Lori Berenson

Lori Helene Berenson (born November 13, 1969) is an American who served a 20-year prison sentence for collaboration with a guerrilla organization in Peru in 1996.

After graduating from LaGuardia High School of Music and Art, she enrolled at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in the fall of 1987.

On her web site, she states that she volunteered for soup kitchens and blood banks and also worked as a mother's helper in the Hamptons as a teenager.

While an undergraduate at MIT, she volunteered with the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador (CISPES).

She dropped out of MIT in 1988 as a sophomore majoring in archeology and anthropology and continued to volunteer for CISPES.

Later, she went to El Salvador and became secretary and translator for Leonel González, a leader of the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN), during negotiations that achieved peace in 1992.

FMLN was at that time an umbrella organization associated with various leftist guerrilla organizations and the Salvadoran Communist Party and working to overthrow the Salvadoran military dictatorship.

FMLN transitioned during the peace process in order to become a legal political party.

González (aka Salvador Sánchez Cerén) was the President of El Salvador.

In Peru, Berenson met members of the Túpac Amaru Revolutionary Movement (MRTA), a group accused of committing terrorist attacks in Peru including kidnapping, bank robberies, extortion, hostage taking, and assassinations.

Berenson initially denied knowing that they were MRTA members.

After acknowledging that her associates were members she maintained that she did not know the group was planning to conduct an attack on Peru’s Congress or planning any other act of violence.

Berenson obtained press credentials for herself and her photographer to the Congress of Peru to interview some of its members and attend sessions where she took notes and sketched a seating plan.

Afterwards, the media reported these to be "false journalist credentials".

Berenson and those who supported her contended that she was on assignment from two U.S. publications, Modern Times and Third World Viewpoint, to work as a free-lance journalist writing articles about the effects of poverty on women in Perú.

Her photographer, Nancy Gilvonio, was actually the wife of Néstor Cerpa, the MRTA second-in-command — although Berenson maintained she was unaware of this connection, saying that she knew her only as a Bolivian photographer.

Berenson had entered the main Congress building with Gilvonio several times during 1995 to interview members of Congress.

Gilvonio was alleged to have provided the information she collected to the MRTA including detailed information on the floor plans of Congress, its security and members.

The alleged plan was for the MRTA to invade the Congress building, kidnap the legislators, and exchange the hostages for MRTA prisoners.

On November 30, 1995, Berenson and Gilvonio were arrested on a public bus in downtown Lima.

Berenson was accused of being a leader of the MRTA, which had been officially classified as a terrorist group by the government.

Within hours after Berenson's arrest, the government launched an all-night siege of the MRTA safe house in an upscale neighborhood in Lima which Berenson had co-rented with an associate.

At the end of the siege, three MRTA guerrillas and one police officer had died and 14 guerrillas were captured.

The upper floors of the house were found to contain an "arsenal of weapons" and ammunition including 3,000 sticks of dynamite.

Diagrams, notes, weapons, and police and military uniforms found at the safe house suggested that the group was planning to seize members of Congress and trade them for captured guerrillas.

Police also seized a floor plan and a scale architectural model of the Congress building.

After being taken to the house siege, in which Berenson claims she was used as a human shield by the Peruvian police, both women were taken to the DINCOTE (División Nacional Contra el Terrorismo, or National Counter Terrorist Division).

Berenson said that she was unaware of what was happening on the upper floors and had even moved out some months prior to her arrest.

She denied knowing of the presence of either the weaponry or the guerrillas, and she also denied knowing that the documents she prepared would be used for terrorism.

She later admitted that she had learned that her associates were MRTA members and she said: "It might not have been intentional, but the bottom line is: I did collaborate with them."

In the same interview she maintained that she had not been aware that weapons were being amassed in the upper floors of her house which she had sublet to the MRTA members, and she also maintained that she was unaware that violent actions were being planned at the Congress, stating that "at that time in Fujimori's dictatorship, Congress was the only place that there was some sort of democratic process."

On January 8, 1996, the DINCOTE hosted a news event in which they showed Berenson to the press.

At the event, she shouted in Spanish, with her fists clenched to her sides, in a statement to the local reporters:

"I am to be condemned for my concern about the conditions of hunger and misery which exists in this country. Here nobody can deny that in Perú there is much injustice. There is an institutionalized violence that has killed the people's finest sons and has condemned children to die of hunger. If it is a crime to worry about the subhuman conditions in which the majority of this population lives, then I will accept my punishment. But this is not a love of violence! This is not to be a criminal terrorist because in the MRTA there are no criminal terrorists! It is a revolutionary movement!

I love this nation.

I love this nation and although this love is going to make (cost) me years in prison, I will never stop loving, and never will lose the hope and confidence that there will be a new day of justice in Perú!"

The image of Berenson defiantly shouting to the press continues to make her unpopular in Peru.

Berenson was convicted of collaborating with the Túpac Amaru Revolutionary Movement (MRTA), a group accused of trying to overthrow the Peruvian government by force, considered to be a terrorist organization by the Peruvian government, and on the U.S. State Department's official "terrorist organization" list from 1997–2001.

Her arrest and conviction, and the circumstances surrounding her trials, drew considerable attention in both the United States and Peru.

Berenson was born and raised in New York City to Rhoda and Mark Berenson, both college professors.