In a chilling final report, Peru's Truth and Reconciliation Commission said on Thursday 69,000 people -- twice the previous official estimate -- may have died in two decades of rebel and state-sponsored violence that ripped this poor Andean nation apart.

"The last two decades of the 20th century were marked by horror and dishonor for Peruvian society," the commission's president, Salomon Lerner, told a ceremony in government palace. He was in tears as he handed over the nine-volume report.

Peru was shattered by parallel wars by the Shining Path and Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement (MRTA) guerrillas seeking to impose communist rule. In response, the military and police committed widespread human rights abuses.

"The most likely figure of victims in these 20 years is more than 69,000 who died or disappeared at the hands of subversives and forces of the state," Lerner said.

"We used to say that in our worst forecast, the violence cost 35,000 lives. What does this say about our politicians now that we know that 35,000 more of our brothers were missing and nobody noticed?"

A Truth Commission official said the report estimated 69,280 people had died or disappeared. The commission identified 23,900 dead -- 54 percent of whom were killed by Shining Path and 30 percent by security forces.

The remainder were presumed to have died at the hands of civilian defense groups or guerrillas of the MRTA. The bodies of the missing have not been found and they are presumed dead.

Three-quarters of the victims were native speakers of the Andean Quechua language and most died in the region of Ayacucho, which translates as "corner of death."

"The report we are handing over expresses a double scandal -- murder, disappearance and torture on a mass scale, and indolence, ineptitude and indifference on the part of those who could have prevented this human catastrophe, and did not."

Shining Path took up arms in 1980 and, with its machete massacres and car bombs, became one of Latin America's bloodiest insurgencies. Although still on Washington's list of terrorist groups, the Maoist's group's attacks died down after the 1992 capture of its leader, Abimael Guzman.

But a few hundred diehard Shining Path guerrillas are still at large, and their recent ambushes and a brief kidnap of gas workers has raised questions over the wisdom of releasing a truth report when violence is not yet over.

"The history of terror must never be repeated," said President Alejandro Toledo. "I call on the country to step into the future and ... pull together in reconciliation," he added.

CONTROVERSY OVER PAINFUL TRUTHS

The commission's report was based on two years of investigations into human rights violations from 1980 to 2000, and nearly 17,000 testimonies.

It examined 73 cases and had unprecedented access to internal military documents and also interviewed jailed rebel leaders, ex-presidents and other public figures.

Supporters say the report, with its recommendations, will help bring justice to millions of victims and heal the wounds of two decades of abuses that were either unpunished or whitewashed.

But critics say the commissioners were too sympathetic to the rebel cause to be objective and were already dismissing their findings as biased.

Peru's report comes as some other countries in Latin America -- a continent with a sorry history of coups and dirty wars -- was taking a fresh look at past injustices.

Argentina's Senate last week voted to scrap the amnesties that protected military officers who tortured and murdered leftists while Brazil, whose president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva was jailed during a dictatorship, is renewing the search for hundreds of people who disappeared.

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