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.
