Facing the Past

This Foreign Correspondent investigation follows the search for justice for victims of Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship from the secret detention and extermination centres of Santiago all the way to suburban Sydney. I worked on the documentary as a researcher, after ABC approached me following my original SBS investigation into former Chilean secret police agent Adriana Rivas and the unresolved connections between Chile’s dictatorship and Australia.

At the heart of the documentary is Simón Bolívar, a clandestine extermination centre whose existence remained largely hidden for decades. One of the crucial witnesses was Jorgelino Vergara, known as El Mocito — “The Little Waiter” — who entered the world of Chile’s secret police as a teenager and witnessed kidnapping, torture and murder. His eventual testimony helped expose what had happened inside Simón Bolívar and contributed to dozens of arrests and convictions, while opening new lines of investigation into people alleged to have participated in the crimes who were now living outside Chile.

The documentary tells this history through the deeply personal story of Fernando Ortiz, a university professor and senior Communist Party figure abducted from a Santiago street in December 1976. His family never saw him alive again. Evidence subsequently established that Ortiz was taken to Simón Bolívar, brutally tortured and killed by lethal injection. His remains were secretly disposed of, and decades later his daughters joined other families searching an abandoned mine where only tiny bone fragments could eventually be recovered and identified.

That history leads directly to Australia. Witness testimony placed Adriana Rivas, a former member of Pinochet’s feared secret police, DINA, at Simón Bolívar and alleged her involvement in the treatment of political prisoners. Chilean prosecutors accused Rivas of seven counts of aggravated kidnapping involving Fernando Ortiz and six other disappeared prisoners, including Reinalda Pereira, who was six months pregnant. Chile’s Supreme Court approved a formal request seeking Rivas extradition from Australia to face proceedings in Chile.

The Australian part of the story builds on the reporting I had begun at SBS. In 2013, I had located and interviewed Rivas in Sydney, obtaining an extraordinary on-camera account in which she denied involvement in kidnapping but spoke openly about her years in DINA and defended the use of torture against political opponents. The ABC documentary incorporates material from that original SBS interview before Foreign Correspondent attempts to approach Rivas itself at her home in Sydney.

For me, this documentary represents an important continuation of investigative work, taking the investigation back to Chile, interviewing witnesses, victims’ families, prosecutors and lawyers, and connecting what happened inside a secret extermination centre during the dictatorship with the continuing pursuit of accountability in Australia.

Watch the documentary on ABC 

Simon Bolivar barracksSimon Bolivar barracks