Bondi nanny Adriana Rivas asks High Court to halt extradition over Chilean torture allegations

A Bondi nanny accused of harrowing crimes on behalf of a Chilean dictator is asking Australia’s most powerful court to halt her extradition.

A Bondi nanny accused of working as a secret agent in a South American torture chamber is asking Australia’s most powerful court to keep her out of the hands of Chilean prosecutors.

But the families of Adriana Rivas’ alleged victims believe her challenge will fail and she will be put on a plane out of Sydney “this year”.

Rivas has been locked in a three-year legal battle to convince multiple NSW judges and magistrates that the Republic of Chile wants to falsely prosecute her for ‘disappearing’ seven people almost 50 years ago.

Adriana Rivas faces prosecution in Chile over seven alleged kidnappings. Picture: Facebook

Chilean authorities have been hunting Rivas since 2006 accusing her of being part of a terrifying and secretive government agency – DINA – that brutalised the political enemies of dictator Augusto Pinochet in the 1970s.

Police arrested Rivas at her Bondi brick unit in 2019 and a Sydney court found she could be legally sent to Chile to face prosecution for seven counts of aggravated kidnapping.

Rivas, still in custody, lost an appeal in late November after three judges of the Federal Court found no errors had been made by the lower courts.

The families of seven vanished unionists and suspected communists, Pinochet’s enemies, celebrated the news Rivas would be prosecuted for the alleged kidnappings.

But the nanny was not extradited over Christmas as they hoped.

Instead, The Daily Telegraph can reveal, her lawyers have applied for the High Court to halt the extradition.

Adriana Rivas as a young woman with General Manuel Contreras, Chile’s intelligence chief during Pinochet’s military dictatorship.

Her solicitor, Peter Tsintilas, said the Federal Court judges “failed” to see Chile was running a

“tainted” extradition request.

Chile’s case, Mr Tsintilas said in court documents, is designed to create a “retrospective criminal prosecution” that ignores Chile’s own amnesty laws.

Rivas had effectively been “pardoned”, her lawyer argues, and Chile had revealed it had a “political motivation” in its case against the nanny.

The case against Rivas is “repugnant”, Mr Tsintilas said, and a breach of the principles of the law.

The Republic of Chile, in a response to the High Court challenge, said “there is no question” that Rivas’ alleged crimes of kidnapping existed when DINA snatched its victims.

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

The High Court chooses whether it will hear a case or not and Chile wants the court to refuse Rivas saying there was “no plausible error” in her last appeal.

Francisco Ugas, a lawyer working on behalf of the families of the missing seven Chileans, says Australian courts have rightly concluded the nanny has a case to answer for in her home country and there was no error in the decision to extradite her.

Mr Ugas said there is “nothing new” in Rivas’ High Court documents that would lead the most powerful court in Australia to overrule the “consistent” extradition rulings against Rivas.

“We are happy to learn that the Rivas Application does not contain anything new and trust that she will be extradited to Chile this year,” Maria Estela Ortiz, the daughter of one of Rivas’ alleged victims Fernando Ortiz, told The Daily Telegraph.

Rivas during an interview with SBS in 2013. Picture: SBS News

Rivas denies she knew anything about what happened in the DINA headquarters and her lawyers say Chile has not spelled out her role in the organisation.

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

“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 dossier reads.

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

DINA’s detainees were 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.

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

Once the interrogations were over the prisoners were 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 maintains her innocence.