New Yorker paroled after 15 years in Peru prisons

[The Straight Story]

LIMA, Peru
A judge granted parole Tuesday to Lori Berenson, the 40-year-old New York activist who has spent 15 years in Peruvian prisons on a conviction of aiding leftist rebels.

Judge Jessica Leon granted a request by Berenson, who gave birth a year ago, for conditional release at a hearing at the Lima prison where the American has been held since January 2009.

She said, however, that Berenson cannot leave Peru until her sentence for terrorist collaboration ends in November 2015.

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Berenson nodded assent but did not speak when asked by the judge if she accepted the decision. Bespectacled and wearing earrings, with her braided brown hair hanging over an embroidered sweater, Berenson looked serene during the one-hour hearing.

"I'm happy with the sentence because justice was done," said her lawyer, Anibal Apari, who is also father of Berenson's child, Salvador.

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fgw-lori-berenson-20100526,0,5655788.story

[naaman fletcher]

1. she's guilty

The three-judge tribunal ruled that Ms. Berenson had rented a house in Lima with a co-conspirator for the express purpose of providing a base for a Marxist terrorist organization, bought various computer and communications gear for the group, and then used press credentials as a cover to scrutinize the halls of Congress and facilitate an eventual attack.

.....

Ms. Berenson was arrested in Lima in November 1995, hours before the police raided a four-story house she rented. The police met stiff resistance from rebels in the house and ultimately found 8,000 rounds of ammunition and 3,000 sticks of dynamite.

.....
The prosecution argued, as it did in her first trial, that Ms. Berenson had posed as a foreign correspondent in order to rent a safe house for the rebels and to gain access to Congress accompanied by a photographer who was herself an underground terrorist.

....

The prosecution showed a forged Peruvian voting identification card bearing Ms. Berenson's photograph that was found in the M.R.T.A. safe house during the 1995 police raid. They showed a coded seating plan of the Congress, as well as printouts of several rebel documents with scribbled editing corrections, which police handwriting experts say are in Ms. Berenson's hand.

...

The prosecution and judges openly expressed skepticism that Ms. Berenson could have rented a house for a year inhabited by more than 15 M.R.T.A. rebels and hired a photographer who was the wife of a terrorist leader without ever suspecting the identities of the people she so closely associated with.

...

Ms. Berenson only apologized for appearing strident when she was first arrested, when she shouted, her fists clenched to her sides, ''There are no criminal terrorists in the M.R.T.A.; it's a revolutionary movement!'' That image has made her an unpopular figure in Peru to this day.

....
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/06/21/world/20-year-sentenc...