Australia must extradite Pinochet agent Adriana Rivas

A former agent of the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile has been living in Australia avoiding justice for her role in the aggravated kidnapping, torture and murder of at least seven Communist Party activists in the 1970s.

Adriana Rivas is accused of being part of a government campaign of terror and genocidal violence unleashed on the left and the workers’ movement by the dictatorship after the coup of 11 September 1973.

Rivas lived as a free woman in Australia from 1978 to 2006, working and living in Bondi, Sydney. While visiting Chile for a family wedding in 2006, she was arrested and later charged for her role in Pinochet-era crimes. But while released on bail in 2010, she fled Chile, making her way back to Australia.

In 2014, Chile formally requested her extradition. The Australian government failed to act on the request for five years before arresting her in 2019. While several Australian courts have confirmed the legitimacy of her extradition, Rivas and her lawyers continue to appeal the extradition order in the High Court.

In 1970, Salvador Allende and his Popular Unity coalition were elected to office in Chile, promising to carry out a parliamentary road to socialism. The election of a left-wing government, and the resistance of the Chilean capitalist class to its progressive reforms, unleashed a wave of strikes across the country.

The struggle reached revolutionary proportions in 1973, when workers began to form industrial cordones, institutions of working-class power and industrial democracy independent of the government, to coordinate struggle, defend workers’ gains and pressure the government to implement the promised nationalisation of industry, which Popular Unity had retreated on.

Tragically, the revolutionary process was drowned in blood. In August 1973, Allende invited General Augusto Pinochet into his cabinet in an attempt to appease the Chilean and international capitalist class. On 11 September, Allende was murdered in the Presidential Palace. Militants from the Socialist Party, the Communist Party, the revolutionary MIR and working-class activists were rounded up in their thousands, ushered into the National Stadium of Santiago to be tortured and summarily executed.

The regime continued to hunt down left-wing workers and socialist militants for nearly two decades, while receiving the full diplomatic support of Western governments, including Australia.

In 1974, the Pinochet dictatorship passed Decree Law 521, which created the Directorate of National Intelligence (DINA), a Gestapo-like secret political police force reporting directly to Pinochet. DINA became infamous for its apparatus of repression. This included torture centres, extrajudicial murder and the forced disappearances of thousands of civilians.

The murder of prisoners sometimes occurred through suffocation, the experimental use of sarin gas or injection with cyanide. Survivors have testified that prisoners were killed through beatings, their bodies disposed of in lime mines or thrown into the sea via helicopter in notorious “death flights”.

US support for these crimes is well known. In August 1970, a month before Allende and Popular Unity were elected, Henry Kissinger, then national security adviser for President Richard Nixon, had discussed the feasibility of the US supporting a military coup against Popular Unity.

After the coup, the US supported DINA significantly. In 1974, CIA Deputy Director Vernon Walters hosted a luncheon for DINA Director Manuel Contreras Sepúlveda at CIA headquarters in Virginia. The following year, the CIA briefly put the DINA director on its payroll as a paid asset.

Between 1973 and 1977, Adriana Rivas worked for DINA as part of the Lautaro Brigade, operating under the name “La Chani”. The Lautaro Brigade was an intelligence unit within DINA that targeted Communist Party activists with the aim of liquidating the underground leadership of the resistance to the regime. Rivas was the personal secretary of Army Colonel Contreras, who oversaw DINA.

Many of the Lautaro Brigade’s crimes and its agents were not exposed until 2007, when a former agent gave evidence as part of the Conference Street I and II judicial processes. These two cases covered the aggravated kidnapping and disappearance of Fernando Ortiz, Fernando Navarro, Lincoyan Berrios, Horacio Cepeda, Hector Veliz, Reinalda Pereira and Victor Diaz, secretary of the Communist Party at the time. Rivas is accused of being a participant in the disappearance of all seven.

In 2007, a former DINA waiter turned witness, Jorgelino Vergara—whose own guilt led him to expose the Lautaro Brigade torture centre—claimed that Rivas participated fully in the torture as well as the administrative side of the Lautaro Brigade’s work. In an article in El Dinamo, Vergara claimed he saw Rivas in the gym hitting one of the detainees, who was sitting in a chair with his hands cuffed behind his back.

While Rivas denies involvement in kidnappings, beatings and disappearances, she remains unrepentant about the violence of the Pinochet era and DINA. In a shockingly candid interview with SBS Spanish in 2013, she claimed that the torture of Communists was “the only way to break people” and described her time at DINA as “the best years” of her youth. In the interview, she proudly recounted guarding Pinochet’s hotel room door.

It is a travesty that the Australian government allowed Rivas to live freely in Bondi until 2019 despite knowledge about her crimes coming to light as early as 2006. The Australian government’s indifference to justice for the Chilean victims of Pinochet’s agents should not be surprising, given Australia’s past.

Despite having a reputation for welcoming Chilean refugees, Australia gave full diplomatic recognition to the Pinochet regime for its entire existence, and Australian Secret Intelligence Service (ASIS) spies aided and abetted the CIA in destabilising the Allende government and cultivating conditions for a military coup.

In 2021, declassified Australian documents revealed that, in 1970, Liberal Foreign Minister Billy McMahon approved an ASIS request to open a base in Santiago. The heavily redacted papers show that Australian spies operated in concert with the CIA, but very little detail has been revealed—in line with Australia’s secretive approach to security documents.

In 1972, Labor Prime Minister Gough Whitlam ordered the closure of the Santiago office, while working strenuously to avoid “embarrassing” the CIA. But after his dismissal in 1975, Whitlam suggested his orders to ASIS may have been ignored.

The next High Court hearing for Adriana Rivas is on 10 March 2025. Chilean militants with Movimiento Anticapitalista, including Camilo Parad—the grandson of one of Rivas’ victims, Fernando Ortiz Letelier—have called on the Australian left to mobilise to pressure the courts to extradite Rivas.

The attorney general must act to extradite Rivas without further delay. Every day that she remains in Australia is another insult to the people of Chile, as well as the thousands of Chilean Australians who fled to this country as refugees. In addition, all records relating to ASIS operations in Chile in the 1970s must be fully declassified and released. Justice delayed is justice denied.