Paraguayan army Capt Modesto Napoleon Ortigoza, once Latin America's longest standing political prisoner, was awarded $2 million by a Paraguayan court this week in a landmark ruling which ended a 39-year search for justice.
Capt Ortigoza was detained in 1962 for the alleged murder of a cadet, Alberto Benitez, and convicted a year later after signing a confession obtained under torture.
Capt Ortigoza's real crime was refusing to sign an oath of loyalty to the Paraguayan dictator Gen Alfredo Stroessner (1954-89), who turned the nation's army into his private militia and converted the entire country into a personal fiefdom, ruling through terror and blackmail.
Capt Ortigoza suffered constant beatings, simulated execution and several periods of solitary confinement, while on one occasion he went without food for a week, after his jailers forgot he was still behind bars.
Capt Ortigoza was offered an opportunity to sign a letter of apology to Gen Stroessner to obtain his release, an offer he refused; "I didn't do anything wrong" he told me in 1998, shortly before he recovered his lost rank by presidential decree.
His case was taken up by international human rights groups but it was only in 1987 that he was granted house arrest, where he heard of his full release on a radio news bulletin.
The restless ex-prisoner immediately went for a walk. A policeman spotted him and attempted to rearrest him. "I hit him hard," said Capt Ortigoza, who fled into the Colombian embassy and obtained political asylum in Spain.
Capt Ortigoza returned to Paraguay in 1990 but it was only in 1996 that the country's Supreme Court ruled that his confession was extracted under duress and therefore invalid.
On October 2nd, 1998 President Raul Cubas annulled the decrees issued by former president Stroessner in 1970, paving the way for the indemnity.
The exonerated soldier studied political science and slowly rebuilt his life, finding it difficult to adapt to a country which had changed rapidly in the intervening decades.
"If my family had abandoned me, I'd be dead now," he concluded.