New York City The Nation acknowledges that military and civilian trials in Peru violate due process of law in terrorism cases, that thousands of innocent people have been convicted and that thousands remain in prison in Peru today after political trials. Presumably it agrees that DINCOTE, the Peruvian antiterrorism police responsible for those convictions, are about as restrained and trustworthy as the elite national police that served Pinochet in Chile, the military governments in Argentina and Guatemala in the seventies and eighties and similar other police states.
Why then did The Nation choose to use its resources and invest its credibility to challenge Lori Berenson’s innocence by relying on what are allegedly DINCOTE documents [Jonathan Levi and Liz Mineo, “The Lori Berenson Papers,” Sept. 4/11]? The Nation was told that Peru planned to nullify Lori’s military tribunal conviction and sentence to life imprisonment on the basis of a petition she filed in December 1999, and that The Nation was being used by DINCOTE to support charges against Lori for a new show trial.
Jonathan Levi misleads his readers by implying that the Berensons and I questioned only the authenticity of the records. If he will listen to the tape he made of our interview, he will hear it was the reliability of the papers, not merely their authenticity, that we challenged. We told The Nation that DINCOTE leaked the papers, “never before seen by the public but obtained by The Nation,” precisely to spread false information about Lori in its pages, which reach so many of Lori’s supporters, at the very time Peru would nullify Lori’s military trial and begin yet another propaganda campaign against her in a new show trial in civilian courts, a trial that is itself illegal and not capable of fairness. The military tribunal, after a nine-month delay, nullified Lori’s conviction and began the new proceedings just as the Nation cover story with its picture of Lori was being distributed.
The article accepts as gospel the false DINCOTE allegations of fact even where Lori has had the rare opportunity to state the opposite. The article refers repeatedly to Lori’s “testimony,” “deposition,” “transcripts,” suggesting there exist exact verifiable statements by Lori. But there are no transcripts, depositions or verbatim testimony, there is only what Levi claims a DINCOTE file they will not disclose contains. Who believes DINCOTE? Nor is it accurate to say that the papers “shed new light.” All the false claims about Lori have been leaked to the press and printed repeatedly.
Levi has refused to permit the Berensons, or me, to see the papers he has. This places him in the same position as DINCOTE, which he concedes refused to provide copies of the documents “even to her lawyers,” and in the same position as the Fujimori government, which has refused to provide any documents to the Berensons, Lori’s counsel or the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. Levi said he is “especially afraid with the trial coming up” to provide Lori a copy of the documents, because that would “have us working for the defense.” Incredible. He is working for DINCOTE. He claims to have “sources intimately familiar with [its] workings.” We ask only for a copy of the false papers with which Levi challenges Lori’s innocence, not the source for the papers.
Aside from the moral outrage of promoting DINCOTE propaganda, the Nation article is patently cheap and demeaning to Lori Berenson. In a single sentence, asserting how “most ordinary Peruvians” feel about Lori, Levi writes that she “is a Beauty who slouches…toward Latin America, only to turn into a terrorist Beast, eyes wide open.” Why the triple play on a fairy tale, a Didion book title and a prurient movie? Why the repeated references and allusions to sex? Above all, why is Levi, who has never met Lori, compelled to deny the possibility that she acted from inner qualities of goodness, even greatness, as he observes heroines in “classical tragedy” to do? Instead, he argues that she is doing the reverse: “She seems to be translating her fall into a theatrical grandeur.” Lori has spent nearly five years in life-threatening prison conditions without a trial by any civilized standard on false charges in complete isolation, where any effort at “theatrical grandeur” can be seen by no one. All while the controlled press in Peru demonize her daily and The Nation serves DINCOTE’s cause here in the United States.
Levi seems to know little about Peru, or Lori’s case, except what DINCOTE and people within its sphere of influence told him. Lori’s Peruvian lawyer in the military trial, who has not represented her for years, despite Levi’s assertion that he still does, “although he is not as active as he once was,” was never present during her nearly nine days of intense interrogation and sleep deprivation when Lori was alone in the tender hands of DINCOTE. On the day the statement DINCOTE prepared was given to her to sign, he saw Lori for the first time but was never able to talk with her in private before, during or thereafter. From time to time he has made statements harmful to Lori for whatever reason, which Levi joins the Peruvian press in repeating with glee.
The utter emptiness of the effort to support some level of guilt is found in Levi’s repeated references to the one exposure to the Peruvian press just before her sentencing that was forced on Lori, in which she courageously and angrily spoke with passion about her concerns for the poor and about the absence of social justice in Peru. She also expressed the opinion that the MRTA is a revolutionary movement, not a terrorist group. Can the expression of a single opinion in less than twenty words be a crime? Levi thinks so. He refers to the “contempt in that face” from the film clips, although he has never seen her face. Lori was very angry for good reasons. Peru claims her words are the crime translated as “apology.” It carries a lengthy prison term. Levi distinguishes the fate of an Italian woman who was convicted like Lori–but according to them on “more hard evidence”–and who was released after seventeen months, based on her claim of innocence, but Lori has always insisted she was innocent. Apparently he never saw the film clips of the Italian woman, who appeared far more agitated than Lori.
Levi called the Berensons to congratulate them when they heard Lori would get a new trial. But surely even he knows such a trial will not be fair. We can ignore the outrageous and repetitious claims of DINCOTE against Lori carried in The Nation. They are false. Lori will tell the truth if she is forced into a public show trial, and the truth will keep her free in spirit and someday make her free in body.
It is more difficult to ignore the role of The Nation in using its pages to support false DINCOTE propaganda planted to poison US opinion about Lori. A majority of Congress has demanded Lori’s release from prison because Lori’s parents, despite all the propaganda from Peru and the “Washington Peru policy,” have persuaded them Lori is innocent. The Nation has not helped truth find its way out.
Perhaps the Nation Institute will now investigate how this happened.
RAMSEY CLARK
New York City; Cambridge, Mass.
It’s sad to watch such a historic defender of human rights as former Attorney General Ramsey Clark so willfully misread our report on his client, Lori Berenson. This misreading starts even before our story begins. Throughout his letter Clark attributes the article solely to Jonathan Levi. In fact, the byline was shared by Levi and Liz Mineo. Clark writes: “Levi seems to know little about Peru or Lori’s case.” Mineo, a full partner in the research and writing of the piece, was not only born in Lima but lived there for more than thirty-five years and worked (as her bio indicated) as an investigative reporter for a variety of newspapers and magazines, including El Comercio, a newspaper that the Berensons have lauded for its fair coverage of their daughter’s case.
Clark makes some strong claims about our journalistic integrity and the motivations behind our story, but he fails to provide any evidence to support them. We reported in the article that Berenson’s own lawyer in Peru, Grimaldo Achahui, signed the DINCOTE record of her interrogation and later confirmed its authenticity. Clark attempts to disparage Achahui by declaring that he “has not represented [Lori] for years” and that “he has made statements harmful to Lori.” In fact, his last action on her behalf was filing Berenson’s appeal to the Inter-American Court of Human Rights in 1999, and as recently as August the Berensons themselves referred to Achahui as Lori’s Peruvian lawyer. The only statements of his that we repeat pertain to his verification of Lori’s testimony to DINCOTE and his opinion that her sentence was unfair.
Clark writes, “The article accepts as gospel the false DINCOTE allegations of fact….” Perhaps Clark missed the following sentence: “The story that emerges from the documents is one of unusually hasty police surveillance, negligent interrogation and reckless reliance on one witness whose testimony was neither challenged nor corroborated. The documents give a crude demonstration of how hyperinflation can be applied to a police charge, raising Berenson, in its final pages, from the obscurity of a minor suspect to the limelight of a major leader of the MRTA.” Our aim was to examine all received truths about the case. To that end, we conducted interviews with dozens of people in Peru, including former and current members of DINCOTE as well as former and current members of the MRTA and educated observers within the diplomatic and business community. Nowhere did we represent the DINCOTE documents as the record of a fair and balanced judicial process. Although we described discrepancies between Berenson’s story as it appears in the documents and other available evidence, we also clearly showed grave inconsistencies in the government’s case against her.
It is Clark who displays a striking ignorance of Fujimori’s Peru. Although anti-regime journalists (including Mineo and many of her former colleagues) have been harassed and threatened by the government, they continue to operate with vigor. Like journalists everywhere, they routinely use anonymous government sources in their work. We came upon the documents in question through sources within DINCOTE who, in our judgment and that of other independent journalists in Peru, were reliable.
Moreover, contrary to Clark’s implication, our article, which was published five days before the announcement that the military charges against Berenson had been dismissed, fairly represented the Berensons’ fear that their daughter would be retried in civilian court on the charge of collaboration with terrorism, which carries a sentence of twenty years. (She had previously received a life sentence for “treason against the fatherland and conspiracy to overthrow Congress.”)
Clark seems most angry that, after our article appeared, we would not show him the documents. An associate of Clark’s asked for the documents on a Monday because Lori was due to be examined by the civilian judge on Wednesday. Once the new legal process had begun, we would have risked compromising our credibility as journalists by showing Clark or his associates the documents. We believe that the Peruvian court was wrong to withhold these documents from Berenson and her attorneys. But one does not have to be a lawyer to understand the difference between a judge and a journalist.
In Clark’s view, since we were not willing to work for him and the Berensons, we must be working for DINCOTE. It is a charge that is beneath Clark, a veteran of the struggle during the dark cold war days of this country, when loyalty was painted red or white, and if you weren’t on our side you were on theirs. Although we feel great sympathy for Mark and Rhoda Berenson and can only hope that our parents might fight so tirelessly and energetically if we found ourselves in Lori’s position, we react with an appalled sadness to Clark’s slander.
JONATHAN LEVI
We stand by Jonathan Levi and Liz Mineo’s careful reporting for this magazine on the Lori Berenson case. We also share Ramsey Clark’s belief that justice is not possible for Berenson in Peru and that she should be released, a view we expressed in an editorial accompanying Levi and Mineo’s article and another just after her new civilian trial was announced. The only “truth” we presumed to reveal was that the investigation of her case, her trial and conviction were deeply unfair and the government’s evidence against her hopelessly tainted. Therefore, our recommendation was not for her case to be reopened but for human rights advocates to step up pressure on the regime to free her and all those unjustly convicted of terrorism in Peru.
THE EDITORS
New Orleans
I read with interest the timely report on Lori Berenson, which coincided with the Peruvian government’s decision to grant her a retrial. This decision, welcome as it may be by human rights activists and the Berenson family and friends, is, however, seen by large sectors of the Peruvian public as a cynical attempt by a beleaguered government nationally and internationally perceived as illegitimate to improve its relations with the United States. While it makes sense for Berenson’s family and well-wishers to portray her at best as totally innocent and at worst as a useful idiot, the documentation provided by The Nation points to a much more conscious collaboration with a guerrilla group intent on forcibly deposing a foreign government. In the United States too, long sentences have been imposed on foreigners convicted of aiding in the planning and/or perpetration of acts of terrorism. The World Trade Center case comes to mind.
As a Peruvian, I find the methods used by my government against the guerrillas excessive and often more criminal than the groups it was fighting. The time has come to re-evaluate many of those actions, in both the military and the legal realms. As scandalous as the lack of due process that led to Berenson’s incarceration was, it would be equally scandalous for her to be set free simply because she is a well-represented American at a time when freeing her becomes expedient to the Peruvian and US governments, while hundreds or thousands of others remain indefinitely in jail, sentenced under similar conditions and including the truly innocent.
ARI ZIGHELBOIM
New York City
That Lori Berenson was denied fair jurisprudence and that our government has not secured her release are both clear. But Jonathan Levi and Liz Mineo’s attempts to paint a personal portrait of Lori Berenson (through evidence that may have been completely fabricated or through her “militant” attitude during her press statement, where she was instructed to yell to be heard) miss the point. In an instance of gross human and civil rights violations, it is entirely inappropriate to look for kernels of rationale based on the victim’s behavior. That Lori is innocent isn’t even the issue here–would you deem it appropriate to examine the behavior of a Jewish storekeeper in Nazi-era Germany in order to find a shred of justification in his subsequent gassing at Auschwitz? Lori’s imprisonment, her health problems and the outrageous treatment she has suffered by the Peruvian courts are the issues. I don’t care if she’s a country club Republican or an Uzi-toting terrorist’s moll. She’s a human being and an American, and she must come home.
ELIZABETH SCHWARTZ
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