by failing to enforce the Convention's provisions within its domestic legal system.

However, by six votes to one, the Court found no breaches of Berenson's human rights in her second trial, the one conducted before the civilian courts in 2000–01. Berenson's supporters believe the Peruvian government exerted pressure on the Court to hand down this decision, while her opponents believe it was only pressure from the United States government which got her retried. In fact, on November 20th 2004, Perú's foreign minister, Manuel Rodriguez Cuadros had made the statement that if the Inter-American Court of Human Rights were to rule to free Lori the government of Perú would simply ignore the Inter-American Court. Amnesty International, however, recently conceded that she had finally had a fair hearing. The case is now effectively closed and there is no real chance Berenson will get out early, save a pardon. "I don't feel I've ever convinced anybody" in Peru, her father said to the press after referring to a Peruvian judge as a "lackey." Her mother has written a book entitled Lori, My Daughter Wrongfully Imprisoned in Peru, and both parents have appeared on radio and television promoting their daughter's cause.

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Years in jail

Berenson has spent most of her time in prison at facilities high in the Andes, some of which the Inter-American Court ruled are operated inhumanely. The Yanamayo prison where Berenson was initially held for several years lies at 12,000 feet (3650 m) above sea level near Lake Titicaca in the Puno Region, in southern Peru. Prisoners serving at Yanamayo suffer a high rate of cold-related injuries; confined for up to 23 hours a day in an unheated, unlit concrete cell with glassless windows open to the elements. Berenson's health was seriously affected during her years there. Thus, one of the rulings of the Inter-American Court's judgment was that the Yanamayo facility be upgraded to comply with "international standards" and that Berenson be provided with the "due specialized medical care" that she requires.

On 7 October 1998 Berenson was moved to another prison in Socabaya. She remained there until 31 August 2000, when she was transferred to the women's prison of Chorrillos in Lima. Then, on 21 December 2002, she was relocated to the maximum-security Huacariz Penitentiary in Cajamarca, 350 miles (560 km) north of Lima.

In October 2003, Berenson married Aníbal Apari Sánchez, 40, who, because of legal impediments (he is a convicted MRTA terrorist who has since been released), was not present in the wedding and had to be represented by his father Teófilo Apari Cuba. The marrage shocked some of her supporters and confirmed to her critics that she had ties to the terroists. Apari Sánchez met Berenson in 1998, when both served prison sentences for terrorism in the Yanamayo jail. In the late 1980s, Apari Sánchez was a leader of the CUAVES ("Comunidad Urbana Autogestionaria de Villa El Salvador"), an organization formed in 1971 after more than 50,000 persons invaded lands destined for residential houses and then were relocated to a desert area without any services, 19 km from Lima, later called Villa El Salvador. Apari Sánchez later joined the MRTA and was eventually arrested and jailed. Her union with Sanchez was her second marriage to a Latin American revolutionary.

Berenson currently works at the prison bakery at the Huacariz prison. In February 2002, she joined a short-lived hunger stkike of "political prisoners." Through her website page entitled "The Writings of Lori Berenson," Berenson issues commentaries to the public, including advice to youth, and attacks on the World Bank, the International Monitary Fund, capitalism, globalism, the United States, the U.S. National Guard,the Cable News Network, and Peru's "political class." She also published a short statement in 2006 critical of the "American Way of Life." Since in prison, Berenson has openly allied herself with MRTA inmates accused of terrorism.

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External links

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