Sitting Across from History

Following the interview, Chile’s government requested her extradition, a request that took five years of back-and-forth paperwork to meet Australia’s legal extradition requirements. It was February 2019 when Adriana Rivas was arrested in Sydney, to prevent her from fleeing again, forty years after she had first arrived in Australia in 1978.

1978 now feels symbolically crowded with beginnings and contradictions. It was the year Rivas started a new life in Australia, carrying a baby boy in her womb when she arrived in February. 1978, the year I was born, only three months before Rivas gave birth. Three lives beginning in parallel, across continents and circumstances, unknowingly bound by histories that would only surface decades later.

As the daughter of a colonel from Uruguay, a neighbouring dictatorship to Chile, I found myself sitting across from Rivas 35 years later to interview her. Five years after the interview, I found myself sitting across from her son, in a private room in the Court of her first extradition hearing. Both of us are the same age, both children of parents who served in the dictatorships of our respective countries, now meeting in an Australian courtroom, 13,000 km from South America.

What struck me the most about Rivas’ son was not denial in a deliberate sense, but something more human and more complicated: a deep, unshakable belief in his mother’s goodness. To him, she could not possibly have committed the acts she was accused of because the woman he knew was kind, present, and loving. Filial loyalty is powerful and probably instinctive. But it raises an unsettling question: at what point does loyalty to family begin to overshadow accountability to humanity?

Because this is not about minor wrongdoing or moral ambiguity; these histories involve human rights violations, which demand accountability beyond personal allegiance. Every perpetrator, after all, belongs to someone. They are parents, children, siblings. If love alone were enough to absolve, then accountability would collapse entirely. The dignity of human existence must stand above that instinct to protect our own. Expecting truth, acknowledgment, and responsibility is not a betrayal of family. I like to believe that it’s a deeper form of ethical loyalty to the world we share.

This tension is explored in the intimate documentary “Adriana’s Pact”, the debut film of Lisette Orozco, Rivas’ niece, who embodies that very intersection. She stands between worlds: between family love and historical truth, between inherited silence and the need for accountability. I realised Lisette was going through this process as she was producing the documentary while I was producing her auntie’s interview. As the seed of unavoidable facts and the need for truth grew inside Lisette, the film’s production took a dramatic turn from its original version.

Historical truth is the shared space where people like Lisette and I stand, but where Rivas’ son could not enter, revealing the different ways these legacies are carried. A reality I deeply understand, as it mirrors my own family back in South America. It’s in these encounters that history stops being abstract and becomes personal, where memory, identity, and responsibility collide, asking each of us what we are willing to see and what we are willing to carry forward.

This tension has given birth to “Historias Desobedientes” (Disobedient Stories), a human rights movement in Latin America made up of children and relatives of perpetrators of military dictatorships who publicly and actively support truth, justice, and memory. Separately, but non coincidentally, both Lisette and I found ourselves connected to the Disobedient Stories movement. It’s a refusal to continue perpetuating cycles of denial; not to inherit guilt, but to confront it, to stop the gaslighting of victims, and to insist that accountability, as the backbone of justice, cannot be selective.

It’s precisely this intersection of lived experience and professional rigor that strengthens my work, rather than compromises it. But in an Anglo-centric environment, where Latin America is often filtered through a United States lens and reduced to distant, fragmented narratives, this complexity risks simplification. I had to tread carefully so that what I know does not overwhelm what can be heard. I had to create a narrative that’s legible and engaging for an Australian audience, without watering down the relevant facts that matter the most.

When I zoom out, I realise that the intersection of investigative journalism across borders, community memory, lived experience, and a nuanced understanding of Latin American history and the Cold War gave me access to Rivas, a woman few expected would ever be found, let alone speak.

So many people have asked me… Why her? How did you find her? Were you scared? How did you convince her? Did you feel at risk? The questions went on… I appreciate the public’s curiosity and I’ll share as much as is possible when the time is right.

When I’m asked how I feel about Rivas being detained or if I’m looking forward to her extradition, I believe that the question needs to be reframed to match the purpose of our work. Investigative journalism is not about delivering justice or punishment, but to reveal significant facts and connections that were hidden. The deeper the investigation, the bigger the truth, and the greater the potential impact.

Rivas' story is only a fragment of the story, an example of a life choice where individuals agree to serve illegitimate and unlawful systems in exchange for privilege, power, and personal benefit. A choice millions have made throughout history and continue to make. Agreeing to work for the intelligence services of the Pinochet dictatorship meant being part of a regime that perpetrated crimes against humanity. Blinded by access to luxury and power, Rivas had a profound admiration for Manuel Contreras, who died in jail, serving 505 years for human rights violations.

It’s not about justifying, excusing, or accusing Rivas, but about seeing her in the broader picture, so that her case does not contribute to the invisibilisation of the institutions and many other individuals who profited from the same regime. A system that enabled Rivas to exist and needed the Rivas of the world to function, that relied on those who were so thirsty for the privilege that comes with proximity to power that they would promise loyalty and silence.

Always, under the disguise of acting in the public interest and national security, to protect the nation from foreign powers deemed evil. Unchallenged narratives, unaccountable behaviour. The Rivas of the world made choices, and those choices had consequences. But they did not act alone, and they did not create the system they served.

The story also exposes the institutional responsibility of Australia, which opened its doors to individuals connected to the Chilean dictatorship. For many Chileans who had found refuge in Australia, discovering that those accused of torture and forced disappearances were living within the same community in Australia, was a breach of trust. This investigation has also revealed that ASIO was surveilling members of that community in Australia as early as 1974, which has deepened their sense of injustice and strengthened expectations of an explanation from Australian authorities. Where does Australia draw the line between assisting allies and safeguarding democracy? How transparent is the system in examining these purposes, and who decides when national security becomes complicity?

It’s a story that intertwines at least three others: the violence of Latin American dictatorships during the Cold War; the life of a Chilean intelligence agent who built a quiet life in Australia; and my own journey as an investigative journalist: born into a dictatorship in the nearby Uruguay, shaped by its silences, and later drawn across continents, following their traces in Australia, and discovering this country’s responsibility in the 1973 CIA-sponsored Chilean coup.

In 2009 a jailed Uruguayan intelligence officer told me, “Ask the Australians what they did in Chile.” That question stayed with me, becoming the thread that would unravel an overlooked chapter of Cold War history. Years later, now living in Sydney, the question was still resonating in my head. It led me to discover how the Australian Secret Intelligence Service (ASIS) had secretly assisted the CIA in destabilising and overthrowing the Chilean democratically elected government of Salvador Allende. It also led me to dig into the DINA agents who had fled to Australia and were living here, hidden in plain sight. One of them was Adriana Rivas.

The story moves from a Uruguayan prison to the Australian National Archives, from Facebook messages to a housing commissioning living room in Bondi, where the past and present collide. So many things went wrong the 24 hours before the interview with Rivas, but every single operational challenge was met with an immediate solution. It was meant to be. After an eventful setup, we were finally ready to start the interview… I looked at her. She looked back at me. And I realised in that instant that I was not just interviewing Adriana Rivas. I was sitting across from history. And it was about to speak.