Peru Paroles Jailed NY Woman, Lori Berenson

Updated Wednesday, May 26, 2010, at 12:59 p.m.

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

Judge Jessica Leon granted Berenson's request for conditional release during a hearing at the Lima prison where the American is being held. She said Berenson cannot leave Peru until her 20-year sentence for terrorist collaboration ends in November 2015.

Berenson, who gave birth to a son a year ago, nodded assent but did not speak when asked by the judge if she accepted the decision.

In 2000, five years after being jailed in Peru for treason, Lori Berenson spoke from prison exclusively with "48 Hours" correspondent Peter Van Sant. The interview aired Oct. 19, 2000. Regarding the charges against her, Berenson told Van Sant, "[They're] preposterous and they're obviously false." She added, "I am not a terrorist by any means; quite the contrary I do not believe in any act of terrorism."

Lori Berenson's Exclusive 2000 Prison Interview

Upon news of Berenson's parole, her mother, Rhoda Berenson, told CBS Radio News her daughter is "as excited as we are" at the news. Rhoda Berenson, who had a brief telephone conversation with Lori, quoted her daughter as saying, "I don't believe it, but it's really true."
"I'm happy with the sentence because justice was done," said her lawyer, Anibal Apari, who is also father of Berenson's child, Salvador.

Apari said Berenson, whom he met in prison and married in 2003, would be freed within 24 hours. Their child has been living with his mother in prison since his birth last May.

Apari is a former member of the Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement, or MRTA, the now defunct leftist band of which Berenson was convicted of helping.

The judge's decision, read by a clerk, said Berenson had "completed re-education, rehabilitation and re-socialization" and demonstrated "positive behavior."

Berenson had said in her parole request that she planned to work as a translator if released. Her defense team said she "recognized she committed errors in involving herself in activities of the MRTA."

The daughter of two Ph.Ds., Berenson dropped out of the Massachussets Institute of Technology in 1989 to pursue a passion for social justice. For a time she worked in El Salvador where a brutal civil war was winding down.

During the war in El Salvador, there were two sides. The side of the government and the side of the FMLN, a Marxist guerrilla group. "I sided with the search for justice," Berenson told Van Sant in the 2000 interview.

For Berenson that meant joining the guerrilla movement and working for one of its top leaders. In 1994, she traveled to Peru.

"There is a lot of poverty. There's a lot of social injustice," she told Van Sant.

When she arrived in Peru, Berenson chose to live in a house in La Molina. In 1995 the government said this was the headquarters of the Marxist guerilla group MRTA. Thousands were killed at the hands of terrorists like the MRTA.

On Nov. 30, 1995, police raided the La Molina house. There was a fierce firefight with MRTA members inside. When it was over, authorities said they discovered a huge cache of weapons. Berenson claimed she knew nothing about any terrorist activities at the house.

Some might find it hard to believe that she was unaware of these weapons. "If I live in the house 24 hours a day and spent my life spying on other people in the house, sure," she said in 2000. "I really never saw anything unusual. I went to my room. And that's the only thing I did."

Berenson was arrested in 1995 and accused of aiding Tupac Amaru, which bombed banks and kidnapped and killed civilians but was not as violent as the better-known Shining Path insurgency. Police claimed she helped coordinate Tupac Amaru activities and obtained weapons for the group.

Within weeks, Lori Berenson was brought before a court. All the judges wore hoods because they said they feared reprisals from the guerillas.

"We were lined up in a room where...behind each chair, there were rifles, like, which they pointed basically at our heads," she told Van Sant.

The trial lasted just minutes.

There was no cross examination of witnesses and she was not allowed to make a statement, Berenson said in 2000, adding there was no due process.

But then came a moment that even Berenson's supporters say undermined her claims of innocence. While awaiting her verdict, Berenson was paraded before the press. And she exploded with rage.

"In the MRTA," she shouted, "there are no criminal terrorists. It is a revolutionary movement."

Three days after her outburst, Berenson was found guilty by the military court and sentenced to life in prison in 1996.

A civilian court retried Berenson in 2000, convicting her of the lesser crime and reducing her sentence to 20 years.