The interview which uncovered an
alleged torturer
Ex-Chilean agent Adriana Rivas (Chany) reveals how she escaped her homeland, where she's accused of kidnapping,
torture and murder during the Pinochet dictatorship.
Whilst Rivas denies the claims against her, the interview
triggered a historical extradition request to Australia.
On February 19, 2019 Australian police arrested Adriana Rivas, a dual Chilean-Australian citizen wanted in Chile over aggravated kidnapping offences alleged to have been committed in the 1970s during the military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet.
The arrest came after an exclusive interview on August 28, 2013 with SBS Spanish where Rivas described in detail how she escaped from Chile by illegally crossing the Andes mountains to Argentina, where she boarded a plane to Australia.
In Chile, Rivas was part of the feared National Intelligence Directorate (DINA).
Since she arrived in Australia in 1978, Rivas worked as a nanny and a cleaner.
She was in Chile visiting her family in 2006 when she was arrested. She made her escape while on bail in 2010 and returned to Australia, where she lived in taxpayer-funded housing in Sydney's Bondi.
In January 2014 an extradition request from Chile was received by the Department of Foreign Affairs.
It took Australia five years to start the judicial assessment that will determine if Rivas is extradited to Chile to face court proceedings for her alleged involvement of crimes against humanity.
Read the transcript in English of Adriana Rivas' escape from Chile here
(original audio in Spanish)
Chilean intelligence officials in Australia
The fact that Adriana Rivas has been in Australia since February 1978 might not be a coincidence. Author Mark Aarons suggests that there may be hundreds of war criminals living secretly in Australia since World War II.
Aarons said that war criminals living in the country come from many places and organisations, including Chile’s DINA, the dictatorship’s secret police between 1973 and 1977.
These security officers who found “sanctuary” in Australia, Aarons added, were guilty of “torture and summary executions”. More tellingly, Aarons argued that a number of those people were brought to Australia “as intelligence assets
by our intelligence services and resettled here for purposes of ongoing intelligence operations by our own services”.
Listen to the complete interview with Adriana Rivas, following her arrest on February 19, 2019. Her extradition case continues.
Read the transcript in English of Adriana Rivas complete interview here (original audio in Spanish)
In 2013, Rivas told SBS Spanish she was innocent of the charges, but defended the use of torture in Chile at the time as necessary.
“They had to break the people – it has happened all over the world, not only in Chile," she said.
Australian intelligence officials in Chile
Primer Minister Gough Whitlam
Primer Minister Gough Whitlam
Adriana Rivas in 1979
Adriana Rivas in 1979
In May 1977, nine months before Rivas arrived in Australia, Prime Minister Gough Whitlam told the Parliament:
“It has been written - and I cannot deny it – that when my Government took office, Australian intelligence personnel were working as proxies of the CIA in destabilising the government of Chile."
In 1983, an ABC documentary "Allies" broadcasted remarks from Mr Whitlam's former Minister for Immigration, Clyde Cameron.
"I was appalled to think that my own department was involved in this sort of work and that our intelligence agents in Chile were acting as the hyphen between the CIA and the Pinochet junta. Imagine my amazement when I received a letter from the Prime Minister [Mr Whitlam] saying that I was to take no further action in the matter, that I was not to withdraw ASIO agents even from Santiago in Chile and that nothing was to be done about it at all."
In September 2013, an SBS Spanish investigation 'The Other 9/11,' featured Adriana Rivas as an example of the presence of the Chilean regime in Australia. The investigation also uncovered a formal request by the United States to Australia to support their intelligence operations in Chile in the early '70s.
Two officers from the Australian Secret Intelligence Service -ASIS- were stationed in Santiago de Chile.
By 1972, the officers agreed to manage three agents on the CIA’s behalf and to relay information back to Washington DC.
Click on the picture to access SBS investigation.
Click on the picture to access SBS investigation.
Aggravated kidnapping in Chile is a first-degree felony punishable by imprisonment.
In the context of the Chilean dictatorship, aggravated kidnapping constituted human rights violations - a crime against humanity involving systematic torture and murder.
Adriana Rivas is accused of aggravated kidnapping in seven cases.
Rivas has been denied bail and remains in prison, waiting for her second bail request to be assessed by the court on April 2, 2019.
2019 SBS
2019 SBS
