Gringa in an Andean Prison.

• Author: Flinchum, Robin
• Position: Brief Article

A campaign mounts to bring Lori Berenson home

January 11 marked the fourth anniversary of the unfair trial and sentencing of U.S. citizen Lori Berenson to life in a Peruvian prison. To commemorate the occasion, Berenson began a hunger strike to demonstrate her "rejection of the social injustice" and "the violation of human dignity" in prison, she said in a statement released to the U.S. embassy in Lima. "In the face of injustice, silence is an accomplice.... In the face of the structural and institutionalized violence, which is prevalent in so many places, one cannot and must not keep quiet."

Before she began the strike, Berenson told her mother in a visit at the prison that the strike would end when she felt she had made her point to both the U.S. and Peruvian governments. As it went on, she made no demands of either government and only issued her statement of protest. She ended her strike two weeks later.

The Clinton Administration has never publicly acknowledged her wrongful incarceration or lifted a finger in protest.

Berenson traveled to Peru in 1995 as a journalist and human rights activist. Later that same year, she was arrested and charged with "treason against the fatherland of Peru" for her alleged involvement with a guerrilla group known as the Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement. Her conviction was swift, the proceedings secret. Berenson was not allowed to speak in her own defense, and her sentence was handed down by a hooded military tribunal. Since then, she has exhausted all possible appeals in the Peruvian courts, and the Peruvian government says she will not be granted another trial. Berenson's health has deteriorated considerably, according to her parents and her lawyer, Ramsey Clark.

Oddly enough, the best hope for Berenson may turn out to be Peruvian President Alberto Fujimori, who condemned her on national television before her trial in 1996. Fujimori hasn't changed his tune on Berenson, but his increasingly public disregard for democracy and human rights in Peru is beginning to alienate Washington, and this may lead to more willingness on the part of the Clinton Administration to raise the issue of Berenson's incarceration.

"Fujimori is becoming more and more obstinate," says Gail Taylor, national coordinator of the Committee to Free Lori Berenson, based in Washington, D.C. "This gives us more pull with the U.S. Administration."

And pull is what it will take to free Berenson from her Andean prison.

According to...