After two years of study, Peru's truth commission has finished a nine-volume report on violence between leftist guerrillas and government security forces between 1980 and 2000.

Liduvina Causqui, 67,(R) holds a candle during a vigil in front of the Justice Palace in Lima, Peru, on Wednesday, Aug.27, 2003. Causqui said she was imprisoned for six years on terrorism charges. She was later found innocent of the charges and released in 2000.  [AP]

Commission investigators have said the report is expected to say that more than 60,000 people disappeared or were killed — far more than the 30,000 victims previously believed. The findings were to be published Thursday.

The commission is also expected to say that Shining Path guerrillas were responsible for more deaths than police and military forces. Both sides have been blamed for massacres of indigenous Indian peasants caught in the crossfire.

The report will likely recommend reparations to victims, although it's unclear just how this impoverished nation will pay for it.

Retired generals once responsible for the areas under rebel siege — mostly remote sections of the Andes Mountains — have recently criticized the report and say they did nothing wrong. Conservatives have warned that the report will open old wounds and give guerrillas media attention.

The Shining Path launched its insurgency to overthrow Peru's elected governments in 1980 after a decade of planning. By the late 1980s, the guerrillas had paralyzed much of the Peruvian highlands and had begun moving in on Lima with a campaign of car bombings and assassinations.

Until rebels began attacking in Lima, the capital's residents saw the conflict as an abstract, distant problem involving mainly Quechua-speaking highland Indians, who suffered the brunt of the violence.

A poll of 624 Lima residents released Wednesday showed that nearly 70 percent of those asked said they knew little or nothing about the truth commission's work. The University of Lima survey had a margin of error of 4 percentage points.

The violence dropped off significantly with the capture of Shining Path founder Abimael Guzman in 1992.

A faction of the Shining Path continues to operate in Peru's coca-growing jungle regions, where the guerrillas run protection for cocaine traffickers.

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