<html>
<body>
<font size=3>March 2, 2011<br><br>
</font><h1><b>The Liberation of Lori
Berenson</b></h1><font size=3>
<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/06/magazine/06berenson-t.html?_r=1" eudora="autourl">
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/06/magazine/06berenson-t.html?_r=1<br>
</a></font><h6><b>By JENNIFER
EGAN</b></h6><font size=3>
<a href="http://topics.nytimes.com/topics/reference/timestopics/people/b/lori_helene_berenson/index.html?inline=nyt-per">
Lori Berenson</a> 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.” <br><br>
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. <br><br>
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.” <br><br>
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. <br><br>
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
<a href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/s/shining_path/index.html?inline=nyt-org">
Shining Path</a> 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. <br><br>
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.” <br><br>
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
<a href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/t/tupac_amaru_revolutionary_movement/index.html?inline=nyt-org">
Túpac Amaru Revolutionary Movement</a>, 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. <br><br>
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.” <br><br>
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
<a href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/f/alberto_k_fujimori/index.html?inline=nyt-per">
Alberto Fujimori</a>, 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.) <br><br>
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.” <br><br>
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
<a href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/g/george_washington_university/index.html?inline=nyt-org">
George Washington University</a> 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.” <br><br>
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. <br><br>
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 <i>perceiving</i> 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.” <br><br>
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.” <br><br>
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.” <br><br>
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.” <br><br>
<b>Lori Berenson</b> had a middle-class Manhattan childhood. Her parents
were professors: Rhoda taught physics at Nassau Community College; Mark
taught statistics at
<a href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/b/baruch_college/index.html?inline=nyt-org">
Baruch College</a>. 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. <br><br>
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.” <br><br>
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.” <br><br>
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
<a href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/p/peter_paul_and_mary/index.html?inline=nyt-org">
Peter, Paul and Mary</a>’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. <br><br>
A love of animals prompted Lori to become a
<a href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/v/vegetarianism/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier">
vegetarian</a> 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. <br><br>
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.” <br><br>
Berenson is not a creator of romantic self-narratives. When she speaks of
adopting another kind of religion, she means that at
<a href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/m/massachusetts_institute_of_technology/index.html?inline=nyt-org">
M.I.T.</a>, 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. <br><br>
“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? <i>Politics</i>. My awakening to the world.”
<br><br>
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
<a href="http://FreeLori.org">FreeLori.org</a> 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.” <br><br>
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.” <br><br>
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.” <br><br>
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.”
<br><br>
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.”
<br><br>
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.” <br><br>
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. <br><br>
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. <br><br>
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.” <br><br>
Berenson left El Salvador in October 1994, traveled in South America and
arrived in Peru in November with plans to stay. <br><br>
<b>The morning after</b> 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. <br><br>
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.
<br><br>
Mark and
<a href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/b/rhoda_berenson/index.html?inline=nyt-per">
Rhoda Berenson</a> 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 <i>less</i>. 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.” <br><br>
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. <br><br>
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.
<br><br>
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. <br><br>
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. <br><br>
“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. <br><br>
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.”
<br><br>
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.” <br><br>
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. <br><br>
“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. <br><br>
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.” <br><br>
At the mention of the separation, Apari grew sober, uneasy. “It doesn’t
make me happy,” he said, “but these things happen.” <br><br>
<b>Apari became</b> 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
<a href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/k/khmer_rouge/index.html?inline=nyt-org">
Khmer Rouge</a> 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. <br><br>
“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. <br><br>
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.’ ” <br><br>
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.) <br><br>
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. <br><br>
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. <br><br>
“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.”
<br><br>
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. <br><br>
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 <i>was</i> 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.” <br><br>
<b>The days</b> 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. <br><br>
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.
<br><br>
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
<i>soberbia</i>, meaning “haughty.” <br><br>
“You know, I can’t win,” Berenson said unhappily. “I’m quiet, I don’t
joke around. I’m just like that.” <br><br>
“Here’s a question,” Manrique said. “You didn’t cry.” <br><br>
She meant that Berenson had never once broken down in public a fact
Peruvians saw as proof of her coldness and lack of remorse. <br><br>
“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.” <br><br>
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.’
” <br><br>
Manrique suggested that letting her emotions show at tomorrow’s hearing
even just a little would only make her more sympathetic. <br><br>
“They would just make fun of it,” Berenson said. <br><br>
“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.” <br><br>
Berenson considered. “For me, it would be much harder to crack and be
able to control it,” she said. <br><br>
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. <br><br>
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.” <br><br>
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. <br><br>
“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.
<br><br>
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 <i>after</i> 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. <br><br>
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. <br><br>
<b>Berenson and Salvador</b> 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. <br><br>
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. <br><br>
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. <br><br>
After returning with Salvador from the doctor, Berenson tucked him into
his stroller under a blanket that said, “<i>Te quiero mucho</i>,” and
squatted on the orange concrete floor to read him
<a href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/g/theodor_seuss_geisel/index.html?inline=nyt-per">
Dr. Seuss</a>’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. <br><br>
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
<a href="http://topics.nytimes.com/topics/reference/timestopics/subjects/h/hunger_strikes/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier">
hunger strikes</a>, 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. <br><br>
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.) <br><br>
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. <br><br>
“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.” <br><br>
Recently, she enrolled in an online translation course at
<a href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/n/new_york_university/index.html?inline=nyt-org">
New York University</a> 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.” <br><br>
<b>Berenson was granted</b> 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. <br><br>
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.” <br><br>
“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.’ ” <br><br>
I sat in the living room while Berenson bathed her son in a deep bathroom
sink. He was cranky and fretful. ‘<i>‘Qué quieres, bebé. . .</i>?” 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. <br><br>
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?”
<br><br>
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. <br><br>
Last month, about three weeks later, I spoke to Berenson via
<a href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/business/companies/skype_technologies_sa/index.html?inline=nyt-org">
Skype</a>. 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. <br><br>
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.” <br><br>
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.” <br><br>
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.
<br><br>
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.” <br><br>
Jennifer Egan (jegan8@hotmail.com) is the author of several novels, most
recently “A Visit From the Goon Squad.”<br><br>
Editor: Ilena Silverman (i.silverman-MagGroup@nytimes.com)<br><br>
<br><br>
</font><x-sigsep><p></x-sigsep>
<font size=3 color="#FF0000">Freedom Archives<br>
522 Valencia Street<br>
San Francisco, CA 94110<br><br>
</font><font size=3 color="#008000">415 863-9977<br><br>
</font><font size=3 color="#0000FF">
<a href="http://www.freedomarchives.org/" eudora="autourl">
www.Freedomarchives.org</a></font><font size=3> </font></body>
</html>