Marcela Pradena was only 13 when she first became active in the human rights and pro-democracy campaigns in her native Chile, but it was a decision which was to lead to kidnap, rape, torture and eventual exile from her homeland.
She was kidnapped for the first time in June 1985 outside the law faculty where she was a student at Santiago University.
"They chose the weakest of us, usually young girls similar to me. I know at least 400 young people who were taken in and subjected to mental and physical torture."
She believes the mental torture is the worst, "because a person can recover from physical injuries, but the mental scars stay with you. They were very sadistic and had specialists in psychological torture."
On that first occasion she was blindfold and driven away to a place she was unable to recognise. "They raped me, beat me up and broke both my arms before throwing me out of a car after two days."
A year later, by then married and already pregnant with her first child, she was again kidnapped and suffered similar tortures, being released only after five days in captivity.
On another occasion, while in her parents' home, she was beaten up by masked men and realised she would have to leave Chile. She went into hiding in a Catholic refuge where she was helped by the church and by a Christian Democrat lawyer to obtain a passport.
"I had to pretend to be the secretary to the Chilean pianist Roberto Bravo, who was exiled in London."
Her husband managed to escape by a different route, and the two finally met up in Madrid, where their two children were born.
Mrs Pradena came from a working class family. Her father was an electrician working in a textile factory in Santiago, a trade unionist and an admirer of Salvador Allende.
"But he was never politically active and certainly no communist. We never talked politics at home," she says. Many of her father's colleagues and neighbours suffered at the hands of the secret police and several of them were shot or joined the ranks of the `disappeared'.
Although she is not a practising Catholic, her own activities were always within the framework of Catholic and Christian Democrat organisations. Before going into exile, she worked with the Peace and Justice Service of the Nobel Prize-winner, Perez Esquivel.
Now, at the age of 31, Mrs Pradena works for the legal team which represents other Chilean exiles in their campaign to bring the former dictator Gen Augusto Pinochet to justice.
She admits that her suffering at the hands of Chilean secret police were mild compared to the deprivation suffered by dissidents in the early years of the dictatorship - which was at its worst between 1977 and 1979.
But even today her fears never leave her. She was obviously afraid and reluctant to answer it when her mobile phone rang as we were having a coffee together in a Madrid cafe this week. "I have received three death threats," she explained. "Two after Pinochet was detained in London and another this week after the decision was announced from London."