Paulina Veloso

[2] 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.

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.

[3] Paulina Veloso lived in Switzerland for many years, where she obtained dual nationality, and finally returned to Chile in 1979.

With the return of democracy to Chile at the beginning of the 1990s, Veloso began to work in various public offices, including Undersecretary of Labor and chief of staff in the Ministry of Labor and Social Security (Ministerio del Trabajo y Previsión Social) from 1990-1994, Deputy Director of the National Women's Service (Servicio Nacional de la Mujer) from 1994-1997.

[1] On March 27, 2007 Velaso was replaced as minister by the Socialist lawyer José Antonio Viera-Gallo as part of Bachelet's rearrangement of the cabinet in the midst of fallout over the handling of Transantiago.