NEW YORK — Vicky Peláez, 55, was born in Cusco, Peru, in 1956, one of several daughters in a lower-middle class family. She married Waldo Mariscal in Cusco and at the age of 17 she had a son who was named after his father.

She studied journalism at the University of San Marcos in Lima, Peru and worked at the now-defunct newspaper La Prensa de Lima. During that time she met her second husband, Juan Lázaro, who was also a journalist. According to friends of the couple, Peláez and Lázaro met on assignment. They got married 18 years ago and had a son, Juan José Lázaro, who is now 17.

Peláez started working in television in the 1980s. At the beginning of the decade, she gained national popularity, thanks to her aggressive style as a reporter for the 90-second newscast on Channel 2. On Dec. 8, 1984, she was kidnapped by the Túpac Amaru Revolutionary Movement, along with her cameraman.

During her kidnapping, Peláez interviewed the leader of the leftist group, Víctor Poloy. According to reports, the terrorists asked the television news station to air a subversive message in exchange for the lives of Peláez and her colleague. The interview was not broadcast, but it appeared in the leftist newspaper Marka the following year. The kidnapping only lasted for several hours.

In 1987 Peláez moved to New York, together with her husband Lázaro and their older son. She left Peru during the APRA regime, during which “Alan García didn’t stop calling the channel to complain about the aggressiveness of their reporting,” according to an online report.

In 1988, Peláez started working as a reporter for El Diario/La Prensa, where she worked as an assignment editor, and editor of the countries and supplements section. Since 2000, she has written a weekly column, in which she openly criticized international and U.S. policies. A collection of her columns was published under the title “Desde las Entrañas.”

Peláez and Lázaro lived in various apartments and a small house before moving to the house where they lived when they were arrested on Clifton Avenue in the wealthy neighborhood of Yonkers.

Peláez took care of two Schnauzers, saw friends frequently, and spent time painting and reading when she wasn’t at work. She also attended her younger son’s piano recitals.

Peláez’s older son, Waldo Mariscal, recalled this week the last time his mother was in the public spotlight, when he was 12 years old and she was kidnapped by Tupac Amarú. “I was a kid. Those were terrible weeks, but it went by very fast – one day after the next, but this problem that we have has been going on for 48 hours.”

In an interview form Peru, Peláez’s mother, Angélica Ocampo, denounced the charges as “falseness, lies.”

John Rodríguez, attorney for Vicky Peláez, said Thursday afternoon that he would get a hearing to set bail so she can be released. “She is innocent. She didn’t use a false name,” he said.

On Thursday, Judge Ronald Ellis set Peláez’s bail at $250,000, although she will remain under supervised house arrest with electronic monitoring.

The judge said that, “unlike the other suspects, she didn’t appear to be trained [as an agent]. She is an American citizen. There is no indication that she has false identities.”

However, he added, she did not appear to be innocent, adding that there is evidence that she knew about the operations described in the court documents.

Peláez’s husband, 65-year-old Juan Lázaro, was thought to have been a Peruvian citizen born in Uruguay. He is described as a journalist who was a reporter and cameraman in Lima, Peru and the United States. He studied political science at the New School for Social Research and Gonzaga University in Washington state and was hired as an adjunct professor at Baruch College for the 2008-2009 academic year.

There, he taught a course on Latin American and Caribbean politics for a semester. The director of Baruch told a local newspaper that Lázaro’s contract was not renewed because his course was “substandard.” Some of Lázaro’s students complained about the extremely anti-American opinions of their professor.

According to an AP report published in El Diario/La Prensa, authorities said in a court filing Thursday that Pelaez’s husband had confessed that he worked for Moscow’s secret service, that Juan Lazaro was not his real name, that he was not in fact born in Uruguay, and that his wife had passed letters to Russian intelligence.

News Report, Annie Correal and Cristina Lobogerrero, Compiled and Translated by Elena Shore