Jailed New Yorker fends off rats
Remember this "freedom fighter"? How soon their Lefty friends forget...
LORI Berenson, the leftist guerrilla convict in Peru who once drew support from US lawmakers and the White House, now sits alone in a cellblock 2750 meters up in the Andes fending off rats.
Susan Sarandon is, "Rat Girl of the Andes"! Coming soon to a theater near you...
The native New Yorker and former Massachusetts Institute of Technology student says she is pushing for educating barely literate inmates of the prison in Cajamarca, 850 km northeast of Lima, and fights hordes of rodents clanging bars.
I'd be pushing for some rat poison, myself...
The sole inmate in a jail wing after 50 women rebel convicts there have been freed since 2003, she said she shares nights with hordes of rats almost a foot long including their tails, feeding from raw sewage. "It's just gross and disgusting," said Berenson, 37, over halfway through a 20-year sentence.
10 years left? Why don't you give them names like pets? Might make it easier for everybody?
Hoping for parole in 2010, she works in a jail bakery to escape her cellblock bordering the skeleton of an abandoned church building project. Cajamarca is the fourth jail housing Berenson since her Nov. 30, 1995 arrest. A military judge jailed her for life as a leader of the Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement (MRTA).
Think she'd settle for Gitmo?
Under US pressure, a civilian court retried her, convicting her 20 years as a collaborator of the MRTA. Stating her innocence, she said in an interview conducted in the modern, rat-free prison bakery: "I may have been guilty of being sympathetic for leftist progressive ideals."
You're definitely guilty of being a spoiled, snotnosed, know it all American bitch who thought you were immune to Peruvian law.
She denied any links to the MRTA as armed fighters, saying she knew them only under assumed names and as social progressives.
There was, "Jose, the Bunny Petter", and " Juan, the Kitty Lover", and...
The MRTA demanded her release among inmates in its 123-day siege of the Japanese ambassador's residence in 1996/1997. Its insurgency, together with the bigger Maoist Shining Path rebels, were defeated in a conflict costing 69,000 lives.
I take it Lori thought conflict was for the "little people"?
In Peru, her indelible image is of a post-arrest harangue when she said most Peruvians live in "subhuman conditions." She also said the MRTA was not a terrorist organization, alienating Peruvians scarred by a decade of rebel attacks.
Don't you peasants realize I know what's best for you!!!
Her tirade surprised friends familiar with a mild-mannered pupil at New York's High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts, where her parents say Jennifer Aniston was a classmate.
And I'm sure Jen would like to see her again about as much as she would like to hang out with Angelina Jolie...
Before her hoped for 2010 parole, Berenson sees no sign of leniency. In July 2000, 221 of the 435-member U.S. House of Representatives and 40 members of the 100-member U.S. Senate urged her release on humanitarian grounds. President Bill Clinton called Peru's president to seek ways to release her, local authorities said.
But that was a long, long, loooooong time ago...
"I am a public figure," she said as she whipped up some icing for cakes. "It's not like Joe Schmo, who a judge can say poor thing and let him go. You can't do that in my case."
Some advice? Might wanna keep that giant ego back on the cellblock when you come up for the parole hearing, rat girl.