News stories this week have brought attention back to the name Lori Berenson, and that was truly a blast from the past.
Berenson was, twenty years ago, a young American radical who worked with Communist guerrillas first in El Salvador and then in Peru. She was convicted of treason in a military trial in Peru in 1995, and convicted again a few years later in a civilian trial. The charge was in essence being part of a Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement plot to assault and seize Peru’s congress and hold all its members hostage. The Tupac Amaru group, also known as MRTA, was listed as a terrorist organization by both the United States and the EU. Berenson always claimed she was innocent and had no knowledge of the plot, but she rented the safehouse where it was being planned, and she lived there, and she was arrested with the wife of a Tupac Amaru rebel leader after visiting Peru’s Congress–using her journalist’s visa.
I recall this case because the day she was arrested I received a phone call at home from an anguished young friend of hers. I had never heard of her but the young man told me she was an idealist and could not possibly be guilty of conspiring with guerrillas. I was working for a think tank in those days, not in the government, but he sought my advice.
I told him that I knew nothing of the case but if she were truly innocent, and being framed by the Peruvian government or army, she and her supporters needed to play it straight. Say exactly that, and get her a serious lawyer– perhaps a former official who was known to be a non-political type, and who was a centrist politically. Look, I explained to him, if you try to politicize this and she hires someone like Ramsey Clark as her lawyer, the logical conclusion will be that she is likely guilty–as the facts suggest.
She hired Ramsey Clark.
Berenson was paroled several years ago but not permitted to return to the United States to live until now, when the twenty-year sentence is over. Her flings with these terrorist groups changed her life, and the groups committed enormous amounts of violence. Peru’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission had this to say about her friends in the MRTA: the group “engaged in criminal acts; it resorted to assassinations… the taking of hostages and the systematic practice of kidnapping, all crimes that violate not only personal liberty but the international humanitarian law that the MRTA claimed to respect. It is important to highlight that MRTA also assassinated dissidents within its own ranks.”
Berenson will now be reunited with her parents and will live in New York City. It’s inevitable that she will soon be given a teaching post at some prestigious college, just like the American terrorists Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn. Her experiences in Peruvian prisons may have been awful, and it’s almost certain that the media will attempt to make a heroine out of her. But unlike the American prisoners being held by Iran, such as the Washington Post‘s Jason Rezaian, or the prisoner Fidel Castro’s Cuba held until recently, Alan Gross, she was not innocent and she was not framed. She chose to support terrorist groups. She has paid for those actions, but she is no model, no heroine, and no idealist.
