Don't Free Lori Berenson
Got a problem with hoods? Then put away the bombs.

by TUNKU VARADARAJAN
Monday, October 2, 2000 12:01 A.M. EDT

"Free Lori Berenson," the New York Times exhorted recently, in a typically ill-tailored editorial designed to heap pressure on Alberto Fujimori, the president of Peru. I disagree strongly.

To those not familiar with this case, I offer a potted summary of the facts. Berenson is a 30-year-old woman from New York, a convicted terrorist who has been in jail in Peru for nearly five years. She was arrested on Nov. 11, 1995, and charged with treason. Her conviction by a military tribunal followed in January 1996, as did a life sentence. She has now been granted a retrial, to take place in a civilian court.

The gravamen of the original charge was that she was part of a conspiracy--hatched by the Túpac Amaru Revolutionary Movement (known by the Spanish acronym MRTA), a hardcore Marxist outfit of which she was a member--to assault the Peruvian Congress, to kidnap legislators, and, um, by the way, to overthrow the government. This is the same outfit that in December 1996 stormed the Japanese ambassador's residence in Lima, holding 72 hostages for more than four months. Two soldiers and one hostage died in an otherwise successful rescue mission.

On the day of her trial--before a military tribunal, whose members wore hoods so as not to be identified (about which more later)--Berenson virtually handed the case for her conviction, on a platter, to the prosecution. Far from denying that she was a member of the Túpac Amaru, a group whose killings of innocents and assaults on banks and government institutions were exceeded in volume only by those of the Maoist Shining Path, she faced the cameras and screamed--yes, screamed--these words:

"There are no criminal terrorists in the MRTA! It is a revolutionary movement!"

There are a couple of dubious explanations for her behavior, floated by her parents subsequently. One: that she had seen a fellow inmate tortured just before she appeared in court, hence her hysterical state; and two: that she had been told, incorrectly, that the volume on the speaker into which she made her statement was very low, hence her very loud declamation.

Berenson was found guilty. Yes, the judges were hooded--and no, hooded judges do not convey the best impression of the majesty of justice. But the reason Berenson's judges were hooded (and their counterparts are not in the U.S., say, or Britain) is that groups like the Túpac Amaru had generated such a climate of intimidation and terror that the judicial system was on the verge of collapse. Judges who tried and convicted terrorists were hounded and murdered. Witnesses who gave evidence met a similar fate. Not only did the supply of witnesses dry up, the number of judges willing to risk their lives shrank almost to the vanishing point. If the state had not extended to judges--and to witnesses--the protection of strict anonymity, there would have been no trials of terrorists at all in Peru. Civil society would have collapsed, which was one of the central aims of people like Berenson.

Berenson's lawyers--including the appalling Ramsey Clark, the former U.S. attorney general whose International Action Center also agitates on behalf of such great humanitarians as Saddam Hussein and Slobodan Milosevic--argued that the hoods vitiated her initial trial, that they stripped her of her right to impartial judgment. That's arrant nonsense. The judges who were hooded at Berenson's trial were hooded because of people like Berenson. It's as simple as that. You don't like hoods? Then put away the bombs.

No wonder that the Peruvian people have no sympathy for Berenson. She had little local public support at the time of her conviction. Even today, after years in jail, she has more support on the Upper West Side of Manhattan than she does in all Lima. In a poll conducted recently by El Comercio, a Lima newspaper, 52% of those questioned said they disapproved of her getting a new trial. A third of all respondents felt that her retrial was the outcome not of new evidence, nor of a flawed first trial, but of plain, old-fashioned American pressure.

I am not unhappy that Berenson has been extended a new trial, one by a civilian tribunal. Let the trial proceed. I hope that the tribunal--and the Peruvian administration--will resist pressure from the Clinton administration and from the likes of Jesse Jackson, who recently had the temerity to harangue Mr. Fujimori--a man who saved Peru from a terrorist cataclysm--on the subject of Berenson. If there is evidence to convict her again--and there is every reason to believe that there is--let her stay in jail.

Her parents have put out a revisionist version of her life (and who can blame the poor folks?). For the record, here's what they say, on a Web site dedicated to Berenson:

Lori Berenson is a U.S. citizen, human rights activist, and free-lance journalist who currently is serving a life sentence in Perú following her conviction by a secret, hooded military tribunal, in violation of international law. . . .

After half a decade of hands-on experience with and study of poverty and the plight of Latin America, Lori was able to secure assignments from two U.S. publications, Modern Times and Third World Viewpoint, to work as a free-lance journalist. She was to write articles on the effects of poverty on women in Peru. She secured appropriate press credentials in Lima. With her press credentials, Lori was also able to get interviews with members of Congress and other Peruvian officials. She also wanted to present the views of a wide variety of Peruvians, including those of the Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement (MRTA), a group of self-defined revolutionaries striving to assimilate within the Peruvian government.

I will end on another, broader point, one the New York Times and others have scrupulously failed to mention: that of personal responsibility. Berenson chose to be in Peru. She chose to join the Túpac Amaru. Call me old-fashioned, but I believe that she must now lie in the bed she made for herself. She immersed herself in the politics of Peru, and threw in her lot with a bunch of violent revolutionary thugs. She was not, as some apologists have suggested, a naive gringa from Manhattan who stumbled unwittingly into Peru's revolutionary quagmire. She was a committed, full-blown radical, a hardcore revolutionary in search of a suitable address.

Before descending on Lima, she had spent a while in El Salvador, where she became a trusted lieutenant of a leader of the FMLN, that country's leading revolutionary grouping. Some of her former associates in El Salvador have suggested that she left that country because the FMLN was in the process of reinventing itself, changing from a revolutionary front into a political party that would run for election. Berenson craved revolution, so she moved to Peru, as they tell it. "El Salvador wasn't a hot spot any more," a former FMLN colleague told the left-wing Village Voice in 1996. "She was ready, you might say, to move from marijuana to crack."

Berenson paid for her folly--her crimes--in Peru, and in the Peruvian way. If Peru was her business, then she is Peru's business too. She is not our business. I don't want her back in New York, not while I'm trying to raise children here.

Don't free Lori Berenson. No libertad para Lori Berenson.

Mr. Varadarajan is deputy editorial features editor of The Wall Street Journal. His column appears Mondays.