Bondi nanny Adriana Rivas loses Chile extradition fight

A court has found alleged torturer and kidnapper Adriana Rivas is eligible for extradition to Chile, where prosecutors claim she was part of Pinochet’s feared secret police.

Bondi nanny Adriana Rivas is eligible for extradition to her native Chile where she is accused of kidnapping, torturing and vanishing the political enemies of a dictator decades ago.

Family of her alleged victims are “elated”.

The Federal Court, on Thursday, refused to overturn a decision by a Local Court magistrate that Rivas was eligible for extradition to Chile.

Rivas is wanted in Chile where prosecutors claim she was part of Augusto Pinochet’s feared secret police agency – DINA.

Chile claims Rivas helped snatch seven members of the communist movement off street corners in the mid 1970s before they were “disappeared” in the DINA’s shadowy headquarters in Santiago.

Rivas, in her late 60s, has been protesting her innocence since she was arrested at her Bondi home on a warrant in February 2019.

Adriana Rivas is alleged to have been “an active part” of DINA and her operative group carried out the detentions, tortures, homicides and disappearances.

She was found eligible for extradition by a magistrate in October 2020 but appealed to the Federal Court.

Justice Wendy Abraham, on Thursday, found no error in the Magistrate’s decision meaning Rivas is almost out of legal avenues to halt the extradition process.

“I have spoken to the families and they are elated,” lawyer Adriana Navarro told The Daily Telegraph.

“They kept asking ‘is it true – will she be extradited?’ I have told them we believe so but she will appeal again.”

Rivas’ legal team argued Chile had used “legal fictions” to override their own treaties and amnesty laws so they could prosecute people like Rivas for historical allegations.

Judge Abraham, however, said Chile’s Supreme Court did not recognise amnesty laws for crimes against humanity – and that included the kidnapping accusations levelled against Rivas.

Rivas’ lawyers have repeatedly tried to reframe the allegations saying there was no kidnapping – just arrests by state agents. She denied being an active member of DINA’s Lautaro Brigade.

Former Chilean dictator General Augusto Pinochet pictured in 1999.

But Chile’s Interior Ministry, in a document, said the brigade carried out “repressive acts” against the Community Party including by detaining members and interrogating them in their clandestine headquarters.

Inside the small compound known as Simon Bolivar Headquarters, the document says, victims were physically and psychologically coerced to gain information about the Community Party with a final goal “to kill them and made their bodies disappear”.

“This Brigade was known for the brutality of the crimes perpetrated by its agents,” the document reads.

“It was composed of men and women, with the depositions of this Brigade’s members having established that all of them, without exception, performed operational duties.”

Other prosecuted DINA agents have identified Rivas as one of their own, the documents state.

Rivas maintains her innocence insisting she only performed secretarial duties in the DINA.

The ministry said the political prisoners were strapped to electrified metal bed frames, injected with unknown fatal substances and smothered with plastic bags.

Medical doctors would check to ensure the detainees could endure more torture, the documents say.

Once they succumbed to their injures a welding torch was used to burn off their fingerprints and faces in the bottom of an empty swimming pool.

They were put in sacks, tied to railway beams and thrown into the ocean by air force helicopters, the ministry claims.

The bodies of the missing have never been found with Chilean prosecutors suggesting some were strapped to steel beams and thrown from helicopters into the ocean.

That final step may have made it harder for Rivas to fight her extradition.

Justice Abraham noted there is no time limit for prosecutions in Chile if the bodies of victims have not been recovered.

“People have waited years for this,” Ms Navarro said.

The ministry’s documents allege Rivas was “an active part” of DINA and her operative group carried out the detentions, tortures, homicides and disappearances.

Chile claims six of the seven abductions allegedly involving Rivas took place within just a few days in December 1976.

The final alleged kidnapping in that period was a pregnant 29-year-old woman named Reinalda Del Carmen Pereira Plaza.

“(She was) a medical technician and member of the Communist Party, who at the time was pregnant, was arrested by [DINA] agents travelling in two cars, forcibly introduced into one of the cars and taken to [the Simón Bolívar Headquarters]. There, she was interrogated under coercion and was later made disappear,” the documents state.