ACCOMPLICE TO TERROR

By Michael S. Serrill

BACK HOME IN NEW YORK CITY, HER friends and relatives know Lori Berenson as a compassionate idealist, an innocent waylaid by her concern for the poor and oppressed of Latin America. Rhoda Berenson, a community-college physics teacher, says the very notion of her 26-year-old daughter's being involved in violence "is absolutely ridiculous." A friend since junior high school, Daniel Radosh, finds it "hard to reconcile what they are saying about her with the gentle person I know."

Authorities in Peru take a far harsher view of Lori Berenson. They regard her as a dangerous radical who became closely involved with Marxist terrorists of the Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement (MRTA)--hiding them in her home, stockpiling their weapons, helping them plan an attack on the Peruvian Congress. Convicted of treason last week in Lima after a perfunctory three-day trial by a closed military tribunal, Berenson was sentenced to life in prison without possibility of parole.

The injustice of the trial has come under attack by the U.S. State Department, human-rights organizations, Berenson's lawyers and her family's legal adviser, former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark. Yet Berenson herself may have undercut her defenders at a defiant press conference three days before the sentencing. Presented in manacles and shackles, she not only admitted being affiliated with the MRTA, a serious crime, but naively defended the group as nonviolent despite its record of bombings, bank robberies and kidnappings dating back to 1984. "If it is a crime to worry about the inhuman conditions in which the majority of this population lives, I will accept my punishment," she said in Spanish.

Prosecutors claim that police surveillance established Berenson's complicity with the left-wing guerrilla movement shortly before she was arrested on Nov. 30. When police raided her house in a Lima suburb hours later, they found it packed with heavily armed MRTA guerrillas. In the ensuing shoot-out, two rebels and one police officer were killed. The military terrorism court, where judges and other personnel wear masks, imposed a life sentence, ignoring the prosecutors' recommendation of 30 years in prison. Berenson will serve the term in a notoriously tough maximum-security prison reserved for terrorists that is located high in the Andes.

The question being asked by Berenson's family and friends in the U.S. is how this "warm and friendly"--Radosh's words--middle-class American woman with every prospect of success in life landed in such a fix. Born to two college instructors--her father Mark teaches statistics--and raised in Manhattan, Lori was a good student at La Guardia High School of Music and Art. A whiz also at science and math, she enrolled at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1987.

But Berenson's real passion was always to help the downtrodden; as a teenager she donated time to a soup kitchen. In 1989 she dropped out of M.I.T. and went to work with the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador, a leftist group that opposed U.S. military aid to the right-wing Salvadoran government. She worked for cispes in New York City and Washington before pulling up stakes in 1991 and moving to Central America, where she spent time in Nicaragua, El Salvador and Panama. During occasional visits home to the U.S., she told friends she worked for human-rights organizations.

In late 1994, according to the police, Berenson arrived in Peru with a Panamanian arms dealer named Pacifico Castrellon and rented a three-story house in the Lima suburb of La Molina. She registered as a journalist, and her neighbors knew her only as a quiet gringa with a radiant smile. Berenson and Castrellon, Peruvian police say, were sent together to Peru to meet Miguel Rincon, second-in-command of the MRTA. Castrellon and Rincon, investigators told journalists, both have implicated Berenson. Castrellon says he and Berenson smuggled arms to the guerrillas through Central America; Rincon names her as his "foreign collaborator" in MRTA activities.

Rhoda Berenson maintains that her daughter has never had a chance to defend herself against these charges. "The whole system is a secret one, where you don't know what the evidence is or what the charges are based on," she told TIME last week. Berenson may have one chance for a reprieve. She was convicted of treason, the most serious terrorism offense, and her Peruvian lawyers are appealing on the technical ground that she cannot be tried for this crime. "It is against international law to prosecute a foreigner for treason," says Grimaldo Achahui. "You can't take away her nationality."

Even if the appeal succeeds, however, it will probably result at best in reducing her term to 20 years. Berenson's only chance of a shorter sentence is clemency from President Alberto Fujimori, and the prospect is considered highly unlikely.

--Reported by Elaine Rivera/New York and Douglass Stinson/Lima

With reporting by ELAINE RIVERA/NEW YORK AND DOUGLASS STINSON/LIMA