Story highlights Guadalupe Pérez Castillo spent decades in forced labor

Perez says her innocence was taken away

She finds it difficult to transition to normal life

(CNN) For a woman of 43, Guadalupe Pérez Castillo seems extremely shy. Meeting new people is still a challenge for her. She has a tendency to look down when talking to others and constantly rubs her hands while speaking, as if she were nervous.

Her therapist and her attorney say all of this is because Pérez is only now learning how to live in freedom after spending 30 years in captivity, working as a slave.

"They took away my innocence and the hope of being a self-assured person," Pérez says of the decades she spent in forced labor.

Her story begins in Las Agujas, a little town in the municipality of Tantoyuca in the Mexican coastal state of Veracruz. Las Agujas was an impoverished indigenous community where Pérez, who was 10 years old at the time, sold fruit in the town square to help her family's stretched finances.

One day, a woman came to Pérez's family home. Since the family only spoke Huasteco, the local indigenous dialect, the woman showed up accompanied by a local translator who spoke Spanish.

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