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ACAPULCO, Mexico, July 4 (Reuters) - Valentina Rosendo, an intensely shy Tlapaneca Indian girl, says she was washing clothes in a stream for her young family when she was surrounded by eight Mexican soldiers from the new army base near her village of Barranca Bejuco last February.

"Where are the guerrillas?" the soldiers asked Rosendo, the 17-year-old mother of an infant girl. In broken Spanish, she told them she didn't know.

"I was scared," she told Reuters in an interview on Wednesday, haltingly recounting her story in her native Tlapaneca through an interpreter as her seven-month-old daughter squirmed in her lap.

A soldier put a rifle to Rosendo's chest and read a list of names. She repeated that she did not know of them.

"If you won't tell us, we're going to wreck Barranca," they threatened. Then the soldier struck her in the belly with butt of the gun and knocked the wind out of her, she recalled.

She fell, hitting her head on a stone, and fainted. When she came to she was being dragged by her hair, she said.

Again she was threatened, questioned and hit, falling onto a rock. Then the soldiers held her down. Two of them raped her while the others looked on, she recalled.

"From that day she hasn't been well," said Rosendo's friend and translator from the village.

Her life has changed in ways she might not yet know, say rights workers and lawyers. In pressing her criminal case against the army, the dirt-poor teenager faces one of Mexico's most powerful institutions, known for a history of human rights abuses and impunity.

Though never associated with the brutality of other Latin American military regimes, Mexico's army is widely blamed for waging a "dirty war" against leftists in previous decades, and activists say it continues to terrorize civilians in a below-the-radar counterinsurgency campaign aimed at poor, often indigenous communities.

Despite President Vicente Fox's efforts to open public institutions to scrutiny and subject them to justice, the military remains largely untouchable, said Mireya del Pino, a sociologist at the Miguel Agustin Pro Juarez rights center.

The Defense Ministry declined to comment by telephone on Rosendo's case on Wednesday, though it has previously denied the charges in a public statement.

Rosendo and her soft-spoken husband, Fidel Bernardino Sierra, 23, walked 10 hours with their daughter on Monday from their farming village in the Guerrero mountains to the glitzy Pacific resort of Acapulco to meet with Mexican and international rights workers. Neither can read or write.

They had no money for meals or a hotel, relying on help from friends and activists.

"That can start to break you," said lawyer Arturo Roman, who is handling the case for the Pro Juarez rights center.

Roman's motion is pending to prevent Rosendo's case from going before a military court. He wants to join her charges of rape, torture and abuse of authority with those of another Guerrero woman who says she was raped by soldiers in March.

But the odds against successfully prosecuting the case are overwhelming, Roman said. Similar charges in Guerrero and elsewhere, such as the alleged rape by soldiers of three Tzeltzal sisters in Chiapas in 1994, have languished in military courts.

Victims may face threats or pressure from neighbors and political leaders, even from their husbands, to drop charges or never pursue them. Some just move away and try to forget.

Roman and Del Pino say Rosendo's case highlights a military strategy of counterinsurgency in marginal communities where state repression breeds civic resistance. Attacks against women divide communities by tearing apart families, they say.

Largely poor and indigenous Guerrero has been fertile ground for insurgent movements. The army base near Rosendo's village was installed in January to stem arms traffic.

But as in southern Chiapas state, home to the 1994 Zapatista uprising over Indian rights, rights workers in Guerrero say the people here face daily army harassment.

Asked why she was pressing her case, Rosendo shook her head, at a loss for words. For now she has the support of her community and husband, but with no economic resources and little psychological support, her resolve could crumble under a long and brutal legal process that may just be beginning.

"Her family runs the risk of breaking apart. She may come to a point and say, 'enough,'" Roman said.

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