Bondi nanny accused of Chilean torture chamber abandons High Court bid

A Bondi nanny accused of running a torture chamber in Chile has abandoned her High Court bid to stop her extradition.

A Bondi nanny accused of helping to run a gruesome torture chamber for a Chilean dictator has abandoned her High Court bid to stay in Australia.

Adriana Rivas, in January this year, launched a bid in the nation’s most powerful court to halt the extradition process to her homeland.

Rivas, now almost 70, was living in obscurity in Bondi caring for children until her arrest in 2019 made international headlines.

The Republic of Chile, in court documents obtained by The Daily Telegraph, accused Rivas of holding a central role in a secret agency under the dictator Augusto Pinochet in the 1970s.

She has long denied the allegations and has fought Chile‘s attempt to extradite her to Santiago in every level of the legal system since her arrest.

A picture purporting to show Adriana Rivas with Chilean intelligence agency head General Manuel Contreras in the 1970s.

The full Federal Court, in November 2021, found Rivas was eligible to return to Chile where she would face prosecution for seven counts of aggravated kidnapping.

But Rivas was determined to stop what she once told a television crew was a “politically driven” persecution and asked her legal team to apply for a hearing in the High Court.

Documents were filed asking the most powerful court to intervene in January 2022 but, on Monday, the court released a “certificate of abandonment”.

The document announced Rivas had failed to comply with rules for applying to the court and her request for an appeal was considered abandoned.

The Chilean-Australian human rights campaign to send Rivas back to Santiago shared the news on social media saying it was now up to the Attorney-General to determine Rivas‘ extradition.

The Daily Telegraph, in 2020, revealed the full scope of the brutal allegations contained in the Chilean dossiers.

Those court documents said Rivas was allegedly known as “La Chami” during her time in DINA’s secretive “Lautaro brigade”.

Adriana Rivas spoke with SBS News in 2014.

“Amongst the meanest instruments used by that systematic policy is the creation of specialised repression groups that implemented underground detention centres which later became places where the most hideous acts of horror, torture and genocide took place,” the court dossier reads.

Rivas is named in the documents as a member of the brigade who joined in 1974 after taking “a course in intelligence”.

Chile alleges in court documents Rivas was just one agent who would snatch and detain Pinochet’s political enemies - unionists and Marxists - as they walked the streets of Santiago.

The detainees were allegedly held in the gym and cafeteria, interrogated and tortured in “dungeons” — the dressing rooms next to the gym — with electrified metal bunk beds, the dossiers read.

Adriana Rivas’ alleged victims include (from left to right) Lincoyan Berrios, Horacio Cepeda, Juan Ortiz, Fernando Navarro, Reinalda Pereira and Hector Veliz.

Sarin gas experiments, under the direction of doctors, were allegedly undertaken on the prisoners.

Once the interrogations were over the prisoners were allegedly injected with unknown substances and suffocated with plastic bags.

Their bodies were anonymised by burning off their fingers and faces before they were thrown into the ocean from helicopters, Chile alleges.

Rivas argues she was not involved and had no knowledge of the torture of the detainees.

Her lawyers have long raised strident opposition to the extradition and any trial she may face in Chile.