The conviction she got is dearly not what her father intended. Last week a military court in Peru sentenced Berenson, 26, to life in prison for treason, a fate usually reserved for terrorist guerrilla leaders. Police say she helped supply arms, a safe house and intelligence information to the Marxist Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement (MRTA), which had planned to take congressional hostages and exchange them for imprisoned MRTA rebels. Police say they found a stash of weapons in a Lima house she rented, as well as espionage reports on congressmen and a draft of the congressional seating chart. The documents were allegedly covered with Berenson’s handwriting.
The police’s claims don’t impress Berenson’s family, especially since the incourtevidence hasn’t been made public. Military courts, which in Peru preside over terrorism cases, severely limit defendants’ rights. Trials are conducted in secret. Judges sit anonymously behind a screen to protect them from rebel retaliation. Berenson could not cross-examine witnesses. And while the prosecutors requested a 30-year prison sentence, the judge gave her life. “They apparently want to use our daughter to frighten human-rights activists and foreign journalists out of Peru,” says Rhoda Berenson, Lori’s mother.
‘Not violent’: The Berensons suspect that a man with connections to the rebels may have falsely implicated their daughter after she rejected his romantic advances. But her own words reveal her sympathies. She told the press, “Tupac Amaru is not violent, nor is it terrorist because there is not one terrorist in the group.” She was either lying or deluded. MRTA (unrelated to the better-known Shining Path) has a well-documented history of bank robberies, kidnappings and bombings. The State Department says rebels masterminded 22 political assassinations in 1994.
Berenson’S lawyers plan to appeal, and the U.S. government has asked Peru to transfer the case to civil court, where proceedings are open. Failing those efforts, Berenson will be entombed in Yanamayo, a harsh prison where inmates have their food, their daylight-and, at 9,000 feet above sea level, their air-rationed. Whatever her intentions were, that’s a steep price to pay.
