The Liberation of Lori Berenson

NY Times

The New York Times has a sympathetic story on the front page of its website today entitled The Liberation of Lori Berenson. There are a lot of interesting quotes and stories that jump out while reading her saga.

Here are the two that I chose.

Today, while Berenson refuses to discuss in detail what happened during the year she spent in Peru before her arrest, she does admit that she knew her associates were M.R.T.A. members (without knowing their real names — a customary practice in subversive groups) and willingly helped them to rent the house. “It might not have been intentional, but the bottom line is: I did collaborate with them,” she said...

She admits to vaguely collaborating with the MRTA but still won't tell the entire story.

“I’m not going to have anything to do with a violent organization,” she told me, “but that does not mean that I accept the status quo; I have to do something about it.”

Perhaps there was good reason to believe that violence was the solution in the early 1990s. And while she will pursue nonviolent change in the future, she will not apologize for her role in supporting the MRTA who resorted to violence against the Peruvian government in the early 1980s. 

I hope that President Garcia commutes her sentence before leaving office so that Berenson and her son can return to the US. That was her parents and her son no longer have to suffer.