Guilty until proven useful

Drug war money from the U.S. has helped prompt a retrial in Peru for jailed American Lori Berenson.

By Bruce Shapiro

Sep 15, 2000 | The trial proceedings that began Tuesday in Lima, Peru, would be scarcely recognizable to North American eyes. The accused, questioned for hours Tuesday, has yet to be told the charges against her. As the trial goes forward she will be presumed guilty, and will try to defend herself in courts which "do not meet internationally accepted standards of openness, fairness and due process," in the words of the U.S. State Department.

And that is the good news for Lori Berenson. The last time she sat in a Lima courtroom, in 1996, it was a secret trial before hooded military judges, who never let her challenge the evidence against her. Convicted of treason and being a terrorist ringleader, the then-26-year-old New Yorker was sentenced to life in prison.

Now, after five years on the political margins, Berenson's case is suddenly center stage on two continents. Peru's Supreme Court of Military Justice abruptly voided her first conviction late last month. Now Berenson is being retried by a civilian court. What has changed is not just the venue of her hearing but the stakes in its outcome -- for Peru as well as for Berenson herself.

On the first day of the new trial, her Peruvian lawyer Jose Luis Sandoval told Salon that Berenson "denied all ties of a collaborative nature" with the Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement, the revolutionary faction with whom she has been accused of plotting an attack on Peru's Congress. Berenson -- arrested in a 1995 roundup of MRTA leaders by Peru's anti-terrorism police -- denies ever participating in violent acts, according to Sandoval.

Meanwhile, on Friday, President Alberto Fujimori was confronted in New York over the case by the Rev. Jesse Jackson, who crashed Fujimori's luncheon speech to bankers at the St. Regis Hotel. Jackson pled for Berenson's immediate release, which he said would be "a smart thing" for Fujimori to do. Later in the afternoon Fujimori was reportedly pressed privately by Secretary of State Madeleine Albright.

Fujimori's rhetoric on the Berenson case has changed almost as abruptly as her conviction was overturned. When Berenson was arrested in 1995, Fujimori waved her passport on national television. As recently as this summer he derided his election opponent for raising questions about this case. Yet in New York last week, Fujimori sounded a different note: Although his Justice Minister Ernesto Bustamonte insisted that Berenson's case is in the hands of the judicial branch, "We are always willing to dialogue," Fujimori responded to Jackson, who has said he will travel to Peru on Berenson's behalf.

What is behind this seismic shift in a case that until recently seemed little more than a doomed cause? In part, it reflects the slow maturing of a legal and political campaign by Berenson's parents, who have devoted themselves single-mindedly to her release since 1996 -- a campaign chronicled in her mother Rhoda Berenson's soon-to-be-released memoir.

But the reopening of Berenson's case is as much a response to a crisis of Fujimori's own making. To the international community, Berenson's case is now emblematic of a corrupt and authoritarian regime that resists change even as most of Latin America gropes toward democratic reform.

Next Page: Did Berenson keep a "safe house" for rebels?

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