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Patricia Isasa has been fighting for more than three decades to bring justice to her native Argentina. In the course of her crusade, she has helped put six officials who committed untold crimes against her behind bars for life.

In 1976, when she was just 16, Isasa was kidnapped by security officers from her home in the town of Santa Fe. She was never told why she had been detained, other than that she was suspected of subversion against the military junta.

“I was a student activist, but what I did wasn’t even extreme. I was fighting for social and educational causes,” she said at a discussion at the University of Indonesia on Thursday.

“We weren’t even trying to overthrow the government. I was an honor student, everybody knew me. I placed fourth in my school, I was active in charity activities in a Catholic church, but I guess the police were trying to set an example for the others.”

For 27 months she was detained in a small, filthy cell. There she was tortured and raped repeatedly.

“I was electrocuted many times. I could smell my own flesh burning,” Isasa recalled.

“The torture I had to endure was unimaginable and painfully humiliating.”

She was eventually released in 1978, again with no explanation. She was never brought to trial and there was no indictment against her. Her friends and family could not do much to help her seek justice or investigate who was responsible for her kidnap and torture.

“At that time, if you investigated something, you were putting your own life in jail. My friends and family wanted to help, but they were powerless,” she said.

Years later, though, she saw a TV interview in which a government official revealed how he was ordered to murder people by drowning them.

Enraged, she started to pursue the evidence in her own case to prove the involvement of key important figures who were responsible for her kidnapping and torture ordeal.

“I knocked on every door I could knock. I came to the Red Cross, Amnesty International and even the Vatican,” she said.

Isasa’s efforts and perseverance finally paid off. In 2009, after waiting for more than 30 years for justice, a court sentenced six people to jail for her abduction and torture.

Mario Jose Facino, at the time the chief of the police station where she was held and later the Santa Fe mayor, was sentenced to 20 years in jail, while Victor Hermes Brusa, the Santa Fe court secretary at the time and later a federal judge, got 21 years — both for crimes against humanity.

Isasa, who just returned from a trip to East Timor where she participated in human-rights advocacy sessions, urged Indonesians to learn from her fight.

“Never ever abandon your struggle. Sometimes you might feel you’re alone, but sometimes you’ll see there are millions of people like you,” she said.

She added that even though her torturers had been put behind bars, she would not stop advocating on human rights issues.

She also said that seeking out justice could start with a simple step, such as creating memorials to remember those who were killed and disappeared because they were fighting for a better country.

In Argentina, she said, universities put memorials with the names of missing or dead students inscribed on them.

“It’s a feasible step that you can do here in Indonesia,” Isasa said.

She also urged Indonesia to create a truth commission to investigate what really happened behind a string of gross human rights violations here, including during the troubled period of the May 1998 riots and massacre.

Dozens of protesting students were shot dead and hundreds of ethnic Chinese women were allegedly raped during the period.

Isasa said she did not believe in reparations and rehabilitation, let alone reconciliation with perpetrators of gross human rights abuses.

“The victims need justice,” she said. “They can reconcile with their torturers after justice is served, although I don’t know if I want to reconcile with these psychopaths.”