How could it happen that Lori Berenson, a highly intelligent woman, stellar student, daughter of two prominent New York City professors, has become a terrorist, convicted by two courts in a faraway country?
This 42-year-old former New Yorker was freed in 2010 from a Peruvian prison after serving 15 years of her 20-year sentence for terrorist activities as a member of the Tupac Amaru rebel group (MRTA). On January 6, 2011, CBS News reported: “Lori Berenson has returned to Peru from a holiday trip to New York well ahead of the court-set deadline for the American convicted of aiding leftist Peruvian rebels in the 1990s. The former Massachusetts Institute of Technology student is not permitted to leave Peru permanently until her sentence ends in 2015.”
But Lori Berenson doesn’t think she is La Gringa Terrorista (A Yankee Terrorist). There is no reason to believe that she, despite her numerous apologies, really feels that she is guilty of any crime. Let’s recall that The Peruvian Times reported in an article published on May 25, 2010: “Peruvians still remember Berenson’s Jan. 8, 1996 appearance before television cameras, when she made her now famous declaration in defense of the guerrilla group. With fists clenched at her sides, her face contorted in anger, she shouted: ‘There are no criminal terrorists in the MRTA. It is a revolutionary movement.’”
And The Associated Press recounted on May 27, 2010: “Lori Berenson dropped out of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1989 to pursue a passion for social justice. After a time in Central America – she worked as confidential secretary to El Salvador’s top rebel commander – she traveled to Peru in 1994. When she was arrested in November 1995, prosecutors said Berenson was helping plot a takeover of Peru’s Congress. The alleged plot was thwarted in a gun battle at a rebel hideout that Berenson was convicted of having rented.”
I vividly remember that in 1995, when I first read the news about Berenson’s terrorist “exploits” and her arrest, I felt dumbfounded. I asked myself the same question that I am now asking readers at the beginning of this article: how could this startling transmutation of a lawful American citizen into a violent Peruvian guerilla happen?
Surprisingly, I found the right answer to this question in an old article published by the left-leaning New York Observer on September 17, 2000. In that piece, an erstwhile friend of Berenson’s, Daniel Radosh, made this revealing statement: “She’s street smart, world wise, educated. She’s a real New Yorker, a New York kid. Her politics didn’t grow out of rebellion; they grew out of solid New York City liberalism.”
So, that was the core reason for the Lori Berenson’s conversion – the so-called “solid liberalism”, the siren song of the leftist ideology!
Of course, there’s nothing wrong with the very notion of being devoted to any ideology: leftist, rightist, centrist, moderate, progressive, conservative, etc, etc. – as long as that devotion remains non-violent!
I lived for 40 years in the former Soviet Union, experiencing first-hand the life in a Marxist state that embodied in full the violent leftist ideas which Lori Berenson had imbibed in her early New York years. The Marxist regime of the former Soviet Union was guilty of killing millions of its citizens – in mega-starvations of 1921, 1929-1933, and 1948; in forced and violent collectivization of agriculture; in senseless “purges” of 1937 and 1948.
Similar situation appears in all countries where this bloodthirsty ideology is dominant – in Cuba, North Korea, Venezuela… If Tupac Amaru rebellion had been successful, the Peruvian society would’ve experienced the grim life in the leftist “paradise,” for the creation of which the hapless Lori Berenson has sacrificed 15 years of her young life.