40 Years are Nothing: History and memory of the 1973 coups d’état in Uruguay and Chile Edited by Pablo Leighton and Fernando López 40 Years are Nothing: History and memory of the 1973 coups d’état in Uruguay and Chile Edited by Pablo Leighton and Fernando López This book first published 2015 Cambridge Scholars Publishing Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2015 by Pablo Leighton, Fernando López and contributors All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-7642-9 ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-7642-1 CONTENTS Introduction ................................................................................................ ix Pablo Leighton and Fernando López Preface ...................................................................................................... xiii J Patrice McSherry Chapter One ................................................................................................. 1 Regional Cooperation and State Terrorism in South America Fernando López Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 17 On History and Memory: Some Reflections on the Process of Transitional Justice from the Experience of Uruguay (1985-2005) Pedro Teixeirense Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 33 The Gelman Case and the Legacy of Impunity in Uruguay Debbie Sharnak Chapter Four .............................................................................................. 57 The Celebration: Violence and Consent in the First Anniversary of the Chilean Coup Pablo Leighton Chapter Five .............................................................................................. 77 ASIS and ASIO in Chile: Transparency and Double Standards Four Decades after the Coup Florencia Melgar and Pablo Leighton Chapter Six ................................................................................................ 93 Politics of Memory and Human Rights in Chile: The Struggle for Memorials in the 21st Century Nicolás del Valle vi Contents Chapter Seven.......................................................................................... 111 Moving Memories: Marches Remembering and Embodying the Chilean and Uruguayan Dictatorships Yael Zaliasnik Contributors ............................................................................................. 125 CHAPTER FIVE ASIS AND ASIO IN CHILE: TRANSPARENCY AND DOUBLE STANDARDS FOUR DECADES AFTER THE COUP FLORENCIA MELGAR AND PABLO LEIGHTON On 4 June 2014, the Opposition Shadow Attorney-General, Labor Senator Mark Dreyfus, presented a petition to the Federal Parliament on behalf of the Chilean community in Australia. Around 600 Chilean expatriates, most of them Australian citizens, demanded the government approve the extradition request of former intelligence agent Adriana Rivas, who escaped from trial in Chile where she is accused of seven cases of torture and aggravated kidnapping and disappearance (Dreyfus 2014:56195621). This petition followed what started a year earlier when Adriana Rivas was found by investigative reporter Florencia Melgar living in one of Sydney’s housing commission buildings. The Special Broadcasting Services’ report of her declarations (see Melgar 2013a,c,d, 2014) triggered the reaction of human rights movements and political activists in Chile and Australia and the extradition request. These groups are manifestly against the presence of Chilean violators of human rights living in the same land where they, as refugees, were welcomed after Augusto Pinochet’s coup d’état in 1973. The fact that Adriana Rivas has been living for decades in Australia might not be a mere coincidence or plain misfortune. According to author Mark Aarons, there have been hundreds of war criminals hidden in Australia since 1945 (see 2001, ABC 2009). Aarons has said that the war criminals living in the country come from many places and organisations, including Chile’s DINA, the Directorate of National Intelligence, the dictatorship’s secret police between 1973 and 1977. These security officers who found “sanctuary” in Australia, Aarons added, are guilty of “torture and summary executions”. More tellingly, Aarons argued that a number of those people were brought to Australia “as intelligence assets 78 Chapter Five by our intelligence services and resettled here for purposes of ongoing intelligence operations by our own services” (in ABC 2003). The current presence of a former intelligence agent in Sydney might show another aspect of the practices of support of the Australian secret services to the same Chilean forces that unleashed the coup d’état and sustained a violent dictatorship. As ambiguously revealed in Australia during the years after the coup, the secret services of Australia worked in Chilean territory to undermine the democratic government of Salvador Allende (1970-1973). This chapter looks into how Australia’s involvement in Chile’s coup four decades ago remains under a cloak of secrecy, encouraged by the same secret services that seemed to have worked above government and parliament powers. Together with the contentious issue of transparency in today’s world, this four-decade old history is still prominent and continues to haunt thousands of Chilean-former refugees living in Australia and many others in Chile that were victims of DINA and other secret services. ASIS and ASIO in Chile Four decades ago, Chile’s democratic government headed by Allende was overthrown in a military coup led by General Augusto Pinochet. His regime executed some 2,300 people, imprisoned and tortured more than 38,000, and more than 1,000 victims are still missing (Comisión Rettig 1991, Comisión Valech 2004, 2011). The Chilean coup was not an isolated episode in Latin America. It was part of a series of military dictatorships that claimed to fight “the threat of communism”. At the same time, while many other military dictatorships were previously installed in the region, the year 1973 marks the beginning of particularly bloody governments, acting against broad sections of their own populations. This was also the beginning of a period called “the Condor years”, referring to secret alliances and cooperation between governments of South America, including Chile, Uruguay, Paraguay, Brazil, Argentina, Ecuador, Bolivia and Peru (Dinges, 2005). Through “Operation Condor”, these South American states shared intelligence and seized, exchanged, tortured and executed political opponents in one another’s territory (McSherry, 2005). The international outlooks of these military and fanatically anticommunist political forces—which seemed to overcome their traditional nationalism (see López, Chapter One)—went beyond South America. It is no secret today that in setting the stage for the 1973 coup, the United States (US) government, through the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), played a crucial role. More than 23,000 declassified documents ASIS and ASIO in Chile 79 from the White House, the CIA, the National Security Council and the Defense Intelligence Agency, among others, clearly reveal an instigation of the Chilean coup (see US Department of State 2000, Kornbluh, 2003). What is much less known is that the CIA had help from its counterpart in Australia, the Australian Secret Intelligence Service (ASIS), followed by an Australian Security and Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) mission in Santiago. Officially, ASIS’s “primary goal is to obtain and distribute secret intelligence…outside Australia”, while undertaking “counterintelligence” and engaging “other intelligence and security services overseas” (ASIS 2014). On the other hand, ASIO’s role is presented as internal, concerning “serious threats to Australia’s territorial and border integrity, sabotage, politically motivated violence, the promotion of communal violence, attacks on Australia’s defence system, and acts of foreign interference” (ASIO 2014). Significantly, both services played a role in the Chilean case. More than one source has alleged that Australia was involved in the Chilean coup, helping the CIA to destabilise Allende’s government (see Blum 2004, 245-246; Coxsedge, Coldicutt and Harant 1982, 82-85). In May 1977, former Labor Prime Minister Gough Whitlam confirmed the existence of this operation in the Australian Federal Parliament: “It has been written―and I cannot deny it―that when my Government took office Australian intelligence personnel were working as proxies of the CIA in destabilising the government of Chile” (in Toohey and Pinwill 1990, 141).1 In November 1970, the CIA asked ASIS for support and Australia agreed to send two operatives to Chile (Toohey and Pinwill 1990, 136). 1 Brian Toohey and William Pinwill’s book The story of The Australian Secret Intelligence Service was published in 1990 after the Australian government agreed on the version that was to be published. The book has a reliable record of Robert Hope’s report on Chile’s case, which summarises the findings of the Royal Commission on Security and Intelligence (1974-77). Nevertheless, the relevant information about the operation in Chile (Fifth report, volumes 1 and 2) is blackedout. The book contains an authors’ note: “This book has been subject to censorship by the government of the Commonwealth of Australia. After part of the unfinished manuscript fell into the government´s hands in November 1988, the Minister for Foreign Affairs and Trade took action in the Federal Court which effectively prevented the publication by us of any material about ASIS which had not been vetted by the government. While the concept of prior restraint is repugnant and contrary to the democratic right of freedom of expression, we had no choice but to accept the court´s decision and submit every word of the completed manuscript to Canberra. We then negotiated the final text with officials of ASIS and the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade” (Toohey and Pinwill 1990, xiii). 80 Chapter Five According to former ASIS director, Bill Robertson, the Australian intelligence station “in question”, referring to Chile, was opened in July 1971 during the Liberal government of William McMahon (Robertson 1975, 8). When the Chilean coup took place on 11 September 1973, Australian the station had been active for longer than a year. And by that time, Gough Whitlam and the Labor party were in power. American investigative journalist Seymour Hersh has described the involvement of Australia in the US operation in Chile after the CIA’s men and activities were closely monitored by Allende’s government. Hersh explained that the CIA then “turned to its allies […] By 1972 the Australians had agreed to monitor and control three agents on behalf of the CIA and to relay their information to Washington” (Hersh 1983, 295-296). According to Toohey and Pinwill, ASIS helped the CIA in Chile until 1973 and one of its senior officers left Santiago in July of that year “for cover reasons”, while an operational assistant stayed until October, a month after the coup (1990, 141). In parallel, ASIO intelligence agents remained behind according to multiple statements by the Labor and Immigration minister under Whitlam, Clyde Cameron, who openly recognised it in 1983. While it is still not perfectly clear what the ASIO mission was doing in Santiago, Cameron’s feelings about the operations in Chile have always been certain: I was appalled to think that my own department was involved in this sort of work and that our intelligence agents in Chile were acting as the hyphen, if you like, between the CIA, which weren’t able to operate in Chile at that time…and the Pinochet junta (in Wilkinson 1983). The uncertain nature of the work of the Australian spying agencies in Chile also has something to do with the elusive role of Labor Prime Minister Gough Whitlam at the time. The decision of the Liberal government of McMahon to approve the Australian operation in Chile and support the CIA was inherited by Whitlam. Even though it seems evident that the Prime Minister attempted to stop the ASIS operation in Chile, the timing and how the political decisions were made are not so. Robertson’s 1975 memorandum dealing with the termination of his appointment as Director of ASIS by Whitlam shows that one of the topics that caused frictions between him and the Prime Minister (see The Australian 2010) was ASIS’s operation in Chile. According to Robertson, Whitlam was informed of this operation in February 1973, but he did not want to stop it immediately as he worried about how the US might react. Because it seems Robertson foresaw that Whitlam was going to disagree with the ASIS and ASIO in Chile 81 ASIS operation in Chile, he prepared a document ordering the closure of the station and withdrawal of the staff, as he recalled in 2009 about his own dismissal by Whitlam: Mr Whitlam took the submission but declined to sign it at the time expressing a concern that our intelligence allies might react adversely. After a delay of several weeks the signed submission was returned […] the Prime Minister had “agonised over it” for some time. The order to cease operational activity… was sent to the ASIS station on 1st May [1973]. As there were a number of hostile intelligence services active in the area at that time…there was some delay in withdrawing the ASIS staff (Robertson 1975, 8). Whitlam has a different recollection. In his memoirs, he stated that he was notified in early 1973 and that the ASIS officials left in the first half of that year. The former Prime Minister has affirmed that in early 1973 Robertson informed him that there were two spies in Chile assisting the CIA and Whitlam thought they had no business there: A month later I asked him what had been done about them and he told me that they were still there. I…instructed him to tell the Americans to make alternative arrangements as soon as possible. This time he was able to tell me within a week that our men were no longer working for the Americans and would be returning home (Whitlam 1985:172–173). However, according to the official Royal Commission on Intelligence, the last ASIS agent did not leave Chile until October 1973 (in Toohey and Pinwill 1990, 141). And in that period, Allende’s government was destabilised and the coup took place. The intelligence services of Australia were present and active before and after the coup, when the new military government assumed power illegitimately. In sum, contrary to Whitlam´s instructions and memoirs, there were ASIS spies operating out of the Australian embassy in Chile, under the direct orders of the CIA, during the 1973 removal of a democratic government (Coxsedge, Coldicutt and Harant 1982, 24). Whitlam remembers that after Allende was overthrown he asked about the exact duties of the two ASIS operatives that he had previously discharged in Chile. He was told they had been collecting or buying information on the country’s economic situation from public servants and congressmen, whom they would meet in the suburbs of Santiago (Whitlam, 1985: 172–173). This might give another clue about the actions of Australian agents in Chile. Still, most of the available evidence until today shows that Australian secret intelligence was operating in Chile for 82 Chapter Five much longer after the coup through ASIO, a service that in principle operates within Australia. In this case, the role of Whitlam is even more ambiguous. Many official Prime Ministerial documents testify how Clyde Cameron put forward various requests to Whitlam to get rid of ASIO officers operating in Chile. In a letter to Whitlam of 27 November 1974, Cameron wrote that the assurances he had received from ASIO about one officer being in Chile for “only one occasion” since November 1972 and only during “three days” in July 1973, “does not convince me one iota. I would not expect ASIO to do other than deny any involvement with the CIA in the affair”. Thus, Cameron demanded of Whitlam that the two agents be “withdrawn forthwith”. He added: the present checking of migrant applicants rests heavily on links which ASIO establishes with foreign intelligence through the exchange of intelligence information. I believe that this activity is quite unacceptable…and probably a breach of the Crimes Act [...] I am certainly not going to allow the Department of Labor and Immigration to be used as cover for this sort of activity (in Department of the Prime Minister 1975). Cameron also wrote to the Attorney General, Senator Lionel Murphy, on 2 December 1974: “I am particularly disturbed to learn that ASIO agents have been posing as migration officers in South America and I am now convinced―though firm denials are to be expected―that the reports of ASIO collaboration with the CIA in bringing about the overthrow of the Allende Government, is very close to the mark”. The response by Whitlam was brief and vague: he decided there would be “no changes” until Justice Robert Hope’s general report on Australian secret intelligence services was finished. Cameron, in a follow-up letter to Whitlam of 5 February 1975, insisted that all ASIO officers from overseas should be withdrawn, not agreeing with the need to wait for Hope’s report. He specifically denounced that the making by ASIO of “political investigation[s]”, “dossiers” and “screening” on migrants and overseas born “would be not be tolerated in respect of persons born in Australia”. He vehemently concluded: The continued use of ASIO is, in my firm view, incompatible with the whole philosophy of the Australian Labor Party. Moreover, it violates every decent concept which is dear to a truly democratic society. It smacks too much of the Police State for the liking of decent Australians” (in Department of the Prime Minister 1975). ASIS and ASIO in Chile 83 In the end, his complaints with the Attorney General were fruitful. In same letter, Cameron informed he was pleased that Senator Murphy had finally given “an immediate recall of the two ASIO agents…posing as migration officers” in Chile, although 15 agents remained in other overseas posts (in Department of the Prime Minister 1975). In 1983, Cameron recalled the events: Imagine my amazement when…I received a letter from the Prime Minister saying that I was to take no further action in the matter, that I was not to withdraw ASIO agents even from Santiago in Chile and that nothing was to be done about it at all (in Wilkinson 1983). Equally determinant, Hope’s report, which was the excuse given in 1974 by Whitlam, would not be finished until 1977. The Chilean case became only a small part of that report and until today is heavily censored (see Hope 1977). From the scarce evidence available, it can be said that when ASIO agents were finally being recalled from Santiago in 1975, ASIO Director Peter Barbour sent a letter to Cameron, reminding him it was his own Immigration Department which in October 1970―the same month that Allende became president of Chile―asked for an intelligence officer for South America, who started operating in 1972. In February 1974, five months after the coup, ASIO informed that there were 19,000 migrant applications from Santiago (Department of the Prime Minister 1975), many of them presumably in danger of their lives. It follows that the most probable hypothesis for the actions of ASIS and ASIO in Chile under Allende was first the promotion of ‘brain drain’, the flight of human capital; in this case, the emigration of professionals and technicians to undermine the leftist government, as contended by Mártin-Montenegro (1994:63–66). Mártin-Montenegro also points to the fact that ASIO officials posed as migration agents in the embassy after the coup and the notably different numbers of Chilean migrants to Australia per era. The total number of migrants during Allende (around 4,800) surpassed the entire number (around 3,000) following the coup and until the end of the Whitlam administration in 1975 (Mártin-Montenegro 1994, 77-78), precisely when asylum was most needed. In July 2012, the director of ASIS, Nick Warner, said in a public speech: There have been a few times over the past 60 years when…ASIS and its operations have received widespread publicity in the Australian media. And mostly this has been when things have gone wrong [...] sometimes the fault of ASIS and sometimes not [...] there was publicity in 1977 about operations in Chile undertaken on behalf of our allies (Warner 2012). 84 Chapter Five This publicity has not been substantial enough to resolve the historical, political and moral consequences of the Australian intervention in Chilean affairs. John Pilger argues that in the beginning of the 1970s, ASIS and ASIO’s power derived from the strong alliance with the US, exemplified with The Australia, New Zealand and United States Security Treaty of 1951 (ANZUS), which is still current (see US Department of State 2014). Pilger suggests that Australia’s secret pact of loyalty to foreign intelligence organisations was far reaching: “to many in the ASIO bureaucracy, ‘headquarters’ was not in Canberra but in Langley, Virginia, home of the CIA” (1992, 191). In the US, Victor Marchetti, former executive assistant of Deputy Director of the CIA, explained in 1983 that Australia should have evaluated better its participation in Chile if they were going to be so politically sensitive about being part of CIA’s mission to overthrow Allende. For that “kind of activity”, he said, there was “a miscalculation on the part of the Australian officers” (in Wilkinson 1983). Already in 1974, Whitlam spoke unmistakably to the United Nations General Assembly against these operations that use “unconstitutional, clandestine, corrupt methods, by assassination or terrorism” as a way to achieve economic or political change (in Coxsedge, Coldicutt and Harant 1982, 26). More directly, the official 1977 Royal Commission on Intelligence Activities Overseas might serve as the foundation of what the Australian intervention in Chile implied: “to conduct espionage against foreign countries [agents] must probably infringe the laws of those countries [...] espionage is illegal…deceptive, covert, underhand” (Hope 1977). Transparency and accountability four decades later On 9 October 1974, Ian Frykberg published for the first time the link between the Chilean coup and Australia, while reporting on Whitlam’s official visit to the US. In his article “Australia Spied In Chile”, he wrote Two former intelligence operatives…said…they had no doubt that the Australian mission in Chile assisted the Central Intelligence Agency in its operations against the Allende government [...] the Australian agents in Chile probably would have included acting as the conduct for money passing from the CIA to newspapers and individuals and leaking propaganda information to newspapermen and other influential people (Frykberg 1974). The then editor of the Sydney Morning Herald, Brian Johns, assigned young journalist Hamish McDonald to investigate the details of this ASIS and ASIO in Chile 85 operation in Chile. McDonald remembers that by that time he had already identified the Australian chief officer operating in Chile: I was told by our managing editor, Graham Wilkinson, that the deputy head of ASIS had rang out and said ‘Please, call it off, this is not in the national interest’ [...] I did call the ambassador who had been in Santiago at that time…Deschamps, and asked him if he had any comment on the allegations and his reply was simply ‘What on earth do you expect me to say’ (in Melgar, personal interviews, 2013). The Sydney Morning Herald agreed to cease the investigations. Today, Professor Barry Carr from the Australian National University believes there is no hope that Australia will disclose any information about what happened in Chile in 1973 due to a culture of secrecy, which would be much more restrictive here than in the US: “I'm not really holding my breath over any Australian government whether it be Labor Party or the Coalition, ever telling us exactly what those ASIS agents were doing” (in Melgar 2013b). Even though the intervention started under Liberal Prime Minister McMahon, Labor leaders “have been painfully anxious” to not diminish the powers and secrecy of Australian intelligence services (Coxsedge, Coldicutt and Harant 1982, 235). Very recently, for example, it was under the Labor government of Kevin Rudd that one of the intelligence agencies, the Australian Signals Directorate, spied on the leaders of Indonesia (Brissenden 2013). In Australia, intelligence documents dated as far back as 40 years ago are excluded from the Freedom of Information Act (FOI). There are nine categories of exemptions under the FOI Act, including “documents affecting national security, defence or international relations” (OAIC 2014). Melgar’s recent investigation through various sources, including Chile’s Foreign Affairs official records, identified two of the ASIS officers working in Chile around the time of the coup (Ministerio RREE 1970-73). Nevertheless, due to strict laws controlling information relating to intelligence staff and operations, these names cannot be made public. According to the Intelligence Services Act (Commonwealth Consolidated Acts 2001) it is illegal in Australia to identify any current or former intelligence officer unless the heads of those services give explicit permission. At the time of writing this chapter, the Australian Senate with the support of both Labor and Liberal parties, extended the penalty for this offence from 1 to 10 years of imprisonment, together with other restrictions on reporting on intelligence matters, within a new law that gives more powers to these agencies (Woodley 2014). In the Chilean case, ASIS Director, Nick Warner, rejected Melgar’s formal request to 86 Chapter Five investigate these matters. Tim Begbie, Senior General Counsel of Dispute Resolution of the Australian Government Solicitor (Melgar, personal communications, 25 July 2013) warned Melgar that she risked legal prosecution if some of the information was published. Whereas the Australian Royal Commission on Intelligence concluded in 1977 that “espionage is illegal and the clandestine service’s job is to break those laws without being caught” (in Toohey and Pinwill 1990, 198), the Australian government protects the officials who are in charge of carrying out that illegal espionage, even after they have concluded their job, and after their deaths. The evident lack of transparency around this four-decade old Australian intervention in Chile is not only an issue when compared to the relative openness of the same country that has admitted its main role in the coup: the US. The exemption of Australia’s intelligence agencies from the FOI Act blocks the public knowledge of history and denies access to decisions made in Australians’ names. Likewise, this lack of transparency and accountability has had a real impact on the lives of thousands of Chilean victims of the dictatorship, the largest Latin American community in the country, who in their great majority have become Australian citizens. Chilean-Australians For several Chilean-Australians one of the most meaningful aspects of the revelations around Australia’s secret agencies’ intervention in Chile is the fact that it happened at least for a year under the Labor government of Gough Whitlam. For Chilean refugee Vladimir Barcelli, for example, “it sounds very strange that a country that helps you get out of the dictatorship has cooperated with the dictatorship. It is illogical”. Mariana Minguez, a former political prisoner in Chile, has expressed “shock” that this happened under Labor’s administration, which would be more surprising than Australia’s involvement in the coup. Victor Marillanca, a Chilean refugee who arrived in Australia in 1975, has expressed the same perplexity, given that he met during those years many Labor members of parliament and authorities, including Whitlam himself. Tellingly, Hermiña Vázquez, another Chilean refugee in Australia and a human rights activist, has expressed anger and even second thoughts about a country reputed for hosting Chilean exiles: “If I knew this, I never would have come to this country. But on the other hand I realise that despite that, I was received here very well [...] I feel a lot of conflict in my head” (in Melgar 2013c). Although Whitlam reacted just a few days after the 11 September 1973 coup recalling his ambassador in Chile, Noel Deschamps, Australia was ASIS and ASIO in Chile 87 among many Western countries that ended up recognising the new military government less than a month after the coup (Mártin-Montenegro 1994, 60-69), increasing its international legitimacy. As indicated earlier, the migration numbers that Australia offered to Chilean refugees during those years are another contradictory issue that remains obscure. Other evidence makes the relationship of the Australian government with the internationally isolated and widely condemned Chilean dictatorship more doubtful and duplicitous. While thousands of refugees and exiles were arriving and settling in the country, ASIO spied on the Chilean community. A surveillance video made by this agency shows a demonstration in Melbourne against Augusto Pinochet marking the first anniversary of the coup on 11 September 1974 (ASIO 1974). It is not clear why Chilean exiles who were generously welcomed as refugees were also considered “persons of interest” because of their political activities against the dictatorship, a government openly condemned by the Australian authorities. The case of Adriana Rivas is also shrouded in secrecy. Already in the 1990s, many organisations reported to the Australian government that people of Pinochet’s regime, some of whom were identified as torturers and murderers, resided in the country. In September and November 1990, the Australian-Chile Friendship Society of Canberra and the Pablo Neruda Cultural Centre wrote letters to the Minister for Immigration, Local Government and Ethnic Affairs, Gerry Hand, asking about this issue (see ABC 2009, Hand 1990, Santana 1990). Only in 2013 has it been confirmed that an agent of DINA accused of crimes against humanity has lived in Australia for decades. Rivas was the secretary of DINA’s chief Manuel Contreras’ assistant, Alejandro Burgos, during the early years of the dictatorship (Ministerio del Interior 2007). Contreras has already accumulated close to 400 years in imprisonment sentences for violations of human rights, including kidnapping, forced disappearance and assassinations (La Nación 2014a). Rivas is accused of being the co-author of aggravated kidnapping in seven cases. She was imprisoned in 2007 but was released on bail although not allowed to leave Chile. However, she managed to escape in 2010 through Argentina and has been living in Australia since then. She also pleads innocence to the accusations and denies any involvement in the crimes committed by Contreras and his men. More tellingly, she has justified torture: “They had to break the people—it has happened all over the world, not only in Chile” (Melgar 2013e). Following this interview, a Chilean lawyer requested the extradition of Adriana Rivas. The Chilean Supreme Court accepted two 88 Chapter Five extradition requests in January and March 2014 (Corte Suprema 2014) and now the case is being decided by the Australian government. In practice, Adriana Rivas’ case amounts to the impunity of a prosecuted human rights violator welcomed by Australia to start a new life, instead of being sent back expeditiously to face justice. On 27 August 2014, federal Senator Kate Lundy repeated the call to the current Attorney-General, Senator George Brandis, who had received the extradition request but not responded, after two months (La Nación 2014b). The resolution on the extradition request of Adriana Rivas to Chile might clarify Australia’s commitment to the universal principals of protection of human rights, which seemed evident during the years of Pinochet’s dictatorship. The prosecution against Rivas in Chile could also help to explain how a Chilean intelligence agent came to Australia in the first place and dispel the doubts of secret agreements of cooperation between the two governments or the respective defence departments and national intelligence services in the 1970s. Australia is undoubtedly responsible for participating in activities that supported and led to the Chilean coup and the crimes that followed. Four decades later, time is up. References ABC (Australian Broadcasting Corporation). 2003. “30 years since Chilean coup ousted President Allende”. ABC Radio. The world today, September 12. Presented by Nick Mckenzie. www.abc.net.au/worldtoday/content/2003/s944849.htm. —. 2009. “War criminals in Australia”. ABC Radio National. Background briefing, October 18. Presented by Hagar Cohen. www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/backgroundbriefing/warcriminals-in-australia/3099724. Aarons, Mark. 2001. War criminals welcome: Australia, a sanctuary for fugitive war criminals since 1944. Melbourne: Black Inc. ASIS (Australian Secret Intelligence Service). 2014. “About us— Overview”. Accessed August 2014. www.asis.gov.au/About-Us/Overview.html. 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Santiago de Chile: Ministerio del Interior de Chile, Programa de Derechos Humanos. www.ddhh.gov.cl/ddhh_rettig.html. Comisión Valech. 2004. “Informe de la Comisión Nacional sobre Prisión Política y Tortura (Informe Valech)”. Santiago de Chile: Gobierno de Chile. Accessed March 2010. www.comisionvalech.gov.cl/InformeValech.html. —. 2011. “Informe de la Comisión Asesora para la Calificación de Detenidos Desaparecidos, Ejecutados Políticos y Víctimas de Prisión Política y Tortura (Informe Valech II)”. Santiago de Chile: Gobierno de Chile. Accessed August 2011. www.comisionvalech.gov.cl/InformeComision.html. Corte Suprema. 2014. “Extradición Adriana Rivas Australia”. Corte Suprema de Justicia de la República de Chile, January 15. Accessed June 2014. www.pjud.cl/documents/10179/11834/EXTRADICION+ADRIANA+ +RIVAS+AUSTRALIA.pdf Coxsedge, Joan, Ken Coldicutt and Gerry Harant. 1982. Rooted in Secrecy. The clandestine element in Australian politics. 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Woodley, Naomi. 2014. “Senate passes new counter-terrorism laws giving stronger powers to intelligence agency ASIO”, ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation), September 25. www.abc.net.au/news/2014-09-25/new-counter-terrorism-laws-passthe-senate/5770256. CONTRIBUTORS Nicolás del Valle (nicolasdelvalle.o@gmail.com) is a PhD candidate in Philosophy at Leiden University (Netherlands) and Universidad Diego Portales (Chile), and has a Master of Arts in Contemporary Thought and a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science. He is a visiting researcher at the Ibero-American Institute of Berlin, Germany, and a researcher at the Centre for Political Analysis and Research (CAIP) in Chile. He is also a visiting fellow at the School of Humanities and Languages, University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia. His current research areas are in philosophy, the social sciences, media under democracy, the politics of human rights, critical theory and biopolitics. The chapter in the present book was written as part of his research activities in the doctoral program in Philosophy at the Institute of Humanities, Universidad Diego Portales, Chile. Pablo Leighton (pabloleighton@gmail.com) researches the notion and practices of propaganda in XX century and current media, and specifically on the history of audio-visual culture in Chile and Latin America since the 1970s until today. He has taught at universities in Australia, United States, Chile and Honduras, and has worked as film director, screenwriter and editor in various fiction and documentary productions. He holds a PhD in Latin American studies from Universidad de Santiago de Chile, and in Media and Cultural Studies from Macquarie University, Sydney. He also has a Master of Fine Arts in Filmmaking from Massachusetts College of Art (Boston, US). He is co-director of the Latin American Research Group Australia (www.latitudesgroup.info) with Fernando López. Fernando López (f.lopez@unswalumni.com) holds a PhD in History from the University of New South Wales and a Bachelor of Arts with Honours in History from the same institution. Together with Dr Pablo Leighton, he co-directs Latitudes: Latin American Research Group Australia. His areas of research focus on contemporary Latin American History, the Cold War in Latin America and, especially, on how the military regimes of Uruguay, Chile, Paraguay, Argentina and Bolivia agreed to formally launch Operation Condor in November 1975. 126 Contributors J Patrice McSherry (pmcsherr@liu.edu) is a professor of political science at Long Island University and author of numerous books and articles on Latin America. Her works include: “Cross-border terrorism: Operation Condor”, NACLA Report on the Americas 32(6): 34-35 (1999); “Operation Condor: Clandestine Inter-American System”, Social Justice 26(4): 144-174 (1999); “Operation Condor: New pieces of the puzzle”, NACLA Report on the Americas 34(6): 26 (2001); “Tracking the origins of a State Terror network: Operation Condor”, Latin American Perspectives 29(1): 38-60 (2002); “Predatory states: Operation Condor and covert war in Latin America”, Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. (2005); “Death squads as parallel forces: Uruguay, Operation Condor and the United States”, Journal of Third World Studies 24(1): 13 (2007); and “Introduction to 'Shadows of State Terrorism: Impunity in Latin America” (with Raúl Molina Mejía), Social Justice 26(4): 1-12 (2007). Her most recent book is “Chilean New Song: The Political Power of Music, 1960s1973”, Philadelphia: Temple University Press (2015). She has been currently teaching at Alberto Hurtado University in Santiago, Chile. Florencia Melgar (florenciamelgar@gmail.com) is an investigative journalist and independent researcher. She produced “No Toquen Nada”, once the highest rating current affairs radio show in Uruguay. She coauthored the books “Las palabras que llegaron’ in 2009 and “Sabotaje a la verdad” in 2006. She has worked for SBS Radio and Online, the ABC, Instituto Cervantes and the website Latinhub.com.au that she directs and was finalist as Best Use of Online in New South Wales (NSW) Premier’s multicultural Media Awards 2014. Melgar was awarded the best investigative story of the year in NSW multicultural media for the multimedia report “The Other 9/11”. In 2011, she was nominated Latin Woman of the Year in Australia for the contribution of Latinhub.com.au to the Latin American community in Australia. She is a PhD candidate at RMIT University in Melbourne and the title of her thesis is: “The exemption of Australia´s intelligence agencies from the FOI Act and its impact in journalism and democracy”. Debbie Sharnak (sharnak@wisc.edu) is a PhD candidate at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (US) studying the history of human rights, transnational networks, and international relations. Her dissertation, "Uruguay and the Contested International History of Human Rights", examines the origins and evolution of human rights discourse in Uruguay, particularly during its transition back to democratic rule. The work addresses issues of transitional justice, the rise of the transnational 40 Years are Nothing 127 human rights movement, and the shifting terrain of human rights in the 1970s and 1980s. Her publications include: "Uruguay and the Reconceptualization of Transitional Justice," in Transitional Justice and Legacies of State Violence in Latin America, Marcia Esparza and Nina Schneider, Lexington, MA: Lexington Books. (2015) (forthcoming); "Sovereignty and human rights: re-examining Carter’s foreign policy Towards the Third World," Diplomacy & Statecraft, 25(2): 303-330 (2014); “Moral Responsibility and the ICC: Child Soldiers in the DRC,” Eyes on the International Criminal Court, 4(1) (2007). Pedro Teixeirense (pedroteixeirense@gmail.com) is at PhD candidate at the University of Río de Janeiro. In 2014, Pedro worked as a researcher for the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), serving as a Research Analyst with the Brazilian National Truth Commission (CNV) that investigated the human rights violations committed during the last dictatorship (1964-1985). His works include: “Justiça de transição e processos de transição: alguns aspectos históricos a partir da experiência uruguaia”, Revista Ars Historica, 8ª Edição: 23-40 (2014); “O que resta da ditadura, o que havia de nós: história e memória nos mecanismos de justiça de transição no Brasil”, Revista Cantareira (Dossiê Os legados das ditaduras Civis-militares), 20ª Edição (Jan-Jun): 6-15 (2014). Yael Zaliasnik (yzaliasnik@gmail.com) is a journalist and Master in Literature from Universidad Católica de Chile, and has a PhD in Latin American Studies from Universidad de Santiago de Chile. Some of her areas of academic interest are Cultural Studies, Theatricality, Art and Politics, and Memory. She is currently a post-doctoral fellow at the Universidad de Santiago de Chile. She has published, among others, the articles “40 años de performances e intervenciones urbanas de Clemente Padín” (2010) and “Memoria en construcción: el debate sobre la Esma” (2011), e-misférica issues 7.2 and 8.1, The Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics, New York University.