Paulina Veloso

Paulina Eliana Veloso Valenzuela (born in Concepción, Chile, February 14, 1957) is a Chilean lawyer and Socialist Party politician who served as the Minister Secretary-General of the Presidency of Chile (also rendered as the president's Chief of Staff in English) from March 11, 2006 to March 27, 2007.

Velaso is the daughter of the ex-intendant of the Biobío Region, lawyer Adolfo Veloso Figueroa (Socialist Party) and Felicitas Valenzuela, an academic with the Universidad de Concepción. She is a cousin of the intendant of Biobío Region, María Soledad Tohá Veloso. She is also the mother of Nicolás Grau, who was the president of the Students Federation of the Universidad de Chile (Federación de Estudiantes de la Universidad de Chile).

After the Chilean coup d'état of Augusto Pinochet on September 11, 1973, Veloso's fiancé at the time (and later husband), Alexei Jaccard Siegler, was detained and tortured by agents of the DINA. In 1974, the two escaped together for an exile in Switzerland. On May 15, 1977, during a trip to Buenos Aires, Jaccard was detained in the name of Operation Condor for Chilean and Argentine agents. He was moved to the ESMA internment camp, tortured, and later was disappeared.