Maria Oyanedel Piña remembers her aunt as she was the day she disappeared.
Reinalda de Carmen Pereira Plaza had flowing brown hair, green eyes and a “wonderful smile”, her young relative says. She played guitar and flew kites, she was known to give away her own shoes to those who had none.
Pereira was a medical technician, but she was also a member of Chile’s Communist party, a group politically opposed to the military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet, and ruthlessly pursued by his secret police force, the National Intelligence Directorate, known by its Spanish acronym, the DINA.
Sometime after 4pm on the afternoon of 15 December 1976, in the Nunoa district of Santiago, Pereira, then 29, was grabbed off the street by DINA agents and forced into a car.
She was taken to a secret extermination centre in the Chilean capital. There, she was interrogated, tortured, and, in the words of a Chilean court judgment, “made disappear”.
Pereira was six months pregnant with her first child.
Her ultimate fate, along with that of her unborn child, is unknown.
“None of us has ever got used to her absence,” Piña tells the Guardian. Her family, she says, was ruptured by her Aunt’s disappearance and never repaired.
“Life for us never returned to normal, we were never the same again. She was not there, we missed her, and continue to miss her.”
Four decades later, and half a world away, Piña may be a step closer to the justice she seeks.
A retired nanny from Sydney’s Bondi
On Thursday, in a court in Sydney, Australia, a judge will rule whether a retired nanny from the beachside suburb of Bondi, Adriana Rivas, should be extradited to Chile to face charges related to the disappearance of Pereira and six other members of the Communist party, including its leader Victor Diaz.
Rivas, who first came to Australia from Chile in 1978, has steadfastly maintained her innocence. She insists she knew nothing of what was occurring at her place of work, the Simon Bolivar Centre, a secretive compound later discovered to be the DINA’s interrogation, torture and extermination site, on the eastern outskirts of the Chilean capital.
Uncontested is that Rivas was secretary to Manuel Contreras, the head of Pinochet’s DINA, a man later sentenced to 289 years in prison for kidnapping, torture and murder. Rivas says her role was purely administrative.
An Australian magistrate has already ruled there is sufficient evidence for her to be extradited to face trial in Chile. On Thursday, the judgment on her appeal will be handed down.
Secretive and brutal Lautaro Brigade
The central allegation against Rivas, according to Chilean court documents, is that she worked as an “agent” of the DINA’s secretive “Lautaro Brigade”, after taking a course in intelligence.
The Lautaro Brigade’s mission was simple: to crush Chile’s Communist party, and extinguish it as a threat to the junta’s rule.
A minute from Chile’s interior ministry describes the treatment of Communist party members at the Simon Bolivar headquarters.
“They were interrogated under physical and psychological coercion with the purpose of getting information about the structure and other members of the party, to kill them and make their bodies disappear.
“This Brigade was known for the brutality of the crimes perpetrated by its agents. 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.”
The Simon Bolivar Centre was a small compound: a handful of rooms, including two dressing rooms commandeered for interrogations and a disused swimming pool used to disfigure the bodies of those murdered.
The Chilean police report alleges that Rivas was a member of the Lautaro Brigade involved in the commission of “forced entries, detention, interrogations and application of torture”.
Chile’s interior ministry told the court: “It is important to emphasise the cruelty of the crimes committed.
“Prisoners were left in dungeons under very poor health conditions; they were interrogated under torture by applying electric current in different parts of the body. The premises were even used to develop advanced killing techniques, such as the preparation of sarin gas.”
The documents state the fingers and faces of dead bodies were burnt with a welding torch before being thrown into the ocean.
Evidence of ‘the Little Waiter’
Rivas first came to Australia in 1978, settling in Sydney’s eastern suburbs.
She established herself quickly among the city’s small Chilean diaspora. Prominent at a local suburban football club, and a regular weekend patron at a Chilean-run bakery, she took jobs as a nanny and a cleaner in Sydney’s beachside suburbs.
Back in Chile, even as the years since the fall of Pinochet’s dictatorship stretched to decades, a reckoning of that time was building.
In 2006, Rivas returned, as she had regularly, to Chile to visit family.
But this time, she was arrested for questioning in connection to her work for DINA.
Held in custody for three months, she was eventually released on bail under strict conditions and instructed not to leave the country.
In 2007, while Rivas was living in Chile on bail, a man called Jorgelino Vergara was arrested and charged with the murder of Diaz, the Communist party leader.
In 2010, Vergara, known as ‘The Little Waiter’, agreed to tell all he had seen inside the extermination centre.
According to his evidence, as a teenager, he had been hired as a tea boy inside the Simon Bolivar Centre, serving food and drinks to DINA agents, but also bringing food to the prisoners.
Vergara’s testimony would directly allege that Rivas participated in the torture of prisoners.
“She beat them with sticks, she kicked them, punched them and also applied an electric current to the political prisoners,” he told a television documentary.
Her task, too, was to help extract a final confession from those held. “Adriana Rivas’s role was also to move the recorder closer to the detainee.” Rivas has expressly denied these allegations and any involvement in torture and she has not been convicted of any crime.
Vergara’s testimony has ultimately led to the conviction of more than 70 DINA agents and officials of the Pinochet regime.
In the same year Vergara agreed to give evidence against the DINA, Rivas escaped over Chile’s land border into Argentina and flew back to Australia.
‘It was a job. It was a chance to survive’
In 2013, as part of a documentary series marking 40 years since Pinochet’s ascension to power in a coup, Rivas granted an interview to SBS.
She admitted she had worked at the Simon Bolivar Centre, but insisted she was not involved in interrogating detainees.
“Not guilty. Not guilty. If I ... look, I never had the opportunity to be where the detainees were. Never, understand? All my work was as a secretary or security. Nothing more.”
In the same interview, she confirmed the use of torture against opponents of the regime.
“Everyone knew they had to do that to the people in order to break them because Communists would not talk. It was necessary. The same as the Nazis did, you understand? A necessary part. And you think the US doesn’t do the same? Around the world they do the same. Around the world they do. Silenced underground, but they do it. This is the only way to break people.”
Rivas said she did not regret working for the DINA.
“That’s why I say the best years of my youth was when I lived in the DINA. I do not regret having worked there, because for me it was a job. It was a chance to survive. Understand?”
‘It leaves a scar in your soul’
The Sydney lawyer Adriana Navarro has led the legal bid to secure Rivas’s extradition to Chile. She said the impartial pursuit of justice remains critical, even after decades, for Chile being able to reconcile and heal from the dark years of the dictatorship.
“We are a society with laws that must be upheld and justice must be served,” she told the Guardian.
“If Adriana Rivas is innocent, if she was a simple young woman typing letters, she should be able to prove that in the court system in Chile.”
Navarro says family members of those disappeared still go to sites around Santiago where they think the remains of their loved ones might be found. Sometimes it is no more than a fragment or two of bone.
“But it is something. I know it sounds absurd after more than 40 years, but if you’ve lost someone you love in those horrendous circumstances, it leaves a scar in your soul. Some sort of justice, some sort of closure, acknowledgement, is needed.”
Pilar Aguilera, based in Melbourne, leads the National Campaign for Truth and Justice in Chile, Australia, and has been the local conduit back to grieving families in Chile, relaying the arcane machinations of the extradition process.
She says the Rivas case is “emblematic” of a broader push for justice and for reconciliation in Chile.
“We hope Adriana Rivas can be extradited back to Chile to face justice. This is almost like a test case, that this can happen, that justice will win in the end.”
Aguilera stresses Rivas’s extradition is not an establishment of her guilt or innocence, but would simply ensure she would be made to answer the allegations against her.
Aguilera says her organisation’s role has been to highlight the crimes of the Pinochet era, and to push for justice for the victims and their family members left behind.
“These families have never had answers.”
‘Lives that were given for their ideals’
Nearly five decades after Pinochet’s brutal coup, an elected citizens’ assembly in Chile is about to write a new constitution for the country.
In Santiago, Piña sees hope, a new chapter, in finally vanquishing the retrograde laws of the Pinochet era.
Similarly, for her and her family, the extradition of Rivas to face the authorities in Chile will mean some measure of justice, and a sense of closure.
“Our family members did not get to live to be old, they did not get to be parents … they were disappeared. We demand justice. We cannot forgive or forget.”
Perhaps above all, Piña wants to know what happened to her “beautiful, charismatic” aunt, and to know where her body was taken.
“The lives of many mothers and children were ended by the dictatorship but they were lives that were given for their ideals. We have not forgotten.”
