During the exclusive interview with SBS Spanish's Florencia Melgar, Ms Rivas denied the allegations against her but confessed to escaping from Chile, information which later triggered a historic extradition request in Australia.
On February 19, 2019, Australian police arrested Ms Rivas, a citizen with dual Chilean and Australian nationality wanted in Chile for aggravated kidnapping crimes, allegedly committed in the 1970s during the military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet.
The arrest followed an extradition request from Chile's prosecutor's office and after the publication of the exclusive interview with SBS Spanish, in which Ms Rivas described in detail to Ms Melgar how she escaped from Chile by illegally crossing the Andes mountain range to Argentina, where she subsequently boarded a plane bound for Australia.
Ms Rivas worked for Chile's feared National Intelligence Directorate (DINA) during the Pinochet dictatorship, between 1973 and 1977.
Within that period, she was secretary to Alejandro Burgos, assistant to Manuel Contreras, DINA director and second-in-charge for General Pinochet.
In Chile, she was accused of having been part of the Lautaro Brigade, an "elite squad" that operated in the Simón Bolívar barracks, considered a centre of extermination and torture.
Although Ms Rivas said in the interview that she had not participated in illegal activities, she did justify the use of torture and said that "it is the only way to break people."
Adriana Rivas with Manuel Contreras, the head of DINA. Source: SBS
"Everyone knew there was torture, it was an open secret, everywhere it was known," she said.
"Everybody knew they had to do that and break people somehow because communists are impenetrable.
"It was necessary, just as the Nazis used it, and as in the United States, everyone does. It's the only way to break people, because psychologically there is no method."
During the interview, Ms Rivas explained that her role at DINA focused on personal security agent duties and called that time working at the organisation "the best years of my youth."
"When I arrived at DINA it was another world for me: clothes, we were dressed from head to toe four times a year," she explained.
"Someone middle class like me, with a middle education, do you think I would have had the opportunity to go to dinner at the embassies in Chile? Or riding in a limousine from here to there? The best hotels in Chile? To be in Portillo for a week, with everything paid, to travel for free?
Adriana Rivas ID in the DINAR, January 1978 Source: Supplied
"I do not regret having worked there because it was a chance to live, to survive," concluded the former agent, who also recounted in the interview with pride how sometimes she was in charge of guarding the door of the hotel room where Pinochet was staying during his travels.
In January 1978, Ms Rivas left Chile to start a new life in Australia through a spouse visa.
Adriana Rivas is photographed while working as personal security of high ranking officials of the Pinochet dictatorship Source: Supplied
Since her arrival in Australia in 1978, she has worked as a nanny and a cleaner.
On a trip she made to Chile in 2006, while visiting her relatives, Ms Rivas was arrested and accused of being involved in the kidnapping and disappearance of seven people: Fernando Ortiz, Fernando Navarro, Lincoyán Berrios, Horacio Cepeda, Héctor Veliz, Reinalda Pereira and Víctor Díaz, secretary of the Communist Party at the time.
They are known as Conference cases. During the judicial investigation in Chile, she was released on bail and, in 2010, left the country illegally to reside again in Australia.
Ms Rivas has always pleaded not guilty to the charges against her, but in the interview with Melgar on August 28, 2013, the former DINA agent explained in detail how she escaped Chilean justice and returned to Australia illegally, helped by friends who organised and paid for the trip.
Adriana Rivas during her time working for DINA. Source: Supplied
"I more or less knew how to leave, but I didn't have the money," she explained in the interview and said that a family friend "...who I had known since I was a child" and whom she met on the street, lent her the money to leave the country, about $4,500 Australian dollars (5 million pesos). "All things came together with me... everything came out, as they say in Chile, through a tube," she said.Ms Rivas said she met the friend in his office who told her: "I can take you out of the country."
"They passed me to Mendoza, from Mendoza I went to Buenos Aires, in Buenos Aires I bought the ticket [to Australia], all on the same day, and I embarked," she said.
Ms Rivas settled back in Sydney in a housing commission apartment block in Bondi. From then on she lived as a fugitive from Chilean justice and continued to work as a nanny and cleaner.
The long judicial process in Australia
In January 2014, the Australian Foreign Office received an extradition request from Chile. It took Australia five years to initiate the judicial assessment until it accepted the extradition request in 2019. In February of that year, Ms Rivas was arrested in Sydney and since then, she through her lawyers have launched a string of appeals against her arrest and extradition.
For more than three years, different judicial bodies, including judges and magistrates of the Local Court of New South Wales and the Federal Court, have successively rejected the arguments against her extradition and decreed that the Chilean is extraditable.
The arguments most repeated by her lawyers alluded to the fact that, although Ms Rivas worked in the Simón Bolívar barracks, in charge of the director of the secret police of the DINA, Manuel Contreras, she was unaware of the activities that took place in those facilities.
They also said that the material presented by Chile in the extradition request "...is insufficient and does not prove that the DINA was an illegal group," and that in the material "...there is no clear statement that [Ms Rivas] was officially present when these people were detained" so they asked that the extradition be invalidated.
Relatives of Chile's missing gather at the Federal Court of Australia. Source: Supplied
They also argued that "...the DINA was a government office created by the law of that time. It was the law created by the 'Junta'."
The judges in Australia insisted that these matters must be considered by the Chilean justice system and that the extradition request and its reasons are in accordance with the extradition treaty between the two countries.
Adriana Rivas Source: Facebook
Finally, on May 9, 2022, the High Court of Australia issued a "certificate of abandonment" by which the last process by which Pinochet's former agent tried to avoid extradition was undone.
Adriana Rivas during an interview with SBS Spanish reporter Florencia Melgar in 2013. Source: SBS Spanish
An earlier extradition process, the case of Dragan Vasiljković, a former Serbian paramilitary leader who was extradited to Croatia in 2015, took nine years to process after his arrest in Perth.
Once extradited, Chilean courts will determine how much Ms Rivas knew about the crimes she is charged with and to what extent she was involved.
In 2017, Chilean documentary filmmaker Lisette Orozco, Adriana Rivas' niece, premiered the film "El Pacto de Adriana" where she shares her experience investigating the past of her aunt, someone she loved so much as a child.
Chilean intelligence officials in Australia
The fact that Ms Rivas has been in Australia since February 1978 might not be a coincidence. Australian journalist and author Mark Aarons suggests in his book "War Criminals Welcome" that there may be hundreds of war criminals living in secret in Australia since World War II.
Mr Aarons said the 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 "refuge" in Australia, Mr Aarons added, were guilty of "torture and summary executions."
More tellingly, he argued that several of those individuals were brought to Australia "as intelligence assets by our intelligence services and resettled here for the purposes of ongoing intelligence operations by our own services."
Journalist Florencia Melgar was working on a journalistic project about Australia's involvement in the 1973 coup d'état in Chile, "".
In her investigation she discovered the existence in Sydney of a woman fugitive from Chilean justice and accused of being involved in the kidnapping and disappearance of seven people during the dictatorship, which turned out to be Ms Rivas.
Ms Melgar told SBS Spanish that she knew about seven other Chileans in a situation similar to Ms Rivas."Let all people who committed crimes, or alleged crimes, face the law in the same way," Ms Melgar said.
Ms Rivas's immigration documentation for Australia. Source: NAA Archives
"Adriana is one in many [cases], the rest should go through the same process."It's not an agenda against Adriana Rivas."
Dr Clinton Fernandes, Professor of Political and International Studies at the University of New South Wales, and lawyer Ian Latham have worked together for more than a decade on several cases that have successfully declassified a number of historical documents relating to Australian intelligence operations overseas.
Since the 1970s, evidence has been published indicating that Australian spies participated in Pinochet's coup.
Australian intelligence officers are thought to have assisted the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in undermining the elected government of Chilean President Salvador Allende however, official Australian intelligence documents surrounding Pinochet's coup have never been released.
"Australia is one of the countries that has the highest level of secrecy of state information," Ms Melgar said.
"You can make an order, but anything that can be argued to be against national security may never declassify it," she said.
She also emphasised the importance of conducting investigative journalism to bring these issues to light.
"When we start measuring the real impact our research has on society, that's when we're going to make the cultural shift and there's going to start to be more resources for investigative journalism," she said.
The judicial history of the Rivas case
1973 - 1977: Adriana Rivas was working for the National Intelligence Directorate of Chile, DINA. During that period she was secretary to Alejandro Burgos, assistant to Manuel Contreras, second in charge to General Pinochet.
1978: Rivas leaves Chile to start a new life in Australia through a conjugal visa.
2007: Rivas is arrested in Chile during a visit to her family, and is accused of the aggravated kidnapping of Víctor Díaz, Fernando Ortiz, Fernando Navarro, Lincoyán Berrios, Horacio Cepeda, Héctor Veliz and Reinalda Pereira.
2010: She escapes Chile illegally while on parole and returns to Australia to settle in a low-income apartment block in the Bondi neighbourhood.
2013: Rivas grants an interview to SBS Spanish journalist, Florencia Melgar, in which she explains how she escaped from Chile across the border with Argentina, and where she defended the use of torture. Interpol issues an international arrest warrant against Rivas.
2014: The Supreme Court of Justice of Chile requests her extradition.
February 2019: Rivas is arrested in Sydney.
June 2019: Magistrate Margaret Quinn of the local New South Wales Court rejects Rivas' first request to grant her bail.
November 2019: Federal Court Judge Wendy Abraham rejects Rivas' appeal requesting release, and keeps her in behind bars.
April 2020: Rivas files a third request for bail in the local court of New South Wales, claiming health issues and the risk of contracting COVID-19 in prison.
May 2020: Magistrate Robert Williams, of the Local Court of New South Wales, denies bail. This third refusal meant Rivas had to front her extradition hearings while in prison.
June 2020: Rivas' extradition hearing is held at the local New South Wales Court with Judge Philip Stewart.
October 2020: After four months of deliberation, Judge Stewart gives the green light for Rivas to be surrendered to Chile.
December 2020: Rivas appeals to the Federal Court of Australia calling for the annulment of Judge Stewart's ruling and her release.
April 2021: The hearing is held in the Federal Court, in which Rivas presents her case against extradition.
June 2021: After almost two months of deliberations, Judge Wendy Abraham of the Federal Court of New South Wales rejects the appeal by which Rivas tried to avoid her extradition.
July 2021: Rivas presents a second appeal to the full bench of the Federal Court of Australia, hoping to throw out Judge Abraham's ruling.
November 18, 2021: The hearing is held in the Federal Court of Australia in a plenary session, made up of three judges, on Rivas' appeal.
November 24, 2021: After six days of deliberations, the full bench of the Federal Court rejects Rivas' appeal and supports Judge Abraham's ruling to be handed over to the Chilean justice system.
10 May 2022: Adriana Rivas fails in her latest attempt to avoid extradition to Chile before the Australian Supreme Court (High Court), which issued a "certificate of abandonment" of the request for special authorisation to appeal.
Listen to the original interview with Adriana Rivas.
Finally, on May 9, 2022, the High Court of Australia issued a "certificate of abandonment" by which the last process by which Pinochet's former agent tried to avoid extradition was undone.
