Peru's government has revoked what was effectively an amnesty for officials and soldiers accused of atrocities during a civil war, following a storm of protest led by the novelist Mario Vargas Llosa.
The country's president, Alan Garcia, yesterday asked congress to annul a decree he personally issued two weeks ago that would have shielded hundreds of people accused of human rights abuses during the crackdown against leftist guerrillas between 1980 and 2000.
To avoid the decree being "put to bad use", the president ordered it revoked "with urgency", said officials via the social networking website Twitter.
The abrupt climbdown was a victory for human rights activists, who claimed Garcia himself would have been shielded from possible prosecution over army massacres committed during his first term as president, from 1985-90.
The decree, numbered 1097, said defendants in trials for human rights crimes committed before 2003 must be sentenced within 36 months of the start of their trial. With most cases bogged down for years, it would in effect have shut them down.
Critics said the measure could have violated UN human rights agreements signed by Peru, but the president shrugged off the outcry until yesterday, when Vargas Llosa addressed him in an open letter.
The politically active novelist, considered a leading Latin American voice, said the decree was a "barely-disguised amnesty" to benefit people condemned or prosecuted for murders, tortures and disappearances during a conflict which left 69,000 dead.
He wrote: "This is truly a disgrace that will revive political divisions in the country, precisely at a time of exceptional [economic] progress and during an election that should be used to reinforce our legal institutions and democracy."
Vargas Llosa accused Garcia of appeasing the military, which was accused of widespread abuses while fighting the Shining Path and other leftist guerrilla movements, and of trying to shield himself from prosecution.
The author of Conversation in the Cathedral and The Feast of the Goat, novels which delve into dictatorship and tyranny, resigned as head of a commission appointed to build a museum to honour the conflict's victims.
"There is, in my judgement, an essential incompatibility between, on the one hand, supporting the erection of a monument to the victims of the violence unleashed by the terrorism of Shining Path, and on the other, opening the back door of the prisons with a legal trick," he wrote.
The decree may also have protected a former president, Alberto Fujimori, who is in prison for human rights abuses. Fujimori defeated Vargas Llosa in the 1990 presidential election.
Peru will elect a new president next year. Garcia is constitutionally barred from seeking another consecutive term. The frontrunner is Keiko Fujimori, a member of congress and daughter of the former president.