Napoleon Ortigoza, the Paraguayan army cavalry officer who became one of the world’s longest-serving political prisoners as a victim of despot Alfredo Stroessner, died January 17 at a hospital in the capital city of Asuncion after a heart attack. He was 73.

Jailed on a fraudulent murder charge, then tortured and kept from his lawyer for 25 years, Ortigoza was often compared to African National Congress leader Nelson Mandela in South Africa for the length of time he endured confinement.

After his release in 1987, Ortigoza was held under a vague form of house arrest and fled the country through diplomatic help. When a new Paraguayan regime ousted Stroessner, Ortigoza returned but declined to be feted as a celebrity.

In 1996, the country’s supreme court cleared him of all charges, finding that his murder confession had been obtained through torture. Despite that and some financial compensation ordered by the state’s human rights ombudsman, Ortigoza remained bitter about the continued freedom of Stroessner and Ramon Duarte Vera, the ex-chief of police who became Paraguay’s ambassador to Bolivia.

“I don’t want to see Duarte Vera and Stroessner die for what they did,” Ortigoza said in 1988. “I just want them to know what it is like to be put in solitary confinement for 18 years in a cell one meter by two.”

Landlocked Paraguay had a legacy of dictators who ignited civil unrest and were partly responsible for chronic poverty. Thirty presidents ruled between 1870 and 1932, followed by several strongmen. Among the worst was Stroessner, a general who commanded the armed forces and led to power a splinter group of the dominant Colorado Party. Stroessner, now 93, ruled from 1954 to 1989, when he was overthrown and settled in exile in Brazil.

Although Stroessner’s absolute rule encouraged some foreign investments, his abuses of human rights and the country’s evolution as a major drug producer profoundly stained his accomplishments.

Capt. Modesto Napoleon Ortigoza Gomez, born February 12, 1932, in Atyra, Paraguay, was one of the most visible victims of the Stroessner regime. In the army from 1949, the dashing cavalryman graduated at the top of his class and seemed to have a promising career.

By the early 1960s, he was serving under a commander reputedly involved in a planned coup. Ortigoza denied all involvement, later telling a reporter, “I knew better than to get involved in some anti-Stroessner game.”

Ortigoza’s arrest on December 17, 1962, was meant to warn all the military from acting against Stroessner. As a twist, he was charged with killing an army cadet who was purported to have discovered the coup plot.

A military court found him guilty, but he was likely saved from the firing squad because of a Franciscan priest, who announced on a Radio Caritas program that the captain was not guilty of the cadet’s death. Further, the priest promised to make a public statement about the true perpetrators based on what he claimed were church confessions by the killers.

Ortigoza received a commuted sentence of 25 years. The captain’s driver also received a reduced sentence of 15 years but was held for 21.

Human rights groups persuaded Paraguayan authorities to allow Ortigoza visits from his family and church officials, but those were brief respites from the routine beatings, electroshocks, and near-death submersions in water.

In time, he was moved to a cell with a bathroom. He was released shortly before a visit by Pope John Paul II, for whom Stroessner wanted to play down Paraguay’s human rights violations.

In his final years, Ortigoza lived modestly, a figure of military rectitude, who talked vividly with school-age children for whom the history of Paraguay’s human rights violations seemed a mirage.

His marriage to Lucila Ortigoza ended in divorce; two daughters survive him.