Pubdate: Fri, 15 Sep 2000
Source: Salon.com (US Web)
Copyright: 2000 Salon.com
Contact:  22 4th Street, 16th Floor San Francisco, CA 94103
Fax: (415) 645-9204
Feedback: http://www.salon.com/contact/letters/
Website: http://www.salon.com/
Forum: http://tabletalk.salon.com/
Author: Bruce Shapiro
Note: Bruce Shapiro is national correspondent for Salon News.

GUILTY UNTIL PROVEN USEFUL

Peruvian President Fujimori's Desire For Legitimacy -- And The Promise Of 
U.S. Drug War Money -- Has Helped Prompt A Retrial For Convicted American 
Terrorist Lori Berenson

Sept. 15, 2000 -- The trial proceedings that began Tuesday in Lima, Peru, 
would be scarcely recognizable to North American eyes. The accused, 
questioned for hours Tuesday, has yet to be told the charges against her. 
As the trial goes forward she will be presumed guilty, and will try to 
defend herself in courts which "do not meet internationally accepted 
standards of openness, fairness and due process," in the words of the U.S. 
State Department.

And that is the good news for Lori Berenson. The last time she sat in a 
Lima courtroom, in 1996, it was a secret trial before hooded military 
judges, who never let her challenge the evidence against her. Convicted of 
treason and being a terrorist ringleader, the then-26-year-old New Yorker 
was sentenced to life in prison.

Now, after five years on the political margins, Berenson's case is suddenly 
center stage on two continents. Peru's Supreme Court of Military Justice 
abruptly voided her first conviction late last month. Now Berenson is being 
retried by a civilian court. What has changed is not just the venue of her 
hearing but the stakes in its outcome -- for Peru as well as for Berenson 
herself.

On the first day of the new trial, her Peruvian lawyer Jose Luis Sandoval 
told Salon that Berenson "denied all ties of a collaborative nature" with 
the Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement, the revolutionary faction with whom 
she has been accused of plotting an attack on Peru's Congress. Berenson -- 
arrested in a 1995 roundup of MRTA leaders by Peru's anti-terrorism police 
- -- denies ever participating in violent acts, according to Sandoval.

Meanwhile, on Friday, President Alberto Fujimori was confronted in New York 
over the case by the Rev. Jesse Jackson, who crashed Fujimori's luncheon 
speech to bankers at the St. Regis Hotel. Jackson pled for Berenson's 
immediate release, which he said would be "a smart thing" for Fujimori to 
do. Later in the afternoon Fujimori was reportedly pressed privately by 
Secretary of State Madeleine Albright.

Fujimori's rhetoric on the Berenson case has changed almost as abruptly as 
her conviction was overturned. When Berenson was arrested in 1995, Fujimori 
waved her passport on national television. As recently as this summer he 
derided his election opponent for raising questions about this case.

Yet in New York last week, Fujimori sounded a different note: Although his 
Justice Minister Ernesto Bustamonte insisted that Berenson's case is in the 
hands of the judicial branch, "We are always willing to dialogue," Fujimori 
responded to Jackson, who has said he will travel to Peru on Berenson's behalf.

What is behind this seismic shift in a case that until recently seemed 
little more than a doomed cause? In part, it reflects the slow maturing of 
a legal and political campaign by Berenson's parents, who have devoted 
themselves single-mindedly to her release since 1996 -- a campaign 
chronicled in her mother Rhoda Berenson's soon-to-be-released memoir.

But the reopening of Berenson's case is as much a response to a crisis of 
Fujimori's own making. To the international community, Berenson's case is 
now emblematic of a corrupt and authoritarian regime that resists change 
even as most of Latin America gropes toward democratic reform.

While nations like Guatemala and Chile have established truth commissions 
to document past atrocities, Fujimori last year withdrew his government 
from the jurisdiction of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, and 
Human Rights Watch blasted the Peruvian justice system for "arbitrary 
arrest, prolonged pretrial detention, lack of due process and lengthy trial 
delays."

This summer, while Mexico's election ended the presidential monopoly of its 
ruling party, Fujimori engineered the theft of his national elections -- an 
election so fraudulent that even the caudillo-tolerant diplomats of the 
State Department felt obliged to condemn the outcome.

As a result, the Berenson case is suddenly seen even by some factions in 
Fujimori's government as a desperately needed chance to restore credibility.

Earlier this summer, Peruvian government officials leaked police records of 
Berenson's arrest to two reporters for the magazine the Nation (where I am 
a contributing editor). On the one hand, those records support the Peruvian 
police investigators' view that Berenson had indeed been involved with the 
MRTA at a low level, helping maintain a "safe house" for the rebels. The 
records, and the suggestion, were immediately denounced as fraudulent by 
Berenson's U.S. attorney, former Attorney General Ramsey Clark.

But even if taken at face value, those leaked documents painted a picture 
grossly at odds with the charge of Berenson as a terrorist ringleader. It 
was as if elements of Peru's justice system were seeking a face-saving way 
to reconsider what had turned into a costly case.

It must be noted that Berenson's retrial is also tied to a key U.S. foreign 
policy interest: Washington's drug war and the commitment of $1.3 billion 
in military aid to neighboring Colombia.  In New York last week, Fujimori 
tried to recast himself as an anti-drug strategist, proposing a global 
system for seizing and redistributing the bank accounts of drug traffickers.

Peru has in long been central to the plans of drug czar Barry McCaffrey. In 
1998, McCaffrey warmly praised Peru's shadowy secret police chief Vladimir 
Montesinos, only to back away from Montesinos after human rights advocates 
pointed out his role in the imprisonment of at least 1,500 innocent 
individuals under draconian anti-terrorism laws. But last year the 
McCaffrey-Montesinos relationship was rehabilitated, with the drug czar 
praising Montesinos during a visit to Lima. Suddenly, the incarceration of 
a young American woman under dubious circumstances is an obstacle to full 
enlistment of Peru in the increasingly militarized drug war.

What will happen to Berenson is still a wide-open question, Despite his 
conciliatory language in New York, in Peru President Fujimori and his 
justice minister have predicted she may yet serve a long prison term. 
Terrorism remains, as Fujimori noted in New York, "a delicate issue" for 
the Peruvian middle class, which remembers long years of violence from the 
Maoist Shining Path guerilla sect (a far larger group than the MRTA). 
Peruvians remember a defiant television appearance by the newly arrested 
Berenson in 1995, and a poll this week showed 52 percent of Peruvians 
oppose her new trial.

Many observers predict that the Peruvian courts will split the difference 
in Berenson's new trial -- finding her guilty of collaborating with the 
MRTA, but sentencing her to the time she has already served. Yet any 
conviction -- and any version of the "facts" presented in this trial -- 
will remain clouded by the imbalances in Peru's antiterrorism laws.

Make no mistake: It is Peru's legal system as much as Lori Berenson which 
is on trial this week. Through the unlikely combination of an American 
radical sympathizer, Washington's drug war and Peru's own factional 
politics, a country which just two months ago was an international 
laughingstock has an opportunity to redeem its justice system, and show 
itself capable of stepping past the overwrought emotions and laws which 
continue to afflict hundreds of similarly convicted but internationally 
anonymous "suspects."
- ---
MAP posted-by: Larry Stevens