Lori Berenson, who was arrested at age 26 and served fifteen years of a twenty-year sentence in Peruvian prisons for, as the New York Times reported March 2, 2011, “abetting a terrorist plot that never took place,” was born in New York on this date in 1969. Berenson had worked in El Salvador with leaders of the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front during the negotiations that ended the Salvadoran civil war in 1992.
Four years later, she was arrested and convicted of providing housing, weapons storage, and assistance to members of Peru’s Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement, which had been labelled a terrorist organization by Alberto Fujimori’s government. Fujimori, elected in 1990, had dissolved the Congress in 1992, suspended the Constitution, and granted the military extraordinary powers to fight Shining Path and other violent, militant groups. By the time of Berenson’s arrest, thousands of Peruvians were in prison on charges of terrorism under judicial circumstances that provoked human rights protests around the world. Berenson was tried by hooded military judges and found guilty of treason. She spent years in Yanamayo prison, an unheated dungeon in the high mountains of Peru, where she met her current husband, another politically active prisoner, and bore her son. Berenson was paroled in 2010 (after years of activism by her parents), and finally returned to the US in 2015.
“I was sentenced for the crime of collaboration with terrorism, and I did collaborate with the MRTA. I have never been a leader, nor a militant. I have never participated in acts of violence nor of bloodshed, nor have I killed anyone. And what I would like to clarify here is that I know that my mere participation, even though it was secondary in one incident, if it contributed to the violence in society, I am deeply sorry and I regret it.” —Lori Berenson