Lori Berenson in Context
The story of Lori Berenson,
the 26-year-old New Yorker
convicted in January of “trea-
son” for her involvement with the
Ttpac Amaru Revolutionary
Movement (MRTA) in Peru, res-
onates with various associations for
solidarity activists. Her life was not
that different from friends of mine
who dropped out of college a half
generation ago to go to Latin
America, or who spent their sum-
mers picking coffee with a
Sandinista brigade in Nicaragua.
Like Berenson, we had parents who
didn’t understand what drove their
children to get involved in leftist
politics. Like her, in our idealism,
we were looking for a cause to
which to dedicate ourselves.
Where Berenson’s story diverges
from this common history is the era
in which she was involved and the
movement she chose to ally herself
with. With the transition to democ-
racy throughout the hemisphere,
most Latin American leftists are try-
ing to open up spaces within the
political system. Support in Latin
America for armed struggle is at a
low ebb. Perhaps the only armed
rebellion that has widespread legiti-
macy today is the Zapatistas in
Mexico, and they haven’t fired a
weapon–except in self-defense–
in over two years.
Berenson first went to El
Salvador on delegations in 1988 and
1989, when the civil war was in its
final phase. She settled in depressed
post-Sandinista Nicaragua from
1990 to 1992. She then returned to
El Salvador in late 1992, by which
time the Farabundo Marti National
Liberation Front (FMLN) was
racked by vicious in-fighting that
crippled the group’s transition to
electoral politics. Berenson moved
on to Panama in 1994, where she
met the alleged MRTA guerrilla
who would lead her to Peru. Her
restless travels convey the frustra-
tion that many feel with the paucity
of left alternatives and the dim
prospects for social change in the
neoliberal era.
She chose to support a guerrilla
force that was on its last legs and,
unlike the FMLN or the Sandinistas,
never had widespread popular sup-
port. While cut from the same cloth
as other Marxist insurgencies that
arose throughout Latin America in
the decades after the 1959 Cuban
revolution, the MRTA has always
operated on the margins of national
politics. The group was condemned
to reside in the shadow of the more
powerful and violent Maoist
Shining Path insurgency.
B erenson’s second misstep was
to get involved with an armed
movement in Fujimori’s
Peru. By the time Berenson arrived
on the scene in 1994, Peruvians of
all political persuasions were fed up
with political violence. Fujimori’s
tremendous popularity derives in
large measure from his crackdown
on Shining Path and to a lesser
extent, the MRTA. A month after his
April, 1992 dissolution of Congress,
he issued a sweeping “anti-terrorist”
decree that contained extremely
broad definitions of terrorism and
instituted a system of “faceless” mil-
itary courts to try suspected terror-
ists. Peruvian human rights groups
have documented hundreds of cases
of innocent people ensnared by this
system.
After her arrest, Berenson was
held incommunicado for a week, during which she was subjected to
relentless questioning. She was
found guilty by a military judge,
who was concealed behind a parti-
tion in a trial that was closed to the
public. Her lawyers were not
allowed to cross-examine witnesses
or challenge key evidence.
Berenson made a valiant effort to
use her ordeal to highlight the injus-
tice of the Peruvian judicial system.
She asked U.S. officials not to make
any special effort on her behalf. In
her one appearance before the
media-the equivalent of the U.S.
“perp walk,” she condemned Peru’s
institutionalized violence of hunger
and misery, and asserted that the
MRTA were not “criminal terror-
ists” but a revolutionary movement.
This valid and familiar distinction,
which was evident in the Central
American context of the 1980s, is
completely lost in post-Sendero,
neoliberal Peru.
The U.S. media joined the U.S.
government in protesting that
Berenson had been denied the right
to a fair trial. But, taking its cue from
the Peruvian press, the U.S. media
eschewed the use of the word “left-
ist” or “revolutionary” in its cover-
age, and wrote of her alleged “terror-
ist” activities. In her one appearance
before the media, she was not given
a microphone. She therefore was
forced to shout to make herself
heard–contributing to the construc-
tion of an extremist and maniacal
image. Unflattering photographs of
her with her mouth gaping open ran
in daily papers everywhere.
Berenson was sentenced along
with 20 other alleged MRTA mem-
bers. They join the approximately
7,000 people in Peruvian jails con-
victed or awaiting sentencing on ter-
rorism charges. She will serve her
life sentence without parole in the
maximum-security Yanamayo pri-
son, a notoriously harsh prison in
the bitterly cold highlands of Puno.
In the press, middle-class Peruvians
have called Berenson a know-it-all,
save-the-world gringa who should
have minded her own business. In
the neoliberal age where interna-
tionalism is a scarce commodity, she
does not deserve such condemna-
tion. Her odyssey, although mis-
guided, rested on her passion for
social justice.
Menu
