Life for guerrillas imprisoned in Peru's labyrinthian prisons is decidedly harsher today than it was during the early 1990s. While Lori Berenson will find a sisterhood of revolutionaries behind bars -- women, for example, made up over half the members of Peru's feared Shining Path movement -- she will find few, if any, foreign guerrillas. Nor do guerrillas control their own cellblocks as they once did. PNS correspondent Robin Kirk visited women revolutionaries in Peruvian prisons in 1991 and 1992 when she worked as a reporter in Peru.

Twenty-six-year-old Lori Berenson has just begun a life sentence in Peru for supporting an obscure rebel group. Photographed before her conviction as she shouted defiantly, I wondered if she yet grasped what price she and her family will pay for her beliefs.

During the late 1980s and early 1990s, I covered Peru's war between the government and the guerrillas for American newspapers. Then, the foreign press paid scant attention to the Tu'pac Amaru Revolutionary Movement (MRTA), favoring their stronger and more vehement rivals, the Communist Party of Peru-Shining Path. Although extreme in its Maoist beliefs, the Shining Path has clearly defined views. In contrast, the MRTA supports the kind of garden-variety democratic socialism espoused by a handful of legal political parties.

What the MRTA did have were fatigues and Che Guevara-style berets. Their attraction, I suspect, lies in a still-vibrant nostalgia for the 1960s, when Latin rebels cut dashing figures as they fought for utopia.

The MRTA also excelled at flashy media events. For example, in 1990, over 70 convicted guerrillas escaped a Lima prison. Although most were later recaptured, this stylish exit, through a mile-long tunnel that was both ventilated and lit with electric lights at a time when most of Lima was left dark by power rationing, was a slap in the government's face. Like the Shining Path, the MRTA controlled the sections of the prisons where its militants were held, and prison was considered a kind of mandatory "finishing school" for any serious guerrilla.

In 1991, I got permission from the Interior and Justice Ministries to get as far as the door to the Shining Path women's cellblock in Lima's Miguel Castro Castro prison. There, I had to get a different kind of permit, from the women themselves. No guard entered there; all visitors were subject to the rules and regulations imposed by the ranking leaders.

Inside, all was neat and orderly. Meals were served at picnic-style concrete tables, and consisted of food the inmates themselves had purchased and prepared. They had a special room for group activities, where they sang me revolutionary songs, and a sun-filled outdoor patio, where they raised rabbits and chickens and painted huge and colorful murals to their heroes.

The fact that so many women filled the ranks of both the Shining Path and MRTA went largely unremarked in Peru. I found it fascinating, especially since most Peruvian leftists were as hidebound as their conservative enemies about issues of gender equality. There was one marked difference between Shining Path and MRTA women, though. While the Shining Path women tended to be portrayed as dour, sexless, and blood-thirsty, their MRTA counterparts were viewed as sexpots. And while Shining Path women clearly held positions of command, rare was the MRTA comrade who transcended girlfriend status to assume leadership.

But the political landscape changed in April of 1992, when newly-elected president Alberto Fujimori imposed draconian anti-terrorism laws and vowed to take control of the prisons again. In Peru, massacres of inmates by the security forces are like natural disasters, unpredictable yet cyclical in nature, always looming. In 1981, a riot by common criminals ended in a bloodbath in central Lima. The 1986 prison massacres, after a Shining Path-led riot, ended with the deaths of over 300 prisoners. And in May of 1992, the transfer of Shining Path women from Castro Castro ended with 42 dead, including three guards.

When I visited the women a month later at Yanamayo prison, they were living four to a cell built for one. They were so short on clothing that one cellmate had to remain naked in bed so that another could move about. The impression that remains strongest with me is the smell -- none had been allowed to bathe or brush their teeth since their transfer. As I left, one of the MRTA's most fabled beauties peered at me from behind a filthy curtain, her face haggard, unclean, yet starving for a glimpse of something new.

In 1996, inmates no longer control their cellblocks. Conditions are especially hard for those, like Berenson, convicted of treason. She might be sent to one of the new prisons constructed just for treason convicts. One, near Lake Titicaca, sits at an oxygen-deprived, freezing 14,000 feet.

For the first year of her sentence, Berenson will be allowed no visits. Afterwards, she will be allowed 30 minutes per month, restricted to close family. Food, medical care, water, and clothing are scarce; for twenty-three-and-a-half hours, she will be locked in a tiny cell with two or three other inmates.

Any hope she has of returning home lies in rousing international pressure and enrolling the U.S. Embassy in negotiating a prisoner exchange -- something Berenson has vowed not to do. She will get no support from Peruvians, most of whom support Fujimori's tough laws and feel little sympathy for foreigners who want to prolong what they see as a lost decade of suffering, fear and grief.

When three Chileans were tried for treason in 1994 for their involvement with MRTA, a commission of international jurists questioned the charge, pointing out that foreign nationals owe no allegiance to Peru, a necessary basis for treason. Fujimoro replied that he would get around to drafting a law to include foreigners. He never did; but the Chileans are now serving life sentences. Like Berenson, they may have the rest of their lives to contemplate their support for a guerrilla group whose time seems to have passed.