Word: mcnamara
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...McNamara's brush with horror began Dec. 4, when four policemen stopped her as she strolled through the southern Peruvian town of Ayacucho. At first they claimed they were conducting a passport check. Then, according to McNamara, the police searched her hotel room and confiscated "suspicious" articles -- medicine, vitamins, a ball of string and tourist maps. In the local jail, McNamara got a hint of the problems to come. "No one told me what was going on," she said. "But the word terrorismo drifted down the staircase...
Within two days the Peruvian authorities charged McNamara with the murder of two government officials who were killed in a 1987 Sendero Luminoso attack near the Andean town of Vilcashuaman. The evidence against her was flimsy: the two survivors of the assault said it was led by a tall gringa, local slang for any non-Indian woman from the Peruvian coast. Both victims met McNamara and said she was not the killer, but to no avail. Though McNamara claimed she was in Puquio, a town more than 200 miles away, when the murders occurred, records from the hotel where...
According to McNamara, she was interrogated for a week by Peru's counterterrorism police and Interpol before she was allowed to call a lawyer ( or the U.S. embassy. On Dec. 28, McNamara was transferred to Canto Grande, Peru's maximum-security prison on the outskirts of Lima. She was housed in a cellblock where some of Sendero Luminoso's most notorious leaders are kept, awaiting trial or serving sentences for crimes ranging from sabotage to assassination...
...interview with TIME inside Canto Grande two weeks ago, McNamara was careful to refer all questions about Senderista politics to the smartly dressed, unfailingly polite "delegate" inmates who run the cellblock. Delegate Dalila claimed that all the pavilion's inmates belong to the "authentic" Peruvian Communist Party, which is how Senderistas see themselves. These true believers disdain both the Soviet Union, which they consider to be as imperialist as the U.S., and today's China. Their goal is to establish a workers' state along the lines of Mao Zedong's China. "We believe in armed struggle to take power," said...
...midst of McNamara's interview with TIME, orders for her freedom suddenly arrived. The lower-court judge investigating her case decided to drop it because of insufficient evidence. That decision must be ratified by a superior court, however, before the matter is closed. Minutes after receiving the good news, the prisoners gathered downstairs to bid the American farewell. "Goodbye to Canto Grande," they sang in Quechua, exchanging the traditional Andean lyrics for revolutionary rhetoric. "I am going to fight for justice . . . for the peasants and the poor, armed with a gun and a flag . . . I will fight the fascists...