A Peruvian court granted parole on Tuesday to Lori Berenson, a US citizen who served 15 years of a 20-year prison sentence in Peru for aiding leftist guerrillas during the dark days of the country’s civil war.
She was imprisoned in 1995 after being pulled off a bus in Lima and charged with being a leader of the Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement (MRTA), a leftist insurgency active in Peru in the 1980s and 1990s.
Her family always maintained that she was unfairly convicted and never took up arms during the period of social unrest in the country.
PHOTO: REUTERS
Lawyers for the government said they would appeal, though she was expected to be released by yesterday following the ruling by Judge Jessica Leon.
Peruvian President Alan Garcia is scheduled to visit US President Barack Obama at the White House soon, although neither president has commented on the case.
Peru’s Ministry of Justice has said it wants to deport Berenson, 40, but the court said she must check in with authorities once a month in Peru, where she will work as a translator while pursuing a dream of opening a bakery.
Wrapped in a shawl with her brown hair pulled back in a long braid, a quiet Berenson smiled and hugged her husband after court officials announced the decision at a prison in the Chorillos neighborhood of Lima, where she has been living with her year-old son.
“We are thrilled and so pleased that the Peruvian judge ruled that Lori has earned her conditional liberty, as they call it in Peru,” her mother, Rhoda Berenson, said by telephone from New York. “She and her baby can now start a new life together.”
“This decision is going to be criticized, but it was well founded,” said her husband, Anibal Apari Sanchez, a former MRTA member who is a lawyer and represented her at the hearing. “It’s legally impossible for her to be deported.”
Berenson married Apari in 2003. The New Yorker studied at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology before moving to Latin America to work as a human rights activist.
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