Word: berenson
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Prosecutors claim that police surveillance established Berenson's complicity with the left-wing guerrilla movement shortly before she was arrested on Nov. 30. When police raided her house in a Lima suburb hours later, they found it packed with heavily armed MRTA guerrillas. In the ensuing shoot-out, two rebels and one police officer were killed. The military terrorism court, where judges and other personnel wear masks, imposed a life sentence, ignoring the prosecutors' recommendation of 30 years in prison. Berenson will serve the term in a notoriously tough maximum-security prison reserved for terrorists that is located high...
...question being asked by Berenson's family and friends in the U.S. is how this "warm and friendly"--Radosh's words--middle-class American woman with every prospect of success in life landed in such a fix. Born to two college instructors--her father Mark teaches statistics--and raised in Manhattan, Lori was a good student at La Guardia High School of Music and Art. A whiz also at science and math, she enrolled at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology...
...Berenson's real passion was always to help the downtrodden; as a teenager she donated time to a soup kitchen. In 1989 she dropped out of M.I.T. and went to work with the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador, a leftist group that opposed U.S. military aid to the right-wing Salvadoran government. She worked for cispes in New York City and Washington before pulling up stakes in 1991 and moving to Central America, where she spent time in Nicaragua, El Salvador and Panama. During occasional visits home to the U.S., she told friends she worked...
...late 1994, according to the police, Berenson arrived in Peru with a Panamanian arms dealer named Pacifico Castrellon and rented a three-story house in the Lima suburb of La Molina. She registered as a journalist, and her neighbors knew her only as a quiet gringa with a radiant smile. Berenson and Castrellon, Peruvian police say, were sent together to Peru to meet Miguel Rincon, second-in-command of the MRTA. Castrellon and Rincon, investigators told journalists, both have implicated Berenson. Castrellon says he and Berenson smuggled arms to the guerrillas through Central America; Rincon names her as his "foreign...
...Rhoda Berenson maintains that her daughter has never had a chance to defend herself against these charges. "The whole system is a secret one, where you don't know what the evidence is or what the charges are based on," she told TIME last week. Berenson may have one chance for a reprieve. She was convicted of treason, the most serious terrorism offense, and her Peruvian lawyers are appealing on the technical ground that she cannot be tried for this crime. "It is against international law to prosecute a foreigner for treason," says Grimaldo Achahui. "You can't take away...