LIMA, Peru - The cobbler worked on the street, a vulnerable place in the best of times.
And it was the worst of times: 1993, the height of Peru's bloody civil war. Police were hunting terrorists in the gray slums of Lima. Terrorists were shooting at the police, civilians and each other.
Every day, however, Julio Loa Albornoz set up his outdoor stand and repaired shoes. He stayed out of politics. He was the father of two young children, a devout Buddhist. As long as he worked and kept his head down, he thought he would be safe.
He was wrong.
One day the anti-terrorist police rolled up in a van. They were torturing a suspect in back, Loa says; the suspect pointed at him. The police pulled the cobbler into the van and into the dungeon of Peru's anti-terrorist justice system, where the judges wear masks and the guilty verdict is read as soon as the defense rests.
Although prosecutors admitted there was no evidence, Loa was charged with terrorism. He spent 3 1/2 years in prison as his case plodded through a Kafkaesque maze of military and civilian courts, convictions, appeals.
Loa became one of more than 1,000 Peruvians believed to have been wrongly imprisoned under emergency anti-subversion laws - inmates known as "The Innocents."
"It makes you sick," said Loa, now 34. "It ... was like they were playing with me. I think they were trying to drive me crazy."
Loa talked about his ordeal a few days after his recent release from a maximum-security prison here. Peru's top military court freed him at a time of growing consensus that the war left a legacy of injustices to be redressed.
The plight of the innocents, according to Peruvian leaders, is an unavoidable result of harsh policies needed to fight a dangerous foe: the country's Maoist rebels. Although the fighting has abated, Congress voted Friday to extend current anti-terrorism laws for another year.
Meanwhile, a special commission headed by Peru's new defender of the people, a public ombudsman, is reviewing the cases of the innocents at the urging of President Alberto Fujimori. About 200 of the wrongly accused have been freed this year _ Loa among them. And earlier this month, the government announced the first of a series of pardons promised by the president.
Some human rights activists criticize the president's remedy, saying it is absurd to pardon convicts who did nothing wrong in the first place.
But they prefer the pardons to relying on the workings of a cumbersome legal apparatus.
The Fujimori administration is trying to undo excesses that date to 1992. As vicious attacks by the Shining Path guerrilla movement pushed the nation toward chaos, Fujimori and the military declared a state of emergency. They armed themselves with extraordinary legislation: a new treason law, plea bargains for informants, harsh sentences for collaborators and masterminds alike.
This counterattack produced victories against terrorism and a fearsome justice system that has been condemned in Peru and abroad.
"It is terrible legislation; it violates basic rights," said Susana Villaran, director of a coalition of Peruvian human rights groups.
Legal tools were turned into clubs, critics say. Between 6,000 and 8,000 alleged terrorists have been tried in closed military and civilian courts, often dark chambers presided over by judges who hide behind hooded masks, one-way mirrors or curtains. Authorities say those intimidating precautions protect judges from Shining Path's proven capacity for vengeance.
The courts are "absolutely medieval," Villaran said. In an anecdote recorded by human rights watchdogs, a visitor to a prison court found himself in a room watching through the one-way glass as a lawyer delivered an impassioned plea for mercy. The visitor realized that the judges' chairs were empty: No one was listening to the defense.
Loa was accused of collaborating with the Shining Path by a confessed guerrilla of the Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement, a rival group. The accuser claimed that terrorists congregated at Loa's shoe repair stand in the tough La Victoria neighborhood, where the two rebel groups were feuding.
But during an initial hearing, Loa's accuser reversed himself. He admitted he fingered the cobbler through the window of the police van at random, out of desperation. He said police promised to let him go if he talked.
Loa was a classic victim of an effective but dangerous law granting leniency to turncoats. False accusations, often extracted through torture, acquire enormous weight because informants and investigators are largely shielded from cross-examination, Villaran said.
Although civilian judges exonerated Loa, he remained in prison while the government appealed. Ominously, his case was attached to the files of other accused terrorists and transferred to the military courts. A year later, he sat next to his lawyer, aghast, listening to the monotonous, disembodied voice of an unseen judge sentencing him to 15 years in prison.