11 September 2023
Today marks 50 years since the Washington-backed junta headed by general Augusto Pinochet violently overthrew Chile’s democratically elected socialist government of Salvador Allende in 1973. In recent years, I have been repeatedly asked by a few Australian journalists and politicians one question: is there anything new to report on Canberra’s connection to the coup in Chile?
For those unfamiliar as to why such a question would be asked, in 2017 University of New South Wales professor of politics Clinton Fernandes, together with barrister Ian Latham and solicitor Hugh Macken, took action to declassify early-1970s reports of the Australian Secret Intelligence Service (ASIS) station in Santiago, Chile — which assisted the CIA’s destabilisation of the Chilean government ahead of the military coup against Salvador.
On June 2 2021, the Coalition released the Australian government’s Santiago station reports to Fernandes and his lawyers. These documents — unlike previous evidence gathered by journalists Brian Toohey and William Pinwill in Oyster: The Story of The Australian Secret Intelligence Service — revealed technical information about the activities of ASIS in Chile, including communication delays, station vehicle deliveries, agent lodging and observations such as “fluent knowledge of Spanish in SANTIAGO is a necessity”.
While these revelations conclusively confirmed Canberra’s role in supporting Allende’s ousting, the partially successful declassification of ASIS files was short-lived.
On November 1 2021, the Administrative Appeals Tribunal handed down a ruling indicating that its full release of documents regarding ASIS operations in Chile between 1971 and 1974, plus records about the violent overthrow of the Popular Unity administration, would “cause damage to the security, defence or international relations of the Commonwealth”.
“It shows that the Australian government fears the people who elect it,” Fernandes said when asked about this ruling. He added that Canberra knows “Australians would never tolerate such contemptible acts if they knew what these agencies were up to. The secrecy protects policymakers from democratic scrutiny and accountability, but this is not national security in any meaningful sense”.
Writing in The Nation last month, Peter Kornbluh, a senior analyst at the National Security Archive at George Washington University, stated:
Both the CIA and the ASIS continue to hide operational records that include numerous intelligence reports from the Australian covert operatives to their CIA counterparts on meetings with Chilean assets embedded within the armed forces, the newspaper El Mercurio — a recipient of CIA funding — and the Christian Democratic party, among other key CIA-connected organizations in Chile.
Kornbluh’s analysis is important because declassifying ASIS files could deeply embarrass Canberra, especially since one ASIS agent is alleged to have remained in Chile after the coup in September, when it would have been impossible not to have witnessed the junta’s reign of terror — or, worse as a foreign agent, aided it.
Here in Sydney, after the ASIS reports were made public, I wrote to then-minister Marise Payne at the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT), requesting the full declassification of its files on Chile, as well as an apology from Canberra to the Chilean Australian community for intervening in the internal affairs of a sovereign democratic state.
While the first letter (September 17 2021) was co-signed by more than 60 Chilean Australians, the second correspondence (November 9 2021) was supported by 269 people, many of whom had been arrested, brutally tortured or subjected to political persecution under Chilean dictatorship. To date, DFAT has only replied to the first letter, arguing that since the issue of declassifying ASIS’ Santiago station reports was still a matter being heard at the AAT, it was not able to comment.
Another matter of interest to the local community is the request by Chile’s Supreme Court to extradite former Sydney nanny Adriana Rivas, an ex-member of Pinochet’s notorious Dirección de Inteligencia Nacional (Directorate of National Intelligence, or DINA).
Rivas, currently in a Sydney women’s prison since her arrest in February 2019, is awaiting extradition to Chile where she stands accused of kidnapping and torture offences against seven members of the Chilean Communist Party. Among her alleged victims was a young woman named Reinalda Pereira who was six months pregnant at the time of her disappearance.
Rivas’ presence in Australia, where she has lived since 1978, could be embarrassing for Canberra. Lawyer Adriana Navarro of Navarro Associates, who represents the families of Rivas’ alleged victims in Chile as a legal observer here in Sydney, notes:
Rivas was an operative agent of the DINA and trained with them in intelligence at Tejas Verdes barracks. Her official title was as a secretary, but she worked for the Lautaro Brigade under instructions from major Juan Morales Salgado, who worked for Manuel Contreras. She provided security to Contreras and his family, and to Pinochet when he travelled overseas.
During Pinochet’s reign, Manuel Contreras led the DINA and was the second-most powerful man in Chile. Contreras died in 2015 while serving a prison sentence of more than 500 years for crimes against humanity, including the kidnapping, forced disappearance and assassination of Pinochet’s opponents.
On September 4 2023, Navarro Associates sent a strongly worded letter to Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus, questioning why Rivas’ extradition to Chile has not proceeded despite “more than 15 months [elapsing] since Ms Rivas exhausted all judicial avenues to stop this extradition”.
When asked how an intelligence agent like Rivas could originally have entered Australia, Fernandes said: “While there may be a benign explanation, the affair cries out for answers.”
“Were people like her given special preference over the victims of torture, and was she protected by the intelligence agencies in the past?”
Back in Chile, the events of the September 11 coup continue to have relevance. Late last month, retired brigadier Hernán Chacón Soto was sentenced to “15 years for aggravated homicide and 10 years for aggravated kidnapping” for his role in the murder of the popular singer-songwriter Víctor Jara. But before being transferred to prison, Soto, like many other retired colonels and generals who worked for Pinochet and faced incarceration, took his own life.
Here in Australia, to mark 50 years since the coup d’état, members of the Chilean Australian community have organised public events at the Parliament of New South Wales, the Victoria Trades Hall, the University of Sydney and the Salvador Allende Memorial, which can be found at Fairfield Park in western Sydney. Events in Adelaide, Brisbane and Perth will also be held.
At these locations, we will remember how the brutal overthrow of Allende resulted in “about 4000 cases of death or disappearance by the [Pinochet] regime, between 150,000 and 200,000 cases of political detention, and approximately 100,000 credible cases of torture”, as noted by Fernandes.
We will also continue to wait for Canberra to further declassify ASIS records and to apologise for the destruction of democracy in our homeland of origin.