It sounds like your Hispanic character was jailed in either Iraq under Insane Hussein or Cuba under Castro. You might want to talk to people from these cultures to see how they learned to cope with that sort of oppression.
The thing is, you don't want your character to be a boring pacifist or just grit his teeth and carry on with business as usual. Let's see him get out that laser gun and kick butt!
I wrote two novels (they sold) but the tortures I use are much more terrifying than sudden, painless death: the hero is a twisted indian chief that was so evil that the tribe had to either tie him down over an ant hill or send him to Harvard law school to bring out his real talents. He opts for the ant hill, so the Tribe decides top make him really suffer by sending him to Harvard anyway.
He returns with all the diabolical fury that a ruthless indian chief can muster: he wants the tribe's land back any way he can get it. So, he has his braves kidnap the local CO at the fort, they rope him into a chair, pass around cotton ear plugs, and the chief serenades with an accordion solo of "99 bottles of beer on the wall" until they reduce the CO to a quivering wasted piece of jelly.
Because a neighboring tribe heard the torture, they went on the warpath, and with his own tribe's blessing, they lynched the accordion-playing chief.
Now, somewhere in the desert, you can still hear an accordion and the screams of terrified music listeners that were stuffed into hell with the chief, because that is the only place where the accordion is welcome . . ..
