[Ppnews] The Liberation of Lori Berenson

[Political Prisoner News]

March 2, 2011


The Liberation of Lori Berenson

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/06/magazine/06berenson-t.html?_r=1

By JENNIFER EGAN

<http://topics.nytimes.com/topics/reference/timestopics/people/b/lori_helene_berenson/index.html?inline=nyt-per>Lori 
Berenson has always loved to walk. When she was a 
high-school student in Manhattan in the 
mid-1980s, she walked home at night from her job 
at Pasta & Cheese, on the Upper East Side, to the 
apartment where she grew up, on East 25th Street. 
When she began her prison sentence in Peru, in 
1996, for collaborating with a terrorist group, 
convicted terrorists had to spend 23½ hours a day 
inside their cells. Even then, Berenson walked in 
the 6-by-9-foot space she and another woman 
shared ­ two steps forward, two steps backward ­ 
for hours. “People ask, what did you miss most?” 
she said in August, two and a half months after 
she was released on parole, having served nearly 
15 years of a 20-year sentence. “This was definitely it.”

It was after dark, and we were taking a rapid, 
circuitous walk through a park that clutches the 
crumbly cliff tops in the Miraflores district of 
Lima, where Berenson and her 15-month-old son, 
Salvador, had been living since her release. 
(Berenson’s parole requires that she remain in 
Peru until 2015.) They were sharing an apartment 
with a family friend and, temporarily, Berenson’s 
parents, who were visiting from New York. 
Berenson had recently separated from her husband 
­ Salvador’s father ­ whom she’d met in prison 
while he, too, was serving a sentence for 
terrorism. Soon after his release in 2003, they 
married, and Salvador was conceived during a 
conjugal visit. The boy spent his first year of 
life with Berenson in the women’s prison in Chorrillos, Lima.

In the gusty winter darkness, bicyclists and 
skateboarders wheeled along paved paths that 
snaked among graffiti-carved cacti and 
fluorescently lighted soccer games. Berenson 
insisted we wait until dark to go out; since her 
parole, she has been hounded by strangers who 
scream obscenities or call her “assassin” and 
“murderer.” Just that day, on her way back from 
the playground with her mother and Salvador, 
“this woman said: ‘You’re under house arrest! You 
should be in your house!’ She was with a 
cellphone, taking pictures. I don’t like going to 
the park, because people stare at you and make 
you feel as though you’re not welcome.”

Berenson wasn’t under house arrest, but she might 
as well have been; the media frenzy surrounding 
her release on May 27 meant that during her first 
10 days of freedom, she never went outside. A 
horde of photographers stormed the car in which 
she was driven away from the prison ­ three 
cameramen thrust themselves into the backseat; 
more jumped onto the roof, leaving dents; a TV 
van crashed into the back. Another gantlet 
awaited her outside her apartment building, 
surging against the surrounding gate with such 
pressure that it buckled. For many days, the 
press lingered outside, interviewing Miraflorans 
incensed at having Berenson in their midst.

Such an outpouring of rage at a 40-year-old 
woman, mother to a toddler, who was convicted in 
her mid-20s of abetting a terrorist plot that 
never took place, is a measure of the degree to 
which Peruvians are still traumatized by the 
violence that convulsed their country during the 
years when the 
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/s/shining_path/index.html?inline=nyt-org>Shining 
Path warred with the military and nearly 70,000 
Peruvians were killed. It also underscores the 
fact that terrorism, all but defunct in Peru for 
more than a decade, is still a hot political issue.

In person, Berenson is an unlikely fulcrum for 
all this drama. She is slight and mild-mannered, 
with wire-rimmed glasses, an inquisitive gaze and 
wavy brown hair that she often wears in a single 
braid down her back. She dresses simply ­ often 
in jeans, occasionally dangly earrings. Her 
speech is polite and a little stiff, in the 
manner of both a native English-speaker who has 
lived much of her life in another language, and a 
person who resists self-revelation. When she’s 
comfortable, a dry sense of humor emerges ­ a 
willingness to laugh at her predicament. She is 
most forthcoming on general topics: Peruvian 
politics, the economy and its inequities. 
Personal questions she often greets with a 
hurried, “Yes, yes, yes,” or “Oh, no, no,” as if 
she were physically brushing the query away. You 
feel that she would go to almost any length to 
avoid exposing her emotional life to a relative 
stranger: deny its existence ­ even forget it, as 
she appeared to when I asked, on our walk, what 
part of her early life she remembered as 
especially happy. “I don’t know,” she said. “I haven’t thought of that.”

Berenson was first detained on Nov. 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; the other woman, whom 
Berenson said she’d hired as a photographer, was 
the wife of Nestor Cerpa, a leader of the 
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/t/tupac_amaru_revolutionary_movement/index.html?inline=nyt-org>Túpac 
Amaru Revolutionary Movement, or M.R.T.A. Within 
hours of the women’s arrest, police officers 
raided a house Berenson had rented with a male 
friend who was an M.R.T.A. member. (She had moved 
out before the raid.) The police engaged in an 
11-hour gun battle with M.R.T.A. fighters who 
were holed up inside; M.R.T.A. members and one 
police officer were killed before the M.R.T.A. 
surrendered. The M.R.T.A. was a much smaller 
insurgent group than the dominant Shining Path, 
and historically less violent. But on the top two 
floors of the house, which Berenson had sublet to 
another M.R.T.A. leader, the police discovered a 
large cache of weapons and ammunition, along with 
evidence of a plan to forcibly seize the Congress 
and hold its members hostage. Berenson claimed 
she was innocent: she had known the people by 
different names, she said, had no idea they were 
M.R.T.A. members and had never visited the top 
two floors of the house after subletting them for 
what she thought was going to be a school.

Five weeks after her arrest, on Jan. 8, 1996, 
Berenson was taken to a small auditorium in the 
headquarters of Dincote, Peru’s antiterrorist 
police, and presented to the press. Her 
performance was indelible: she took the stage 
bellowing in Spanish, hands clenched at her 
sides, long dark hair tumbling down both sides of 
her face. 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!” ­ words that, to Peruvian ears, 
amounted to a confession. She looked scary: big, 
ungoverned and enraged. To this day, clips from 
that 15-year-old tirade are part of any news 
story about her on Peruvian TV; stills from it, 
in which she appears to be baring her teeth, 
appeared on the front pages of Peruvian 
newspapers when she was paroled. Her father told 
me ruefully: “Forty-four seconds, and it ruined 
her life. It doesn’t take much.”

There are practical explanations for Berenson’s 
behavior that day; she was told by the military 
police that there were no microphones and that 
she would have to shout to be heard. She spent 
the prior four days in a rat-ridden cell with a 
woman who had five gunshot wounds; Berenson was 
strung out and sleepless. Before facing the 
media, she had no access to her lawyer. She was 
arrested at a time when the Peruvian government, 
under President 
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/f/alberto_k_fujimori/index.html?inline=nyt-per>Alberto 
Fujimori, had achieved a state of hyperefficiency 
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. The leader of the 
Shining Path, Abimael Guzmán, was captured that 
year. By the time of Berenson’s arrest, thousands 
of people had been imprisoned for terrorism, many 
innocent; Fujimori’s Law of Repentance offered 
strong incentives to name names, and little 
evidence was required to convict. (Fujimori 
himself is now serving a 25-year sentence for 
human rights violations committed during his 
government’s war against the Shining Path.)

Recalling her mind-set that day, Berenson told 
me: “I was indignant about the whole judicial 
process. The lawyer had already told me they were 
asking for 30 years, no parole. It was like: I 
have nothing to lose. I saw such inhumanity, 
particularly in the case of the people who were 
wounded. And thinking that no one would ever hear 
about it. I just said, Well, I know someone will 
listen to me if I say something. That was the 
most naïve and stupid thing I did, was thinking 
that by saying that, it would be helpful.”

It was helpful to Fujimori, who got credit for 
locking up a dangerous American who now 
personified, in the public mind, the irrational 
violence that had racked Peru. Cynthia 
McClintock, a professor of political science at 
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/g/george_washington_university/index.html?inline=nyt-org>George 
Washington University who has studied Peru since 
the 1970s, told me: “That she was going to be 
behind bars served Fujimori’s purpose of 
highlighting the success of his intelligence 
work, and the government’s judicial process. They 
did a very good job of showing the activists in 
these movements in their worst way.”

It was also helpful to the prosecution, which 
upped its request from 30 years to life in prison 
without parole. Three days later, 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, by hooded 
military judges ­ then a customary procedure for 
dealing with accused terrorists. Her parents were not allowed to be present.

It’s hard not to wonder ­ as people close to 
Berenson do ­ whether things might have unfolded 
differently for her had she cowered, rather than 
shouted, before the press, or betrayed even a 
modicum of the panic and despair most people 
would have felt in such circumstances. But anyone 
close to Berenson knows that she would never 
expose herself in that way ­ indeed, her 
toughness may extend to not even perceiving her 
own vulnerability in the way most people would. 
“When they sentenced me to life, I started 
cracking up,” she told me. “It might have been 
sort of a nervous reaction. They started saying 
things I supposedly had done, and it was like, 
What? What’s going on? It was insane.”

A few days later, she was transferred with a 
group of about 40 prisoners to the infamous 
Yanamayo prison in Puno: unheated, at an altitude 
of 12,000 feet. They were flown in a cargo plane 
with their heads covered, guarded by armed 
soldiers, then moved onto a bus. “I don’t 
remember it being particularly scary,” she told 
me. “My logic at that time was different: you’re 
put in this bus, you can’t really hold on because 
you’re handcuffed behind your back, and you need 
to hold on because you might fall on your face.” 
She chuckled, remembering. “And so that was your concern.”

Not perceiving your own vulnerability is a bit 
like not perceiving physical pain; it may allow 
you to tolerate extremes that would crush other 
people ­ as Berenson certainly has ­ but it can 
also hinder your ability to calculate personal 
risk. For all of her emotional 
self-protectiveness, at critical junctures 
Berenson has been unwilling, or possibly unable, 
to perceive the dangers incurred by her words or 
actions. “My coming here, in retrospect I can say 
it wasn’t the best decision,” she told me, with a 
wry laugh, “but I was fascinated by the diversity 
of cultures and peoples, and I guess I didn’t see 
the consequences of not just coming here but getting involved.”

Berenson’s emotional opacity has made her the 
locus of myriad contradictory visions: to many 
Peruvians, she is chilly and unrepentant; to 
Americans who worked for her release and visited 
her in prison, she is brave and stoic ­ almost 
saintly. But what I heard most often, especially 
from women, was that Berenson had reminded them 
of themselves: young, passionate, risk-taking. 
Robin Kirk, director of the Duke Human Rights 
Center, who worked in Peru as a journalist 
throughout the dangerous upheaval of the 1980s, 
said she identified with Berenson but also ­ as a 
mother ­ with Berenson’s parents: “Your bright, 
adventurous child goes off, and you have to be 
supportive, of course, but what kind of things 
are going to happen to change their lives? For 
me, it was all for the better; I would never have 
traded that experience in Peru. And I had good luck.”

Lori Berenson had a middle-class Manhattan 
childhood. Her parents were professors: Rhoda 
taught physics at Nassau Community College; Mark 
taught statistics at 
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/b/baruch_college/index.html?inline=nyt-org>Baruch 
College. Her sister, Kathy, now a research 
psychologist, is two years older. When Lori was 
in kindergarten, the family moved from Queens to 
an apartment in the East Midtown Plaza housing 
complex, in the East 20s (her parents still live 
there), and Lori went to Public School 40 and 
Junior High School 104. The Berensons were 
neither overtly political nor religious. “I’m not 
from a political family at all,” Berenson told me.

By all accounts, Lori was a busy, sociable, 
highly musical child. She played the lead in 
junior-high productions of “Annie” and “Jesus 
Christ Superstar.” An organized, diligent 
student, she was the sort of kid who resists 
telling her parents exactly what she’s up to. 
“They come home at 3 o’clock; ‘How was your day?’ 
” Rhoda recalled. “For Lori, it was: ‘It was 
great. I’m leaving.’ ” She continued, “Quite 
honestly, she does take after me.”

All three female Berensons are profoundly private 
­ to an extent that seems quaint in our 
self-exposing era. In October, Kathy explained to 
me why she preferred not to provide childhood 
anecdotes about Lori: “To some extent, my private 
memories of me and my sister as a child are all I 
have left that hasn’t been already given over to 
this traumatic series of events,” she said, with 
visible discomfort. “So it’s both my private 
nature and my sense that we’ve already given it all away.”

Mark Berenson, Lori’s father, is the vivid 
exception: effusive and mercurial, prone to 
occasional exaggeration and oversharing, he 
routinely embarrasses his wife and daughters. The 
writer of many textbooks on statistics and a 
self-professed workaholic, he berated himself for 
not having listened enough when Lori might have 
wanted to talk as a child. “I was not a good 
parent,” he told me, over his wife’s protests 
that he was better than most men his age. “I 
called for them at school, I took them home, but 
they were talking, and it went in one ear and out 
the other.” According to Mark, when Lori left for 
Central America, she made him a mixed tape that 
began with 
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/p/peter_paul_and_mary/index.html?inline=nyt-org>Peter, 
Paul and Mary’s “Leaving on a Jet Plane,” 
followed by Harry Chapin’s “Cat’s in the Cradle” 
­ that classic ballad of parental neglect. “She zinged it to me,” he said.

A love of animals prompted Lori to become a 
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/v/vegetarianism/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier>vegetarian 
by age 8 ­ in 1978 ­ with such well-reasoned 
vehemence that her mother and sister soon 
followed suit. At 12, she began spending her 
summers in the Hamptons as a mother’s helper, the 
first of many jobs she held, and saving serious money.

In 1980, when Lori was 11, three American nuns 
were murdered in El Salvador. “That stayed in my 
head,” she told me. “I remember hearing about it, 
seeing a movie about it, saying: ‘Wow, it’s 
terrible, it’s not fair. They were helping poor 
people.’ I wanted to be a nun. Of course, you 
can’t do it if you’re not religious. You adopt 
another kind of religion, I guess, and that was sort of what I did.”

Berenson is not a creator of romantic 
self-narratives. When she speaks of adopting 
another kind of religion, she means that at 
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/m/massachusetts_institute_of_technology/index.html?inline=nyt-org>M.I.T., 
where she arrived in 1987, after graduating from 
LaGuardia High School of Music and Art and 
Performing Arts, she had a conversion experience. 
She began working for Prof. Martin Diskin, who 
was doing research on the policies of granting 
political asylum to refugees from Nicaragua, El 
Salvador and Guatemala. She learned that those 
who received asylum were likely to be the ones 
fleeing groups that the United States opposed: 
the Sandinista government of Nicaragua, or the 
guerrillas fighting in El Salvador.

“The others would get sent back to be killed, 
even though they had been tortured,” she told me. 
“Why wouldn’t you give someone who’s being 
pursued refugee status? Politics. My awakening to the world.”

Berenson spoke of this revelation with a forceful 
clarity I rarely heard in discussions of her 
personal experience, which she tends to minimize. 
Her political views, expressed in periodic 
statements from prison that her parents posted on 
their <http://FreeLori.org>FreeLori.org Web site, 
haven’t measurably changed over the years; on the 
contrary, her discovery of a world built on 
oppression, exploitation and imperialism has ­ in 
Berenson’s view ­ been ratified by her experience 
in Peru. “I realized that behind suffering was 
politics. It wasn’t just like, Oh, these people 
are poor and they’re destined to suffer. No. 
There are interests behind that ­ political, 
economic ­ in having a social class be relegated 
to dying in misery, and being exploited, and 
being harmed, and suffering repression.”

At M.I.T., Berenson lived in co-ed housing 
off-campus. Her roommate, Kristen Gardner, still 
a close friend, recalled: “She had a great sense 
of humor, she played the guitar. We both had a 
lot of friends who were involved in politics. 
Neither of us were big partiers. It was very down-to-earth.”

During spring break of that freshman year, 
Berenson joined an interfaith religious 
delegation to El Salvador. “When I got there, 
there was something about it that I just loved,” 
she told me. “I loved the hills. I’ve been a city 
person all of my life, and saying, Wait a minute, 
this is a different world, and I want to be part of this world.”

She lasted only one more semester at M.I.T. “In 
high school, I was a dedicated student,” she told 
me. “I was excessively disciplined. And I just 
decided it was all wrong ­ my vocation was something else.”

Mark Berenson recalled her decision with a 
lingering air of helplessness. “What could we 
do?” he said. “She had her own money. We taught 
her to be independent. So we said: ‘O.K. Go.’ 
Hoping that it wouldn’t be a horror.”

After Christmas break of her sophomore year, 
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, or 
Cispes, in New York and Washington. “And then 
someone asked me if I would be willing to work 
with an F.M.L.N. representation in Washington.”

The F.M.L.N., or Farabundo Martí National 
Liberation Front, is now the ruling party of El 
Salvador; its candidate was elected president in 
2009. But in 1989, when Berenson took the job, 
the F.M.L.N. was an aggregate of five Marxist 
guerrilla groups locked in a long civil war with 
the oligarchy of El Salvador. In early 1990, 
Berenson moved to Nicaragua to work for the 
F.M.L.N. there. The work was mostly secretarial, 
but she also had contact with the Salvadoran 
refugee community. When a cease-fire was declared 
and peace accords signed in 1992, Berenson moved 
to San Salvador and became the secretary of one 
of the F.M.L.N.’s commanding generals, Salvador 
Sánchez Cerén, a signer of the peace accords (he 
is now vice president of El Salvador). Though she 
wrote letters home and made occasional visits, 
she was distant from her parents during her years 
in Central America. They never knew her exact 
role with the F.M.L.N. until after her arrest.

Close proximity to a successful guerrilla war, 
peace negotiation and ensuing political 
legitimacy must have been a heady experience for 
a person of 22, but Berenson would acknowledge 
this only theoretically: “It was feeling like I 
was part of a project that was going to help 
resolve problems of inequality ­ social, 
economic.” As I puzzled over her reluctance to 
evoke that triumphant moment, I found myself 
recalling her sister’s reason for not divulging 
childhood memories: that in giving them away, she 
would diffuse their private power.

By 1994, two years into the peace, Berenson had 
grown unhappy. She married a Salvadoran economics 
student, but the marriage quickly foundered. “In 
civilian life, the urgency wasn’t the same,” she 
told me. “Since I had dedicated 12 hours a day ­ 
almost 24 hours ­ exclusively to a project that 
was positive, once I stopped having that level of 
dedication, I felt as though there was something wrong.”

Berenson left El Salvador in October 1994, 
traveled in South America and arrived in Peru in November with plans to stay.

The morning after our walk in August, under the 
depthless white sky that seems to hang over Lima 
in winter, I visited Berenson in her apartment, 
on the corner of a quiet residential street. 
Parolees are expected to live with family; 
because Berenson is separated from her husband, 
her friend Marie Manrique ­ Salvador’s godmother 
­ is serving that function. Berenson was supposed 
to have moved into Manrique’s apartment in 
another neighborhood, but shortly before her 
release, the antiterrorist police came to the 
home of Manrique’s landlord and asked whether she 
knew that Lori Berenson would be moving in. The 
landlord hadn’t known, and she threatened to 
evict Manrique. There was a last-minute scramble 
for new housing; a succession of landlords 
refused to have Berenson under their roofs. The 
current apartment, which came furnished, is more 
expensive than they’d like (Berenson’s parents 
pay the rent), and a sixth-floor walk-up is not 
ideal for a toddler and a stroller, but they were lucky to get it.

Berenson and Salvador share a bedroom beside a 
kitchen alcove, where a flight of steps leads 
down to the front door. Berenson hadn’t fully 
unpacked, and several fat woven-plastic bags with 
black prison markings were barricading the top of 
the stairs to keep Salvador from tumbling down. 
He settled for tossing a small car over the bags, 
listening with satisfaction as it ricocheted down 
the stairs and smiling impishly. He was 15 months 
old; a sturdy, sweet-faced boy with dark curls 
and a fierce attachment to his mother, whom he 
liked to keep in sight at all times.

Mark and 
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/b/rhoda_berenson/index.html?inline=nyt-per>Rhoda 
Berenson were getting ready to take Salvador to 
the park, as they did each day. Mark is tall and 
boyish, with a clipped gray mustache and beard; 
Rhoda is tiny and serene, clearly the anchor of 
the two. Together, they form a kind of living 
encyclopedia of their daughter’s legal history, 
finishing each other’s sentences as they narrate 
a litany of close calls, near misses and what 
ifs. (What if they’d hired the Miami lawyer they 
refer to as Mr. Slick, who cost $60,000? What if 
Lori had gone to Oberlin instead of M.I.T.?) 
Since Berenson’s arrest, they’d devoted 
themselves to her release, both retiring early 
from their jobs and, for a time, renting a 
Washington office to lobby members of Congress. 
(In recent years, they accepted new teaching 
positions.) During the four months in 1998-99 
that Berenson spent isolated at Socabaya prison 
near Arequipa, her parents alternated visits 
every two weeks: flying to Lima, spending the 
night on the airport floor, catching another 
flight at dawn. In fact, Berenson’s greatest 
source of conflict with her parents arose from 
her wish that they would do less. At a certain 
point, she told me, “I just said: ‘To hell with 
it. It’s over. We lost.’ ” She begged her parents 
to suspend their efforts. “It’s very painful to 
see them wasting their lives away,” she said. 
“And it just created an expectation of something 
changing when I knew nothing was going to change.”

 From the start, the Berensons’ chief hope was 
that the United States government would effect 
their daughter’s release. Former Attorney General 
Ramsey Clark, who in 1989 worked with the State 
Department to negotiate the freedom of a young 
American woman in El Salvador under uncannily 
similar circumstances, said the State 
Department’s efforts fell short in Berenson’s 
case. “The government in Washington didn’t act 
with alertness in the way that a government 
committed to protecting its own citizens ought to,” he told me.

But Dennis Jett, who was the United States 
ambassador to Peru from 1996 to 1999, vigorously 
rejected the notion that the State Department 
could have done more. “What leverage do we have 
over Peru?”he asked. “I think this is a colonial, 
somewhat-racist mentality that these countries 
are always wrong, and all we have to do is apply 
pressure on any underdeveloped country” and it 
will deem an American prisoner innocent.

As Mark and Rhoda Berenson prepared to leave for 
the park with Salvador, he realized that his 
mother wasn’t going along and began to cry for 
her. Berenson hugged him tightly at the top of 
the stairs and kissed him goodbye. Her tenderness 
with her son is a striking contrast to her usual 
reserve, and his wish to cling to her was made 
more poignant by the fact that her parole was in 
jeopardy. The state prosecutor had appealed it 
within days of her release in May, challenging 
whether she’d served enough time (prisoners can 
reduce their sentences through work or study, and 
Berenson had done so), as well as whether her 
psychological reports ­ which must affirm a 
prisoner’s rehabilitation ­ were credible.

If her parole was revoked, she would have to 
return to jail for five more years. By law, 
Salvador could remain with her until age 3, but 
by now he’d grown used to running freely in the 
park. “He’s had a taste of life outside of 
prison,” she said. “I don’t think it’s going to 
be easy for him to go back.” Salvador could 
return to New York with his grandparents (as he 
would have to in nearly two years), but he was 
still so small, and nursing overnight.

“I’m tense, and I’m very tense with him,” she 
told me. “I feel bad about it.” She had been 
trying, subtly, to prepare Salvador for a 
possible future separation. “When we’re alone 
together or he’s going to sleep, I tell him that 
I love him and I’ll always love him, but I may 
not be with him physically always,” she said.

There was an enforced intimacy about life in the 
Chorrillos prison. Berenson was among women from 
the M.R.T.A., some of whom she’d known from other 
prisons, and likened to a big family. Her history 
of good behavior meant that she was allowed to 
move freely between her cell and a communal 
courtyard. “I used to be with Salvador from 6 
a.m. until about 7 at night, and then sometimes 
we’d get together to watch the news with other 
inmates from 7 to 8,” Berenson told me. “I’d take 
him into the cell and close the door, and it’s 
like a playpen. I could make his food or mush his 
banana.” But when she needed to wash clothes or 
clean the cell, she would avail herself of 
“aunties,” fellow inmates who enjoyed caring for 
Salvador. “They’d give him his dinner and a bath, 
and I would join them at 8:30 or something, 
depending on how many clothes I had to wash.”

Berenson says she met Salvador’s father, Aníbal 
Apari, at Yanamayo prison, where Apari was 
transferred as part of a 15-year sentence for 
being an M.R.T.A. militant. Now a lawyer who 
often litigates on behalf of prisoners (despite 
their separation, he was defending Berenson’s 
right to parole), Apari is a rangy, thoughtful 
man, easily moved to laughter. When I spoke with 
him in his office in December, he affectionately 
recalled hearing Berenson’s notorious press 
presentation while in another prison, on a 
contraband radio. “Of course everyone said, 
‘Well, now she’s sunk,’ ” he told me through a 
translator. “I only heard her; I didn’t see her. 
I thought it was courageous, a bit ingenuous.”

When Apari was moved to Yanamayo prison a few 
months later, he spotted Berenson on his second 
day. Prisoners for terrorism were housed apart 
and separated by group. He was able to get 
someone to deliver her a note wrapped in Scotch 
tape. She sent back a note of her own.

“When you’re in prison, the only way you can show 
affection is through gestures,” he said. “The 
authorities allowed us once a week to exchange 
presents with the women. Some people sent sweets 
or candies. I sent a yellow scarf to Lori. It’s 
cold up there, of course. I saw her with my scarf 
on ­ that’s a sign. There was a spontaneous 
chemistry between us, a natural feeling.” They 
overlapped at Yanamayo for a year; then Berenson 
was moved to Socabaya prison. They communicated 
by mail from that point on; Apari would send a 
letter via his father in Chile, who would send it 
to Berenson’s father in New York, who would send 
it to Berenson in Peru. The cycle took about two 
months. When Apari was released on parole, in 
2003, they were married while Berenson was at Huacariz prison.

Berenson said, “The idea was that once we were 
both free, we would celebrate it in a different 
manner.” Apari was allowed two conjugal visits 
each month, and for the first four or five years, 
he visited often. Berenson wouldn’t discuss the 
details of why the marriage didn’t work out, but 
she told me: “The last couple of years, he came 
less. I knew there must be a reason for that.” In 
their final year, Apari visited only twice, and 
on one of those visits, Salvador was conceived. 
The couple separated before their son was born. 
In retrospect, Berenson said, she wasn’t 
surprised that the stresses of prison proved too 
much for them. “We were far away,” she said. “A 
lot of not being able to express emotions for a long time. It’s very common.”

At the mention of the separation, Apari grew 
sober, uneasy. “It doesn’t make me happy,” he said, “but these things happen.”

Apari became involved with the M.R.T.A. as a 
young man through his Lima neighborhood, long 
before Berenson arrived in Peru. He stressed what 
I’d heard from others: that the group had come 
into existence in the early 1980s largely to 
oppose the neo-Maoist Shining Path. Robin Kirk, 
who covered the Shining Path as a journalist, 
told me: “The Shining Path, especially for Latin 
America, was absolutely new. It was like a cult. 
The 
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/k/khmer_rouge/index.html?inline=nyt-org>Khmer 
Rouge in Spanish.” Abimael Guzmán, a philosophy 
professor, formed the group in 1970 and served as 
its prophet and commander in chief, later 
directing his militants to kill anyone who 
rejected their principles or failed to do their 
bidding. There was a scant social program; the 
vision was simply to wipe out the past and let the future take care of itself.

“In a way, the M.R.T.A. wanted to show that you 
can have an armed struggle in a different way,” 
Apari told me. “More like the Sandinistas, like 
what happened in Cuba, where politics were the 
most important thing, and weapons were simply a 
means. When confrontation was impossible to 
avoid, it should be done respecting the 
adversary.” This formula proved successful in 
Latin American countries in addition to El 
Salvador; the current presidents of Brazil, 
Uruguay and Nicaragua are all former guerrillas. 
But the violent unreason of the Shining Path made 
Peru a different case, and toward the end, many 
say, the M.R.T.A. began to emulate its more cutthroat rival.

The Peruvian historian Nelson Manrique told me, 
through a translator: “A lot of the M.R.T.A. 
leaders were sent to prison, and those who took 
the lead were the more-militant leaders, which 
gave it a different sort of character. They said: 
‘We’re acting like little nuns. We’re not 
growing, and the Shining Path, which is brutal, is growing.’ ”

By the time Berenson arrived in Lima in 1994, the 
Shining Path was severely diminished, and the 
M.R.T.A. had been reduced to a skeleton crew with 
one big idea left: to seize a public place, take 
hostages and demand the release of M.R.T.A. 
prisoners. A year after Berenson was jailed, the 
group did exactly that: 14 of its members, led by 
Nestor Cerpa, stormed the residence of the 
Japanese ambassador to Peru during a party, and 
held it, along with 72 hostages, for four months. 
(Berenson was one of the inmates whose release 
the M.R.T.A. sought, but none were liberated; the 
siege ended with a commando raid of the residence 
by government forces, who killed or executed all 14 M.R.T.A. members.)

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, which was televised, Berenson 
asserted her innocence, insisting that she hadn’t 
known her various associates were M.R.T.A. 
members yet also refusing to condemn the group. 
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 
(without knowing their real names ­ a customary 
practice in subversive groups) 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.

“Shortly before I was detained, I had the sense 
that things were out of my control,” she told me, 
referring to activities in the rented house. “I 
didn’t imagine what it was, the magnitude of it. 
But I knew enough to have been able to say, I 
should get out of this.” Instead, she said, “I 
avoided the situation. I rented another place. Very head in the sand.”

What she never knew, she still insists, was that 
weapons were being amassed in the house, or that 
violent action was being planned. She maintained 
that her visits to Congress were genuine 
journalistic explorations. “At that time in 
Fujimori’s dictatorship, Congress was the only 
place that there was some sort of democratic 
process.” She called the notion that she was 
casing the building for a takeover “ridiculous,” 
since anything she might have seen there was public knowledge.

No one I spoke with in Peru seems ever to have 
believed Berenson’s original claim of total 
ignorance, and such an obvious untruth may have 
been self-defeating ­ not just legally, but by 
further damaging her image. When I asked Berenson 
why she had hewed to that story during her 
civilian trial, she told me it was because she 
was innocent of the charge of posing as a 
journalist for the purpose of seizing Congress. 
More critically, had she admitted any inside 
knowledge of the group, she said, the Fujimori 
government would have pressured her to implicate 
those around her. “They wanted me to say: ‘I 
condemn them. They are horrible people. They’re 
terrorists who obliged me to do this.’ Look, I 
didn’t believe in social justice since I was 
young to get up there and blame someone else for 
my own wrongdoings. Maybe I was naïve, maybe I 
was convinced of things that weren’t true, and I 
intentionally avoided dealing with reality. But 
no one put me at gunpoint.” When I pressed her on 
whether the M.R.T.A. trapped her, she responded, “I was willingly trapped.”

The days I spent with Berenson in August were 
marked by the drumbeat of her approaching parole 
hearing, scheduled for Aug. 16. The day before, 
while her parents took Salvador to the park, she 
came out to lunch with Marie Manrique and me in a 
neighborhood far from Miraflores ­ the first time 
she ventured to a restaurant since her release.

Manrique, who is half-Peruvian but grew up in the 
United States, is Berenson’s age, open-faced and 
garrulous; she worked for years in human rights 
and is now studying political journalism. She 
first read about Berenson in 1996 and began 
visiting her in prison a few years later.

I asked how her Peruvian friends felt about 
Manrique’s making Berenson’s parole possible by 
living with her. Reactions were mixed, she said; 
she’d just received an e-mail from a friend who 
referred to Berenson as soberbia, meaning “haughty.”

“You know, I can’t win,” Berenson said unhappily. 
“I’m quiet, I don’t joke around. I’m just like that.”

“Here’s a question,” Manrique said. “You didn’t cry.”

She meant that Berenson had never once broken 
down in public ­ a fact Peruvians saw as proof of 
her coldness and lack of remorse.

“I’ve always been a very private person,” 
Berenson said. “I sometimes have cried in front 
of people ­ I haven’t intended to ­ it’s 
something I’d definitely avoid doing. For dignity.”

Berenson told us that on the day she left prison 
last May, she avoided saying goodbye to her 
fellow inmates ­ to women she regarded as family 
­ purely to prevent being exposed in an emotional 
state when she appeared before the phalanx of 
press that was waiting outside. “I said goodbye 
from the door, and they said, ‘Oh, you’re coming back,’ and I said, ‘No.’ ”

Manrique suggested that letting her emotions show 
at tomorrow’s hearing ­ even just a little ­ 
would only make her more sympathetic.

“They would just make fun of it,” Berenson said.

“I give that to you,” Manrique said. “Some press 
would be like, ‘She’s faking.’ But then other 
people would be like, ‘O.K., there’s something 
under that hard veneer, and it’s a person that’s 
worried about five and a half more years in 
prison.’ If something cracks for a few seconds, it’s O.K.”

Berenson considered. “For me, it would be much 
harder to crack and be able to control it,” she said.

At the hearing, she seemed relaxed. She wore a 
pair of gray slacks with a matching jacket and 
silver hoop earrings. It was a small, crammed 
courtroom. Berenson was allowed five minutes to 
speak, during which she apologized if her 
presence in Peru contributed to violence and 
expressed her wish to be with her family and to raise her son.

Back at the apartment that evening, she was 
upbeat. “I think I did it better than I’ve ever 
done before,” she said. “Public speaking is not my strong point.”

Although the three judges would have 15 days to 
render a decision, Berenson had already begun 
packing; she felt that the decision would come 
fast and would probably go against her. Like 
virtually everyone I spoke to, she believed that 
the furor around her parole had been politically 
engineered (her address was printed in newspapers 
and broadcast on TV) and that politics would most 
likely land her back in prison.

“Her release fell into the lap of the reactionary 
right in Peru, and it was like a gift from Santa 
Claus,” Jo-Marie Burt, an associate professor of 
political science at George Mason University, 
told me. “What they try to do is manipulate the 
fact of Lori’s release, use it politically to 
discredit the judiciary, which is in the process 
of prosecuting a handful of members of the armed 
and police forces for gross abuses of human 
rights.” These forces are believed to be 
responsible for roughly 45 percent of the nearly 
70,000 killed over two decades of conflict.

I left Berenson’s apartment that night wondering 
whether she was being alarmist. But less than 48 
hours later, she and Salvador were back in jail; 
because of the last-minute change in Berenson’s 
housing, the police had inspected the Miraflores 
apartment after the court papers had been filed. 
Berenson would have to remain in prison until the 
technicality was addressed. Then, assuming that 
she was paroled again, another hearing would be 
scheduled to decide the issues.

Berenson turned herself in at the U.S. Embassy; 
the press was tipped off and mobbed her on the 
way to a holding cell. Carrying Salvador, she 
stepped from a car into an aggressive throng of 
cameras, all of which captured his panicked tears 
and Berenson’s visible strain as she tried to 
shield him and push her way to the door.

Berenson and Salvador were still in jail two 
months later, in mid-October. The clerical 
problem had been quickly solved, but the state 
prosecutor was trying other legal maneuvers to 
prevent her from being paroled again.

Salvador had been running a high fever and was on 
antibiotics; he wept and clung to Berenson when 
she tried to leave him with the woman in the next 
cell while she went to speak briefly with the 
prison doctor. She’d been having bouts of vertigo 
­ a recurrent, undiagnosed problem. Since her 
return to jail, it had been so severe that she’d 
had to crawl sometimes to keep from falling.

She and Salvador were sharing their cell with 
another inmate; the bottom bunk, where they 
slept, had sheets decorated with lions, birds and 
zebras. The front wall of the cell was bars 
draped with linens for privacy. A single 
fluorescent bulb hung from the ceiling, but 
natural light came through frosted hallway 
windows. Clothing hung from hangers attached to 
loops of string suspended from the ceiling. In 
the corner opposite the bed was a kind of stall 
that seemed to be both toilet and sink; there was 
a hole at the bottom and two wedges on which to 
place your feet. The water ran cold, but the 
prison would provide warm water to bathe the baby.

After returning with Salvador from the doctor, 
Berenson tucked him into his stroller under a 
blanket that said, “Te quiero mucho,” and 
squatted on the orange concrete floor to read him 
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/g/theodor_seuss_geisel/index.html?inline=nyt-per>Dr. 
Seuss’s “Mister Brown Can Moo!” Then she reclined 
the seat so he could lie back for his nap and 
pushed him into the small, dusty outdoor area 
populated by moth-eaten-looking doves.

Berenson walked back and forth, pushing the 
stroller, for more than an hour. Certainly prison 
life had improved since Fujimori’s reign; for the 
first year she was at Yanamayo, Berenson was not 
allowed a single visitor. After that, she could 
see her family for only a half-hour through a 
double layer of mesh that made them hard to see 
and impossible to touch. Prisoners in for 
terrorism weren’t allowed music, radios or any 
media ­ they were utterly cut off. In Yanamayo, 
the guards often withheld water; inmates blocked 
up the drains of the prison yard during storms so 
they could collect the dirty rainwater. Berenson 
joined other prisoners to protest these 
conditions with 
<http://topics.nytimes.com/topics/reference/timestopics/subjects/h/hunger_strikes/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier>hunger 
strikes, but now she underplayed the hardships 
and spoke warmly of the community: singing 
together; calling out chess moves in virtual 
games; the euphoria of someone’s being released.

At the beginning, many terrorist prisoners, like 
Berenson, had life sentences. “It was somewhat 
carefree because you didn’t have any concrete 
sense of the future,” she told me. “In 2003 a lot 
of people had new trials” and received reduced 
sentences. “There was definitely a sense of, 
O.K., this is the amount of time I’m going to be 
here.” Berenson’s second trial had already 
happened. In 2002, the Inter-American Commission 
on Human Rights declared it unfair and therefore 
invalid. The Inter-American Court of Human 
Rights, in Costa Rica, agreed to review the case 
amid widespread expectations that Berenson could 
be freed. But in 2004, after heavy lobbying from 
Peru, the court took the highly unusual step of 
reversing its commission and upholding the 
validity of Berenson’s civilian trial. (The court 
is charged only with assessing due process, not innocence or guilt.)

During this time, Berenson was managing a bakery 
in the Huacariz prison, in Cajamarca, supplying 
the jail with bread and sweets. “There is some 
satisfaction of doing something with your hands: 
it begins, it ends, you clean up and it’s gone,” 
she said. But in retrospect, she seemed to regret 
her utter commitment to that job.

“It was all day and sometimes all night. I think 
I got so absorbed in the whole thing, I just felt 
time was passing in vain. I could have done other things ­ reading, writing.”

Recently, she enrolled in an online translation 
course at 
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/n/new_york_university/index.html?inline=nyt-org>New 
York University and, with Manrique’s help, was 
managing to keep pace from jail. As for her 
broader goal, it was still unclear. “I’m not 
going to have anything to do with a violent 
organization,” she told me, “but that does not 
mean that I accept the status quo; I have to do something about it.”

Berenson was granted parole a second time ­ still 
contested, and therefore conditional ­ and 
released from jail on Nov. 5, 2010, two and a 
half months after her reimprisonment. She and 
Salvador made a quiet return to the Miraflores 
apartment, without the uproar of the last time. 
When I visited the next month, in early December, 
the sun was finally shining and the heavy, gray 
waves below the Miraflores cliffs were studded 
with surfers. When I arrived at Berenson’s 
apartment, after dark, she seemed harried and 
worn out. She was still awaiting a date for her 
next parole hearing. Salvador was recovering from 
the croup, and her vertigo was so severe that day 
that she was afraid to bathe him without someone 
nearby. 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.

She’d had fewer confrontations outdoors, she 
said, but she seemed haunted by some recent ones. 
A woman said, both to Berenson and her father, on 
separate occasions when they were with Salvador: 
“Watch after that kid. Something is going to 
happen to him.” Another time, a woman with two dogs called Berenson “garbage.”

“She came up behind me and gave an order to the 
dogs, and they were put on the alert. Salvador 
was on the ground, so that really bothered me. 
She started yelling: ‘Why are you in this park? 
You should be embarrassed to be in this park.’ ”

I sat in the living room while Berenson bathed 
her son in a deep bathroom sink. He was cranky 
and fretful. ‘‘Qué quieres, bebé. . .?” she asked 
him gently. She dried him off and dressed him in 
a diaper and pajamas, and Salvador lay back in 
her arms on the couch, clutching a handful of her 
hair as he drank his bottle and began to drowse. 
Berenson carried him to their bed and tucked him in.

Mother and son seemed a lonely pair that night, 
in a dim apartment, surrounded by a city she 
believed was hostile. “I was much freer in jail, 
in a certain way,” she said. “I wasn’t 
ostracized. Is there any way I would ever be able 
to function in this country? Or have they created 
a situation such that the only place they want me to function is in jail?”

On Jan. 24, 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. The press reaction was 
surprisingly muted, as if the paroxysm of her 
first release and return to jail with Salvador had drained it of energy.

Last month, about three weeks later, I spoke to 
Berenson via 
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/business/companies/skype_technologies_sa/index.html?inline=nyt-org>Skype. 
It was summer in Peru, and she’d cut her hair to 
shoulder-length. There was crashing in the 
background; Salvador was throwing things and crowing joyfully.

Berenson seemed more forthcoming and ready to 
laugh. The harassment had subsided enough that 
she’d started taking long walks around Lima with 
Salvador in his stroller. “As I become familiar 
with it, I find it more livable,” she said of the 
city. “It’s incredibly huge. And it’s quite pretty.”

It was hard, she said, to shake off the dependent 
state of being a prisoner. “I’m asking Marie for 
help because I don’t realize that I can just deal 
with it,” she said. “I think most Peruvians who 
were in jail go out to their families, their 
friends. My social base in Lima is basically 
Marie. It’s not rebuilding my place in society ­ 
it’s building it from scratch, constructing absolutely everything.”

In the 15 years Berenson spent in prison, her 
peers have moved from early adulthood into middle 
age. “The world has changed,” she told me in 
August. “Internet, giant malls.” 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.

Of course, Berenson’s future won’t really be her 
own until her parole ends; for now, she is 
raising Salvador alone in Peru, with limited 
options. If she ever feels despair or defeat at 
these conditions, she wouldn’t show it ­ not at 
26, with a life sentence in front of her, and not 
now. 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. But this is speculation; Berenson resists 
such storytelling, leaving the rest of us to our 
own devices in trying to unlock the mystery of 
her biography. What she can’t elude is our desire 
to do so: a notoriety she has sustained, 
uncomfortably, for most of her adulthood. “I am 
always conscious,” she said, “of who I am.”

Jennifer Egan (jegan8 at hotmail.com) is the author 
of several novels, most recently “A Visit From the Goon Squad.”

Editor: Ilena Silverman (i.silverman-MagGroup at nytimes.com)




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