Andres Oppenheimer. Published Thursday, June 21, 2001,
The Miami Herald
I may be alone on this one, but I can't get excited about the case of Lori
Berenson, the New Yorker whose three-month-long trial on terrorism charges in
Peru is making big headlines around the world.While I agree that Berenson
deserved a fair trial, I can't help but feel infuriated by the attention that we
in the U.S. media are giving to her case while we ignore the plight of thousands
of people -- including other Americans -- who are rotting in prisons around the
world in cases that are much more outrageous than hers.
OTHER PRISONERS
"Only in Peru, there are about 700 prisoners who are totally innocent,
who didn't have anything to do with terrorism,'' says Jose Miguel Vivanco,
executive director of Human Rights Watch/Americas in Washington, D.C. "Berenson's
case does not belong to this group of people who were innocent beyond any
doubt.''Amnesty International has not even taken up Berenson as a prisoner of
conscience. Asked why, an Amnesty official said that the group's definition of
prisoners of conscience is "people who have been detained because of their
beliefs, and have not used or advocated violence.''In Cuba, thousands of
prisoners never had a chance to get independent attorneys, let alone an open
trial, or a chance to speak with foreign reporters, as Berenson has. Many Cuban
prisoners, in fact, didn't get a trial at all.
CUBA'S CASE
"I'd love the media to give 10 percent of the attention devoted to Lori
Berenson to Cuba's estimated 450 political prisoners, who are rotting in jail in
cruel and inhuman conditions, for the sole crime of not sharing the official
ideology,'' Vivanco says.He was referring to cases such as Dr. Elias Biscet
Gonzalez, president of Cuba's Lawton Foundation for Human Rights, who was
sentenced to three years in prison on charges of "insulting the symbols of
the homeland'' for hanging a Cuban flag sideways on his balcony at a 1999 news
conference.Berenson, 31, an MIT dropout and daughter of two college professors,
arrived in Peru in 1994 after spending time in Nicaragua during the leftist
Sandinista revolution, and in El Salvador, where she worked as a private
assistant to a Marxist guerrilla leader during that country's peace
talks.According to Peruvian prosecutors, she rented the safe house where police
in 1995 found an urban guerrilla unit of the Túpac Amaru Revolutionary
Movement, or MRTA. The house was raided after a 12-hour gun battle with its
occupants.She says she didn't suspect what was going on upstairs, despite the
fact that the rebels had sealed off all windows with wood and nails. But
prosecutors argue that it's unlikely that anyone who spoke fluent Spanish and
had spent time in Sandinista Nicaragua and among Salvadoran guerrillas would
suspect nothing about the 20 guerrillas living upstairs.This is a typical
example of New York-centric journalism: a New York newspaper runs the story, the
New York-based wire agencies pick it up, and the rest of the world echo it as if
it were equally important everywhere else.
N.Y. JOURNALISM
You will argue that Berenson is getting all this coverage because she's an
American.But, according to State Department figures, there are about 1,900 U.S.
citizens in prisons around the world, including another 27 in Peru. Many of them
were tried under much more dubious circumstances, or not tried at all.Take the
case of the U.S. scholars in China. This week, the House Committee on
International Relations held a hearing about five Chinese-American scholars
arrested in China -- including Li Shaomin, a Princeton Ph.D. who is a U.S.
citizen -- who have been imprisoned there on dubious charges of espionage.They
didn't get a fair trial, yet little has been written about them.And why was
there hardly a mention in the U.S. press about Ernestino Abreu Horta, the
76-year-old Cuban-born U.S. citizen who was arrested in Cuba in 1998 and
sentenced to 15 years in prison on charges of attempting to start an uprising
against Fidel Castro?He never got a public trial, and -- until he was returned
to Miami in February because of health problems -- he was virtually ignored by
the U.S. press.The bottom line is that while I welcome the attention devoted to
Berenson, I wish others such as Cuba's Biscet, or the five Chinese-American
scholars, would get similar attention. They deserve it, even if they're not New
Yorkers. |
