Chilean national Adriana Rivas most recently worked with children as a nanny in Sydney. But her past life in Chile tells a much darker story.
As The Sydney Morning Herald reports, Rivas is wanted for her alleged involvement in kidnapping, torture and murder while she was working as an agent of General Augusto Pinochet’s secret police in Chile.
Rivas served as the assistant to the head of the Dirección de Inteligenca Nacional (DINA) secret police. She has been charged with seven counts of “aggravated kidnapping”.
Among the charges, Rivas is wanted for her alleged role in the murder of a Communist Party leader who was reportedly suffocated in a secret prison and dumped in the ocean in 1976, SBS reports.
Speaking to SBS in 2014, Rivas said she was innocent of charges against her. However, she defended the use of torture during the Pinochet-era as “necessary”.
“Everyone knew they had to do that to somehow break people´s silence…Let´s talk about the things the way they were. It was necessary,” she explained.
“I mean…[it was] the same as what the Nazis used, do you understand? It was necessary. And do you think that the U.S. does not do the same? The whole world does it. Silent, underground, but they do it. This is the only way to break the people. Because psychologically, there is no method. There isn´t an injection—like in the movies—to make you tell the truth. It doesn’t exist.
“So the only way to break people is this way. Because nobody is going to sit down and ask: ‘what did you do today?'”
Rivas was detained during a visit to Chile in 2006, but fled while on bail. The SMH reports that Rivas was last known to be living in a public housing unit in Bondi and is still believed to be in Sydney.
The federal government is now under pressure to grant a Chilean extradition request so Rivas can face charges.
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