The Liberation of Lori Berenson

By JENNIFER EGAN
New York Times Magazine

Lori Berenson has always loved to walk. When she was a high-school student in Manhattan in the mid-1980s, she walked home at night from her job at Pasta & Cheese, on the Upper East Side, to the apartment where she grew up, on East 25th Street. When she began her prison sentence in Peru, in 1996, for collaborating with a terrorist group, convicted terrorists had to spend 23½ hours a day inside their cells. Even then, Berenson walked in the 6-by-9-foot space she and another woman shared — two steps forward, two steps backward — for hours. “People ask, what did you miss most?” she said in August, two and a half months after she was released on parole, having served nearly 15 years of a 20-year sentence. “This was definitely it.”

It was after dark, and we were taking a rapid, circuitous walk through a park that clutches the crumbly cliff tops in the Miraflores district of Lima, where Berenson and her 15-month-old son, Salvador, had been living since her release. (Berenson’s parole requires that she remain in Peru until 2015.) They were sharing an apartment with a family friend and, temporarily, Berenson’s parents, who were visiting from New York. Berenson had recently separated from her husband — Salvador’s father — whom she’d met in prison while he, too, was serving a sentence for terrorism. Soon after his release in 2003, they married, and Salvador was conceived during a conjugal visit. The boy spent his first year of life with Berenson in the women’s prison in Chorrillos, Lima.

In the gusty winter darkness, bicyclists and skateboarders wheeled along paved paths that snaked among graffiti-carved cacti and fluorescently lighted soccer games. Berenson insisted we wait until dark to go out; since her parole, she has been hounded by strangers who scream obscenities or call her “assassin” and “murderer.” Just that day, on her way back from the playground with her mother and Salvador, “this woman said: ‘You’re under house arrest! You should be in your house!’ She was with a cellphone, taking pictures. I don’t like going to the park, because people stare at you and make you feel as though you’re not welcome.”

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