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."