Ines Etienne Romeu, Human rights activist, 1942-2015

Dilma Rousseff, Brazil's president, was tortured. Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, her predecessor, was jailed; and Fernando Henrique Cardoso, whom he succeeded, had been exiled. Each suffered under its military dictatorship. Yet one of the problems of being always a "country of the future" can be a forgetting of the past. Ines Etienne Romeu prodded Brazil out of its collective amnesia.

Romeu was the sole survivor of an extrajudicial torture camp known as the House of Death, and her subsequent testimonies played a crucial role in exposing the abuses of military rule. Her life is a testament to the burning power of truth: she said her desire to report what had happened kept her alive.

Her death aged 72 in Niteroi, a Rio de Janeiro satellite town known as the "City of Smiles", also arguably marks the end of a dark period of history that has warped Brazil's collective memory, and even government policy, ever since.

Born in 1942 in Pouso Alegre in central Minas Gerais state, she moved to the state capital of Belo Horizonte to study history. It was the start of the 1964-85 dictatorship and Romeu showed early pluck. Active in the student movement, she then worked at a local bank, heading its trade union. Soon after, she joined the Popular Revolutionary Vanguard (VPR), a group that in 1970 kidnapped Giovanni Bucher, the Swiss ambassador.

Bucher reportedly developed a fondness for his captors, admiring their scathing humour and easy-going style. After his release two months later, he refused to identify their photographs to the authorities - a stark contrast to Romeu's experience.

She was arrested at 9am on May 5 1971 while walking down a Sao Paulo street. The next 96 days of her life at the House of Death in Petropolis, a highland town outside Rio, are a chronicle of horrifying abuse. She was beaten, electrocuted and hung upside down from an iron bar, the infamous "parrot's perch". She was drugged with a truth serum that left her body numb but her mind lucid. She was raped and forced to clean the kitchens naked. One of her most brutal torturers, a Dr Roberto, dragged her around the floor by her hair and told her that "they didn't need any more information . . . they were simply practising the purest form of sadism".

She tried to commit suicide - four times in all, once by cutting her wrists with a piece of metal and another by swallowing powdered glass. When offered a chance to work in counterintelligence, spying on the VPR, Romeu nominally accepted as way to get out and tell her story. "I [fought] for my life because I hoped to report everything," she later testified.

Romeu was released on August 11 but was soon rearrested and given a life sentence, of which she served eight years. On release, having memorised the names of her torturers and the House of Death's location, she spent the rest of her life making public the abuse she and other prisoners had suffered. In 2012 she gave public evidence at a truth commission, aided by her sister as an attack on her home had left her with speech and other impairments.

Its final report revealed that 100 perpetrators of human rights crimes were still alive and recommended they be brought to trial. A 1979 amnesty law makes that difficult: neither military perpetrators of such crimes nor their leftwing opponents can be prosecuted.

The atrocities of Brazil's military dictatorship pale next to Argentina's or Chile's. More than 400 people died in Brazil, compared with 3,000 in Chile and up to 30,000 whom human rights groups say disappeared in Argentina. Most Brazilians alive today were not born when the repression was at its height; those who were remember the time often as one of economic growth by contrast to the current grinding recession.

Today the army is also generally popular and it is the police who carry on the traditions of violence, killing on average six people a day. At last month's mass protests against government corruption, when more than 1m took to the streets, some fringe rightwing groups even called for the return of the supposed certainties of military rule.

Such calls are not taken seriously. That they are made without universal opprobrium, however, and within the context of a vibrant democracy, may also mark the healing passage of time. Some of the more idealistic legislation put in place with the onset of democracy, such as imprudently generous pensions, are being whittled back, as they are no longer associated with rightwing rule.

If that is the case, and it represents a coming to terms with the past rather than a forgetting, Romeu's courageous work will have played a big role.

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