Wanted: Adriana Rivas

Adriana Rivas with Manuel Contreras

From the Australian:

AUSTRALIA is being asked by Chile's Supreme Court to extradite a woman accused of involvement in torture and murder during Chile's 1973-1990 military dictatorship.

The court requested the extradition of Adriana Rivas overnight.

She is wanted for her role in the 1976 murder of a Communist Party leader who was held in a secret prison before he was suffocated and thrown into the ocean.

Ms Rivas was assistant to Manuel Contreras, the head of the DINA secret police during General Augusto Pinochet's dictatorship.

She moved to Australia in 1978 but was detained during a visit to Chile in 2006.

Ms Rivas was released after some months on probation and escaped to Australia.

In an interview last year with SBS, she insisted she was innocent of the charges.

From SBS: The Other 9/11

Bachelet Heads Up UN Women's Agency

From the New York Times:

Michelle Bachelet, famous for breaking gender barriers by becoming the first woman elected president of Chile, will head the new global United Nations agency created to advance women’s rights, Secretary General Ban Ki-moon announced Tuesday.

Mr. Ban said he chose Ms. Bachelet, 58, from 26 candidates for her political skills and ability to create consensus. She had been a front-runner from the start.

It took four years of wrangling among member states to create the agency, which consolidates four smaller agencies whose work on women’s issues often overlapped. It has been given the rather unwieldy title of the United Nations Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women, but in diplomatic shorthand it is often called the “Gender Entity.”

Chile: Mapuche Women

From Latin America Press:

Life in Araucania is tense and distressing. Residents in this southern Chilean region, where 30 percent of the Mapuche population lives, say the police routinely violate their rights and face constant threats of losing their lands to transnational companies.

"For us, the land is very important," said historian and Mapuche leader Millaray Painemal. "Mapuche means people of the earth, and our struggle is to recover the lands we´ve historically had that are now in the hands of plantation owners or transnational companies."

This historical demand to recover communal lands is at the root of a bitter struggle with the state, which has responded with repression.

Women Mapuche leaders, even though they do fight for their people´s general cause, are also struggling to overcome historical repression against their gender."We have had to fight for women to know which international treaties there are," said the Rayen Voygue president, referring to the United Nations´ Convention on the Elimination on All Forms of Discrimination against Women. "That´s why the role of women´s organizations is important so we can empower ourselves with these instruments."