11/11/2010
I can’t remember his name right now, and I guess it doesn’t really matter. He was smug—a cheto as the porteños (residents of Buenos Aires) would have called him—young, well-built, though not overly muscular, with Lacoste everything and a cocky stride that stuck out in an otherwise bland IBM office building in Puerto Madero.
I knew when I first met him that every class would be a challenge. In that sense I was lucky his attendance was sporadic.
One particular class, he was especially irritated. He was complaining about the laissez-faire attitude (read lazy) of the Spanish workers with whom he was obliged to communicate on a daily basis for what was at that moment the foreseeable future; then suddenly he came out with this:
“What are you doing here?”
Put on the spot, I came up with an embarrassing, barely coherent answer I won’t repeat. It felt like I was challenged and lost; I promised myself I’d never be unprepared for that question again.
It was a promise I didn’t keep.
Because the other day, on a bus to Cali, Colombia, a man in his forties sat down next to me, started to tell me how he’d lived for fourteen years in New Jersey, lost everything when he was deported for not being able to provide the authorities with papers after a supposedly random inspection...
“I miss it so much. There’s nothing here for me,” he continued. Then: “What are you doing here?”
I mumbled something about “viajando and de vacaciones”. He smiled and told me he was glad I was seeing his city, but the sad envy in his eyes told me something else. I could go back to the cold winters and opportunities. He had to wait six more years in sultry Cali before he could have a chance to get back to his American-born daughter in Newark.
This has been an extremely longwinded way of getting to what I planned on discussing: Lori Berenson—a woman who's answered that question and had the question answered for her repeatedly over the last fifteen years— a martyr to some and a sanctimonious would-be terrorist to others.
What was she doing with the Tupak Amaru Revolutionary Movement in Peru in 1995?
If you were to believe her parents, she was doing what any young, intellectual social activist would do?
From the Free Lori website:
“Lori Berenson is a firm believer in the need to work for a better world for all, for a world in which everyone's fundamental human rights are respected.”
They go into great detail about the kangaroo court that tried her—much less about the MRTA weapons cache found in the house she was renting in Miraflores, Lima, her grito de dolores-like statement (“There are no criminal terrorists in the MRTA; it's a revolutionary movement!") made slightly less credible by their subsequent seizure of the Japanese embassy, and well, the fact she was arrested with the wife of one of the group’s leaders, Néstor Cerpa.
That she was guilty is and was hard to dispute. But despite how vociferously that guilt was contested by those close to her, it was always the judicial process rather than the evidence that was questioned.
When she was initially released this past May, I admit I found the reaction of her new neighbors in Lima surprisingly aggressive; a lot of time had passed; she looked older than her forty years, certainly owing to the fifteen years she’d already spent in prison. And yet that clearly visible naïveté was as strong as ever—like she’d do it all over if she had to.
Again granted parole five days ago, I’ve rethought my disappointment at again not having an answer to such a simple question.
Uncertainty shouldn’t be a source of embarrassment; there’ll never be a shortage of rebels. There’ll never be a shortage of causes.
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