THE YEAR WAS 1974 when Jacqueline Drouilly arrived at INACAP as an intern sent by the School of Social Work of the University of Chile, in Santiago. She was a beautiful young woman of only 22 years, possessing a graceful figure that immediately caught the attention of men, who would cast their eyes, dazzled, upon the colorful irises of her cheerful green eyes.

However, what captivated the interlocutor was the innate sympathy that emanated from her friendly demeanor, and if the conversation managed to last for more than thirty minutes, a torrent of intelligence and cultural information would flow freely, ensnaring the listener.

Within a few weeks, she demonstrated her responsible capacity in concrete tasks, integrating herself assertively into the work team with complete success. One could foresee in her a future social worker of real value.

But the times the country was going through were not all sweetness and light. Very few Chileans could claim to live calmly, securely, and contentedly. There was no concrete information, much less official, regarding the tragic reality experienced by a significant number of people, but the word on the street spoke of murders, torture, and early-morning arrests.

Thinking was forbidden. Disagreeing or expressing an opinion was synonymous with death. And praying was no longer enough. One afternoon, I had lunch with her at a restaurant on Calle Pío Nono (in the Bellavista neighborhood), sharing our particular realities as good friends.

There, I learned that she was a few months pregnant, enough reason to experience some happiness in a time of tragedy. I knew she was striving to build a future together with the man she loved, Marcelo, a young man who had graduated from a technical program and who, like her, came from the city of Temuco.

The next day, Jacqueline did not arrive at INACAP. The night before, like a predatory claw lashing the plains, the beastly murderer Osvaldo Romo Mena and his DINA henchmen had emerged from the shadows, with weapons ready to fire—protected by the unchecked terror granted by a dictatorship—to raid with blows, insults, and bludgeonings the apartment that the young couple rented in a neighborhood of Providencia.

Just as Alexander cut the Gordian knot with a firm stroke of his sword, Romo and his hitmen severed the lives of Jacqueline and Marcelo in a single blow. The military of that time was accustomed to using force when facing intellectual capacities that surpassed them in stature and level. "Fire against ideas," was the order of the day. "Long live death, down with culture," the Francoist general had shouted at a stunned Miguel de Unamuno in the prelude to the Spanish Civil War.

Can one expect anything less brutal from a coup plotter? Jacqueline was taken to the dungeons that the DINA implemented in different parts of Santiago to torture and humiliate the detainees. In dark underground cells, she suffered unimaginable physical punishment, torture frayed into screams of horror sunk in the morass of loneliness and helplessness, while the victimizers took pleasure in the young and beautiful body of the girl.

It is impossible for me to stop imagining the images that must have occurred in those foul hells. I fight against my feelings, but I always lose the battle. I imagine Jacqueline lying on a filthy cot, tied hand and foot, naked and weak, beaten with malice by her executioners, electrocuted again and again without any objective or meaning, only to finally endure the growing truth of her inexplicable situation.

One after another, the beastly punishers strip off their pants and, in a line of sick troglodytes, wait for their turn to climb over the still beautiful and attractive body of the girl. José Domingo Cañas, Villa Grimaldi, Tres Álamos, Cuatro Álamos... names that repeat themselves in the same measure that the girl is moved from one horrendous place to another worse one.

In all of them, the experience is the same. Blows, electricity, insane malice, repeated rapes, but loneliness and hopelessness remain the only companions of those condemned to serve as therapy for the inquisitors of the abyss.

I close my eyes and my mind opens the pages of the Rettig Report. Jacqueline could not attend the interviews and give her testimony. She had died in 1975 in one of the DINA's torture centers, just like Marcelo, her husband.

We never heard from her again, nor from the child who slept in her womb. From time to time, I dared to speak with her mother, Norma Yurich, to find some comfort in the words of encouragement that emerged beautifully after the electoral victory of Patricio Aylwin, but which fell shattered to the bottom of the abyss as soon as we heard from the lips of the President himself that 'justice would be done as far as possible.' Norma Yurich wore out her knuckles knocking on the doors of courts, press outlets, embassies, commissions, political parties, and regiments to obtain answers to her questions.

She obtained only words of incomprehensible apathy. Not even Jacqueline's pregnancy moved the powerful. She was one more number on the endless list of Chilean forcibly disappeared persons. After all, Jacqueline had not been an artist, a politician, a beauty queen, an athlete, or a writer.

She was just a young, beautiful woman, an outstanding university student with a small social network. Why would the establishment worry about her specifically? Therein lies our great debt as a nation. Forgiving is possible when the naked truth is known, but forgetting signifies an irresponsibility.

Our public figures have shown how capable they are of forgetting for convenience. Forgetting individual cases and occupying themselves only with global statistics. Forgetting that there were Chilean women and men, anonymous in essence to the press, who gave much, but much more than what was contributed by some of our current leaders to recover the democratic system.

Forgetting, in short, that the compatriots sacrificed by the messianic madness of criminals—who are perfectly locatable if there were a true intention to find them—deserve at least that current generations know the identity of their murderers, some of whom walk freely and gracefully among the people.

Others even occupy public office. We will have to wait 50 years to acknowledge that democratic governments were wrong to hide the names of the victimizers. Officially, it is said that in 1975 the DINA murdered Jacqueline Paulette Drouilly Yurich and her offspring.

But the DINA was a government organization, with leadership and those responsible. It was not the DINA that cut short Jacqueline's life, but rather one of its members, following superior orders, who committed the murder of the student and her unborn child.

Osvaldo Romo Mena knows the name of the perpetrator of those crimes, since it was he who initiated the saga of bloody abuses, arguing that he did it for the 'security of the fatherland.' By whose orders?

For certain military men, national security is in check when citizens prove capable of thinking for themselves, since that event puts in ridiculous evidence the ignominious social application of the verticality of command that has constituted their way of life inside the barracks.

That is to say, to follow orders without thinking, never to think... never to discern. Only to obey blindly and carry out the instruction, exacerbating violence as a way of showing a 'soldier's soul.' The human remains of a dear friend and brilliant university student rest next to the incipient body of her child, while her murderer enjoys the company of his peers in some military unit where the justice of the men of the country of the 'politically correct' will hardly decide to punish him.

Beyond the Valech Report and the inconsequential political tautologies that emanate from democratic authorities, there still lies the true justice that begins by identifying the manager of the crimes. Regarding these serious matters, the Concertación governments have involuntarily replicated the opinion that Joseph Stalin expressed after having ordered one of the bloodiest Soviet 'purges': "one death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic." Mr.

Pablo Rodríguez, as the ardent lawyer for former General Augusto Pinochet, and to avoid having statistics become the only form of justice possible, have the kindness to ask your client: "which of your subordinates murdered Jacqueline Drouilly?"

Source: 24 de Enero 2005 El Gran Valparaiso

Date: 01-24-2005

Jacqueline Paulette Drouilly Yurich was born on December 3, 1949, at the Florence Nightingale Clinic in Santiago, Chile. Daughter of Jorge Drouilly Silva and Norma Yurich Costagliola. When she was 4 years old, her father was transferred as an architect to the city of Temuco by the Ministry of Public Works for that provincial office.

The following year, 1955, we enrolled her in the kindergarten of the German School. Very soon, she made friends who came to our house (and whom she kept until her final moments). She completed her primary studies, standing out as a cheerful, communicative, and sociable girl.

In 1956 and 1957, two sisters arrived. When she was 11, she had another sister. In 1964, she left the German School to enter the Baptist School along with her sisters. But she completed her final years of secondary education at the Liceo Gabriela Mistral in Temuco.

The personal report from her head teacher said: "She adapts, is spontaneously cooperative, and responsible in her extracurricular activities, and very polite." Jacqueline was always an affectionate daughter and very responsible in what was entrusted to her.

Very attached to her family, helping her sisters with everything. Fulfilling her duties to her teachers, her family, her friends. There are infinite testimonies of this. Her vocation was always to help the sick, the destitute, the poor, the abandoned, and this from a very young age.

Many times we thought that perhaps she was going to be a nurse. But she chose the Social Work career. With a good score, she entered it at the University of Chile, in Temuco. Some time later, she met a young man who was also studying.

They fell in love. Later, he wanted to continue studying in Santiago. They agreed, and we could do nothing, because she would soon be of legal age. It was very difficult for her to re-enroll in Santiago.

So she chose to pursue her artistic interests: theater, which was an old hobby. She spent 2 years at the Theater School of the U. of Chile. Then, she insisted on returning to Social Work. She entered again, here in Santiago, at the U. of Chile.

Marcelo Salinas Eytel On August 2, 1974, she married Marcelo Salinas Eytel at the Civil Registry of Ñuñoa. Shortly after, they went to live at Decombe 1191, renting the second floor, with an independent entrance.

The house belonged to a Social Work classmate. Five days before she was detained, my husband and I visited them, having lunch with them. At 6 in the afternoon, we returned to Temuco. That was the last time we saw them.

On Wednesday, October 30, 1974, near midnight, when she was doing work for the School in the lower part (the house of her classmate), since she was doing her internship at INACAP and needed the typewriter, some vans arrived with men dressed in civilian clothes asking for Marcelo.

She told them he was not there and that he would arrive soon, that she was his wife. Then they began to interrogate her, and roughly made her go up to the 2nd floor, raiding, beating her, and committing all sorts of abuses to find out the whereabouts of her husband.

According to statements by Ms. Marilu Varela, these guys kept returning several times to the ground floor, while she, her sister, her little brother, the maid, and a driver from her house heard the party with music and dancing that the others were having upstairs, after having taken my daughter who, barely able to put on a wool coat and a hat when they, throwing her into a van, told the people in the house that they were taking my daughter "as a HOSTAGE," while they would take my son-in-law "if he arrived," but by those hours there was a curfew, they threatened Marilú and left people stationed there. The leader of the group, who by the signs was Osvaldo Romo, told Marilú not to go to bed because they would return to talk to her... to ask her "other little questions" and wait for Marcelo. A friend of mine who was going to visit Jacqueline the next day learned of this and notified us in Temuco. I traveled to Santiago and there our long and agonizing pilgrimage began. Someone told me to go to the Pro-Peace Committee. I later visited the house on Alberto Decombe and spoke with Ms. Marilú, and only then did I learn that my son-in-law had been taken the next day at the door of the house, shooting at a taxi where he was coming and taking them with the taxi driver. We filed a writ of amparo for my daughter. Another for both of them. A complaint for kidnapping. Another appeal, adding a letter that came from the International Red Cross saying that they had visited Jacqueline at the Tres Álamos prison on November 20, 1974. And that they still had no news about her husband. With the writs of amparo; complaint for kidnapping, letters of 2 or 3 pages to the Minister of the Interior, General Raúl Benavides, to the commander-in-chief of the Military Government of Santiago, Jaime Arellano Stark, and many other generals and figures of all branches. Interviews with consuls, ambassadors, high commissioners. Visits, almost every day, for years to many organizations, such as CIME, CONARE, CELADE, and how many daily trips to the Secretariat of Detainees (SENDET), asking and asking the Ministry of Defense. Obtaining visas from European and American countries to be able to have a place where my daughter and her husband could arrive after being judged according to the most perfect form of Justice: without hearing anything other than: "Stay calm, ma'am," "Come back in another week." Meanwhile, in Tres Álamos, the Correctional facility, and other places of detention, they answered: "That person is not found here. Do not insist." Other times... "We have not had news." "We don't know anything, go to SENDET." My daughter was taken while expecting a family: a three-month pregnancy. And that child who should have been born around April 1975? What became of him? Where do they have him? Where? I gave birth to a healthy, beautiful, and intelligent daughter. And in the prime of her life, when she was preparing to be a mother, one night, criminals from an organization called SIM, DINA, or CNI clandestinely broke into her house and took her to the torture houses, held her incommunicado, then made her disappear, depriving her child of life and also torturing her entire family. God knows there is no eternity with which to pay for such perversity. Today, the testimonies, the sworn statements, the witnesses are everywhere in Chile and the world. The names of my daughter and my son-in-law are in numerous countries in America, Europe, Africa, at the United Nations, resounding... But it has been said publicly that these, like hundreds of other people, "Have never existed in Chile." (testimony of Jacqueline's mother)

Source: Vicaría de la Solidaridad

, a stage production that premiered in December of last year and has received glowing reviews regarding the case of the Social Work student from the U. of Chile, Temuco campus, Jacqueline Drouilly Yurich, 24 years old and 3 months pregnant, and her husband, Marcelo Salinas Eytel, also a student, 27 years old.

Both were detained and disappeared in 1974. In 2011, the Universidad de La Frontera awarded the couple their respective degrees posthumously. The play, for those over 14 years old, will be offered in two performances, on Thursday, May 19 at 11:00 a.m. (students) and at 7:30 p.m. (general public), in the Aula Magna of the Universidad de La Frontera , with free admission upon reservation at this link .

The production is presented by the Colectivo el Deseo, made up of stage artists from the Los Lagos region, who under the direction of Verónica Arellano Pino, have been shaping their creative work since 2018, flowing between stage production and audiovisual composition, participating in various regional and national instances.

The cast highlights the leading participation of Carolina Contreras along with Iván Álvarez (Professor Charly in the series El Reemplazante).

AN IMPORTANT WORK OF MEMORY

The Company, through this play, has managed to reconstruct a particular story, among many others, of a case of political disappearance in the context of a dictatorship, recreating the events from the perspective of seven versions: from Marilú (Jacqueline's friend), from Jacqueline, from Marcelo (Jacqueline's partner), from the torturers, and from the family, concluding with the account of the actuary a year later, generating a closure in the year 1999.

Its director, Verónica Arellano, pointed out that "for us as Colectivo el Deseo, this invitation to the UFRO has a special connotation for different reasons. One of them is the fact that Jacqueline Drouilly was a social work student at that university, and on the other hand, the invitation we received from her sister Nicole.

Without a doubt, it is an honor for us to be able to continue sharing Jacqueline's memory with new generations and to defend life with our tool, which is art." Meanwhile, the director of the UFRO Human Rights Center, Nicole Droully Yurich, sister of the person who gives the play its name, stated that "as the Human Rights Center of the Universidad de La Frontera, we are very happy to bring this play.

Preserving memory is one of our tasks, particularly in these cases of our students. Memory, together with justice, contributes to creating the conditions to achieve the guarantee of non-repetition." At the same time, she added that "as Jacqueline's family, we are grateful to the Human Rights Center and all the units that made it possible to make this play known in Temuco, such as the Social Work program and the Rector's Cabinet.

The Colectivo el Deseo has produced a work of great quality and has interpreted the complexity of the reality we live as a family. To all who attend the play, our thanks for the moment of reflection and warmth that you will dedicate to our dear Jacqueline and Marcelo."

Source: ufro.cl 5/18/2022

Date: 05-18-2022

The Government has covered the perpetrators of torture and atrocious murders with a cloak of impunity for another 50 years, but the question of who they were will not be easily extinguished. THE YEAR WAS 1974 when Jacqueline Drouilly arrived at INACAP as an intern sent by the School of Social Work of the University of Chile, in Santiago.

She was a beautiful young woman of only 22 years, possessing a graceful figure that immediately caught the attention of men, who would cast their eyes, dazzled, upon the colorful irises of her cheerful green eyes.

However, what captivated the interlocutor was the innate sympathy that emanated from her friendly demeanor, and if the conversation managed to last for more than thirty minutes, a torrent of intelligence and cultural information would flow freely, ensnaring the listener.

Within a few weeks, she demonstrated her responsible capacity in concrete tasks, integrating herself assertively into the work team with complete success. One could foresee in her a future social worker of real value.

But the times the country was going through were not all sweetness and light. Very few Chileans could claim to live calmly, securely, and contentedly. There was no concrete information, much less official, regarding the tragic reality experienced by a significant number of people, but the word on the street spoke of murders, torture, and early-morning arrests.

Thinking was forbidden. Disagreeing or expressing an opinion was synonymous with death. And praying was no longer enough. One afternoon, I had lunch with her at a restaurant on Calle Pío Nono (in the Bellavista neighborhood), sharing our particular realities as good friends.

There, I learned that she was a few months pregnant, enough reason to experience some happiness in a time of tragedy. I knew she was striving to build a future together with the man she loved, Marcelo, a young man who had graduated from a technical program and who, like her, came from the city of Temuco.

The next day, Jacqueline did not arrive at INACAP. The night before, like a predatory claw lashing the plains, the beastly murderer Osvaldo Romo Mena and his DINA henchmen had emerged from the shadows, with weapons ready to fire—protected by the unchecked terror granted by a dictatorship—to raid with blows, insults, and bludgeonings the apartment that the young couple rented in a neighborhood of Providencia.

Just as Alexander cut the Gordian knot with a firm stroke of his sword, Romo and his hitmen severed the lives of Jacqueline and Marcelo in a single blow. The military of that time was accustomed to using force when facing intellectual capacities that surpassed them in stature and level. "Fire against ideas," was the order of the day. "Long live death, down with culture," the Francoist general had shouted at a stunned Miguel de Unamuno in the prelude to the Spanish Civil War.

Can one expect anything less brutal than a coup plotter? Jacqueline was taken to the dungeons that the DINA implemented in different parts of Santiago to torture and humiliate the detainees. In dark underground cells, she suffered unimaginable physical punishment, torture frayed into screams of horror sunk in the morass of loneliness and helplessness, while the victimizers took pleasure in the young and beautiful body of the girl.

It is impossible for me to stop imagining the images that must have occurred in those foul hells. I fight against my feelings, but I always lose the battle. I imagine Jacqueline lying on a filthy cot, tied hand and foot, naked and weak, beaten with malice by her executioners, electrocuted again and again without any objective or meaning, only to finally endure the growing truth of her inexplicable situation.

One after another, the beastly punishers strip off their pants and, in a line of sick troglodytes, wait for their turn to climb over the still beautiful and attractive body of the girl. José Domingo Cañas, Villa Grimaldi, Tres Álamos, Cuatro Álamos... names that repeat themselves in the same measure that the girl is moved from one horrendous place to another worse one.

In all of them, the experience is the same. Blows, electricity, insane malice, repeated rapes, but loneliness and hopelessness remain the only companions of those condemned to serve as therapy for the inquisitors of the abyss.

I close my eyes and my mind opens the pages of the Valech Report. Jacqueline could not attend the interviews and give her testimony. She had died in 1975 in one of the DINA's torture centers, just like Marcelo, her husband.

We never heard from her again, nor from the child who slept in her womb. From time to time, I dared to speak with her mother, Norma Yurich, to find some comfort in the words of encouragement that emerged beautifully after the electoral victory of Patricio Aylwin, but which fell shattered to the bottom of the abyss as soon as we heard from the lips of the President himself that 'justice would be done as far as possible.' Norma Yurich wore out her knuckles knocking on the doors of courts, press outlets, embassies, commissions, political parties, and regiments to obtain answers to her questions.

She obtained only words of incomprehensible apathy. Not even Jacqueline's pregnancy moved the powerful. She was one more number on the endless list of Chilean forcibly disappeared persons. After all, Jacqueline had not been an artist, a politician, a beauty queen, an athlete, or a writer.

She was just a young, beautiful woman, an outstanding university student with a small social network. Why would the establishment worry about her specifically? Therein lies our great debt as a nation. Forgiving is possible when the naked truth is known, but forgetting signifies an irresponsibility.

Our public figures have shown how capable they are of forgetting for convenience. Forgetting individual cases and occupying themselves only with global statistics. Forgetting that there were Chilean women and men, anonymous in essence to the press, who gave much, but much more than what was contributed by some of our current leaders to recover the democratic system.

Forgetting, in short, that the compatriots sacrificed by the messianic madness of criminals—who are perfectly locatable if there were a true intention to find them—deserve at least that current generations know the identity of their murderers, some of whom walk freely and gracefully among the people.

Others even occupy public office. We will have to wait 50 years to acknowledge that democratic governments were wrong to hide the names of the victimizers. Officially, it is said that in 1975 the DINA murdered Jacqueline Paulette Drouilly Yurich and her offspring.

But the DINA was a government organization, with leadership and those responsible. It was not the DINA that cut short Jacqueline's life, but rather one of its members, following superior orders, who committed the murder of the student and her unborn child.

Osvaldo Romo Mena knows the name of the perpetrator of those crimes, since it was he who initiated the saga of bloody abuses, arguing that he did it for the 'security of the fatherland.' By whose orders?

For certain military men, national security is in check when citizens prove capable of thinking for themselves, since that event puts in ridiculous evidence the ignominious social application of the verticality of command that has constituted their way of life inside the barracks.

That is to say, to follow orders without thinking, never to think... never to discern. Only to obey blindly and carry out the instruction, exacerbating violence as a way of showing a 'soldier's soul.' The human remains of a dear friend and brilliant university student rest next to the incipient body of her child, while her murderer enjoys the company of his peers in some military unit where the justice of the men of the country of the 'politically correct' will hardly decide to punish him.

Beyond the Valech Report and the inconsequential political tautologies that emanate from democratic authorities, there still lies the true justice that begins by identifying the manager of the crimes. Regarding these serious matters, the Concertación governments have involuntarily replicated the opinion that Joseph Stalin expressed after having ordered one of the bloodiest Soviet 'purges': "one death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic." Mr.

Pablo Rodríguez, as the ardent lawyer for former General Augusto Pinochet, and to avoid having statistics become the only form of justice possible, have the kindness to ask your client: "which of your subordinates murdered Jacqueline Drouilly?" If you know anything more about Jacqueline Drouilly who was studying to be a Social Worker and was a militant in the MIR along with her partner Marcelo Salinas Eytel , share it with us via an e-mail to martin@lashistoriasquepodemoscontar.cl If you also know anything about any other comrade disappeared or murdered by the dictatorship, share it with us as well; that will help us to never forget them. By Arturo Alejandro Muñoz

Source: lashistoriasquepodemoscontar.cl no date

I am writing to tell you that I have come to know you. Thirty years ago, you were just a number to me—first, one of the thousands upon thousands, then one of the 2,500, and at the same time, one of the 119.

But later, through the passing of the years and constant denunciation, I met your sister Nicole. It was then that I saw your photo for the first time; it is the one where you are in the arms of your partner, Marcelo.

That photo has been shown in Chile and around the world, that photo that is always attached—perhaps by now, with the passing of the years, tattooed—to the lapel of your sister, who defiantly presents her forcibly disappeared sister and brother-in-law to the world.

That is how I was able to put a face to the name, and that is how I began to know you, to learn of your childhood in that indomitable Temuko, where from long ago until today one can feel the injustice against the Mapuche people, the poor peasant, and the worker of your city.

Perhaps that is what led you to grow from a "well-to-do girl" into a social fighter; perhaps that is what triggered your rebellion—a rebellion you transformed into commitment and militancy. Together with your partner, you became part of those who were building that new homeland, those who tirelessly sought that state of workers and peasants, that homeland without the exploited or the exploiters.

Together, you forged illusions in that spring of the thousand days; you taught settlers and peasants who anxiously awaited better days how to dream. You participated in long and laborious volunteer work that fused workers and students into an amalgam of teachings, values, and commitments, and that is how an unbreakable proletarianization was born from that union.

You alternated your higher education, switching from Social Work to Theater when you went to Santiago, and later you returned to Social Work, perhaps following your vocation to help the most dispossessed.

All of this happened while you were living your great love with Marcelo to the fullest and fulfilling the tasks that your revolutionary militancy demanded of you. This is how September 11 found you, and you had to go underground.

It was extremely hard for you to accept the coup d'état, the fall of so many comrades, and to have to face the tasks of reorganizing the party. In 1974, you married Marcelo. These were moments when the repression against your comrades was intensifying; you were suggested to leave the country, but you considered that option a desertion and decided to stay.

The structures were being heavily struck, the organizational units were falling, and at the beginning of October, they killed Miguel, which hit you hard. The repression was closing in; in the AGA, there was already a large number of comrades detained, and your name and Marcelo's could be extracted at any moment during some torture session.

I confess that it is very difficult for me to imagine the pressure under which you lived, the fear that must have gripped you when you went out to every meeting point, especially knowing that the child you both desired so much was growing in your womb.

That night of October 30, when the beasts of the DINA arrived at your house, it was the beginning of your long pilgrimage through the torture centers. Through the testimonies of some survivors, we have learned of your stay in Cuatro Álamos, in Villa Grimaldi.

You were also seen with your partner in José Domingo Cañas. A comrade highlighted your joy and your solidarity with the women who shared your cell. Despite the calamitous state you were in due to the torture sessions, you were capable of offering your smile, a kind word, sharing the little food you received, and even your clothes with comrades you considered needed them more.

Dear Jacqueline: 30 years have passed since they took you. For your family, they have been 30 years of searching. Your mother, Normita, has not ceased to look for you, and from the beginning, she joined other mothers and wives who were also looking for their own, and together they formed the "group" (AFDD).

I will tell you that these women have given a display of dignity to the country and the world; they have never compromised, and to this day, they demand trial and punishment for the guilty. Your sister Nicole went into exile, and from outside the country, she has always remained active in the constant search for solidarity and the denunciation of the injustices and abuses committed in our country.

Michele, along with your nephew, travels through the now-public detention and torture centers; perhaps they feel your presence in those places, and so that it is not forgotten, she has placed some of your belongings in what is now the Park for Peace.

Your sister Viviane remains in Temuko; from there, she continues to remember and care for your father, Jorge, who, after traveling through a great number of countries denouncing your disappearance and dragging his sorrow, returned to Chile.

And there, among so many memories, the scents and landscapes brought him closer to you, and perhaps trying to assemble your childhood smile or remembering your childhood games in Temuko, or the last time he saw you in Santiago—and in the effort to steal images from memory, his mind grew tired.

Today, Jorge, with his exhausted brain, waits while receiving the required care and finds joy in Viviane's daily visit. Jacqueline, I also want to tell you about your comrades. Many continue in constant denunciation, seeking spaces and creating memory; others, the few, today co-govern with the seditious and coup-plotters of yesterday, those whom Miguel denounced in the Caupolicán—the Aylwins, the Saldivars, the Freis, do you remember?

They call themselves "renewed," they consider themselves Neoliberals, and they rabidly applaud the system, measuring its success by the number of cell phones or color televisions that exist in the population.

I... well, I am in a work collective where we have set out to denounce and create memory; we believe that future generations must know what happened to you and to so many thousands of comrades, family members, and friends.

I tell you that in Chile today, there is an attempt to cover the past with a great poncho of impunity; there is an attempt to drown memory in a lake of amnesia; justice gallops on a steed of indifference.

But I promise you that I will continue creating memory, denouncing, and demanding trial and punishment for the guilty. Jacqueline, before saying goodbye, I want to thank you for having known you. Your friend forever,

Source: Roberto Vasquez - London, October 30, 2004

Date: 10-30-2004

The title of this poem is the answer my daughter gave when they called her Jackie. Her mother, Santiago, December 1994 Trees with painted faces,

with a weapon under the arm

I dreamed of you; and a deaf and wild scream wrapped my streets, Jacqueline. Yesterday I reviewed my thoughts and I found your friends full of love.

They did not know about you

The only ones who know about YOU are the enemies of the people.

Sometimes I think sometimes

sometimes I believe sometimes

sometimes I don't believe it and sometimes I know it is true. Jacqueline daughter girl woman I breathe in the mountain range of the Andes from one end to the other and, in that, I scan everything with my eyes in case I find you My oxygen will end.

And the door will open with a single blow through which my oblivion will pass. When the magnolia is left alone at night it sings. Upon the useless earth suddenly in the little corner of my frozen dreams, you appear, and you shatter my voice: then I stop.

I turn on the receiver and along with the music I put my loneliness on the edge of the window to play and refresh itself among the trees. And fleeing from the SMOG, I write you this long letter that will not reach you but it will reach the others, while I concentrate. I make whirlpools in the universe of my anguish but now I have convinced myself that I will not see you.

Nor will you ever see me

for, you will cross the century through those who come with another strength. Of blood, it is of pains and of death, the womb of my country: although nothing of you has been lost. Everything for a renewed people.

To sleep under the music of the rain. Damn it. What music. The music in the shantytowns for example? Above the cough and the hunger? Jacqueline, above or below the cold? Rain rain rain rain and rain...

I feel my pain embodied in my heart. And that daily hole between my temples. Because those who hid you are hidden, in the masks of high society. Because they shot until eternal hate hate, which covered us, to be later sown by the world.

When I finally understood the TRUTH

that I would not find you not even to leave you a carnation. I felt then the transformation. The Love for you, was the Love for the World. Before I was falling slowly, but I was able to emerge, Jacqueline. I could no longer evade myself.

Like in earthquakes

sinking the houses. Splitting the roads and breaking the pipes; turning off the lights; demolishing everything... like that with you, Jacqueline, My city was destroyed. Like a volcano that can no longer resist burning rivers fell on my black blouse.

How to explain what happens to me and happens to you. How to explain. How to explain it. And how to silence it. The impotence is the cage in which you hold me, Jacqueline. The sun that you turned off and the mountain that I still have not finished crossing.

And the squares. And the shops. The crowd and the guards watched us pass. With our pupils full of the water of sorrow and the anger of its salt. By that time, Jacqueline you lived there when the SOUTH threw itself with all its strength onto the pavement without respecting anyone, not even the most dispossessed.

Some night I will forget this book forever with all its sadness. And others will remember what I gave birth to night after night. Today, January twenty-sixth, someone told me: "write, Norma, everything you feel, everything that washes you"...

And here I am, Jacqueline. With moist eyes feeling you. A noise at midnight reminds me of your heart, who knows how. But the noises of the day's traffic distract me, Jacqueline; they make me remember that I must not remember.

And less so forget. The harsh smell of the fig trees wraps me in another life: the one I had before you, Jacqueline. How it was, I don't even imagine. And, what follows after the sea?... Manzanero's voice appeared on all the speakers and stuck like sugar to your skin.

And inside your orange dress, I heard

"...with you I learned that the week has more than seven days..." And you, Jacqueline, knew nothing. Nor did we, that in the shadow of that music you were saying goodbye to everyone. While you were falling in love with your love who would fall with you.

My hatred for the vermin tightens my veins and also my words, only a black river escapes, endless, wide as Space. Very early I wake up with the birds that are small grinding wheels, to remind me that my thought can do many things and, besides, I am alive.

The sea breaks its waters the palaces of sand until destroying them. And it does not end. Its strength nor its constancy does not end, until destroying them. And it will never end. Just like you and me, even if we are no longer here.

Other sands will come to rise, to continue growing. And so on... Have you noticed from over there? From any side or depth? How many walk through the corners throughout this country without finding anyone?

I don't want to hear the conversation about your sad heart, while they walked over you on the stones with your eyes covered. Walking, I stumbled upon memory. And do you know what I did, Jacqueline?: I thought about something else.

I don't know what. Yesterday I talked to you about my mother and even my body broke. Time was a single avalanche over the words. Tired of the cold waters. Of the frozen wind. Of the night that rained under the sky, I ran to look for your nameless heart through the shadows...

Your departure grinds my bones as if the train in which you left had passed over me. I never understood what NOTHING could be, until you stopped being inside the air. So many years sleeping on the frost.

With endless pupils. Having to be reborn to die. Having to sleep to wake up. The moment to meet other friends stopped. Your body stopped. My time stopped. Everything stopped. Even the EARTH. It was only something like death itself, air, punctual and forever.

December third, nineteen forty-nine. You were a little girl of honey who spilled her heart so pure under my breasts. When you became a woman you learned to fly over another body. You hooked your heart to another, and you were a single thought, to finally create a black star between my eyes.

But your heart and his are now my strength. There is nothing that can break the whirlwind that got tangled in my temples when the days passed and I did not find you. And so we remained: without a meeting.

The vegetation grows and I am enchanted when the earth cracks. And I don't like to say "tears." Because today, Jacqueline; language has no Sense. This morning you are a tree. A tree that scatters its aroma around the patio where we live.

You are a basket of Magnolias, white-lilac in color, and tender green leaves. You will be the smile of sadness and the tear over joy. But I will have you within my reach, being reborn with me... I am not interested in anything else about the enemies.

I know they will never be judged: only the face of all of Chile and in full light, so that the same sidewalks spit on them. With the years as disordered as my heart, so beaten in different ways, worn out and half-dead, that is how I remained. I write to them.

And I write to you

because it is impossible to seal the events that have marked us, and to continue walking lost is already to spin in the same vertex and I have few hours left to do so many things that are still missing.

And on that wall, your photo with Marcelo. or of André Jarland, with arms crossed and still sitting in a chair Jacqueline: you are by his side. I think of you. I think of him. Of Marcelo, your partner.

Of EVERYONE. I think of the suffering settlers. And I buy the newspaper, to find myself in its pages with Rodrigo and Carmen Gloria, burned alive without mercy by "the brave soldiers" simply in broad daylight at a street intersection.

And I think of your strong heart resisting, without help and without us. So many things to tell and not forget, such as for example: Javiera Parada dissolving my soul when recounting the kidnapping of her father and the subsequent events.

Thinking of Lonquén, or of Cuesta de Barriga. And so on. And so on. Arcadia Flores and her family. Paulina Aguirre, twenty years old, shot at the door of her house. Mothers. Siblings. Spouses. Parents and Children. Young and old thinking the same thing: of their people. Pregnant girls and how many what a pretension to think only of myself. There are thousands to think about.

Source: From Norma Yurich - her mother

fortune tellers, spiritualists, and mediums... asking for you. They spit on me at the gates of the command posts, I am ignored in the anterooms of the ministries, the doormen kick me - my fingertips bleed, my eyes burn, reviewing files – asking for you.

I sit at the table with palm readers, chiromancers, and tarot readers – throwing cards, scrutinizing crystal balls, activating Ouija boards – Asking for you. Barefoot, covered in ashes, I make a pilgrimage to Delphi, Fátima, Silicon Valley, The UN, NASA, The Vatican, Mecca, and Lhasa – Asking for you.

I enter insane asylums. I snoop in confessionals. I psychoanalyze myself, I get drunk, I hypnotize myself with peyote – asking for you. I plant myself in the plaza, I chase the gypsy women, who flee – when I ask for you. At the exit of stations, airfields, ports, I hold up a polyglot sign

• Asking for you.

I burst into temples, desperate, searching for the true name of God, because this one I invoke does not answer when I ask him about you. Empty, exhausted in the dust, Curled up in my abandonment, I surrender, tired to infinity, but your memory, like a sting, transports me from sadness to nausea, and from there to the peak of rage.

Your memory revives in me, like a burning tattoo on my belly, a nail of ice between my eyes, a scapular of shadows resisting the erosion of time. Why won't they let us know where you are? whether in the earth, the water, or the air.

I walk now on tiptoe, painfully alert, avid for signs... perhaps a small broken branch, the threads of a torn spiderweb, a sigh, a moan, something, a minimal clue that might return to us the shadow of your longed-for presence.

Meanwhile, we will weep, here, there, and yonder – Daily – We will weep until we pour out the last tear. We will weep without tears, without eyes, from empty sockets. When the frost melts, we will weep blood from the heart, from the heart of the cloven heart, peering terrified across the plains, from the shivering of the summits, we will weep, motionless like black crosses silhouetted against walls of impenetrable arrogance

• we will weep -

Before the indolent angels, livid, faces turned toward the impassive heavens, trembling reeds before the immense ossuary of a sea of indifferent lead – We will weep – Before breakfast, at every meal, between soups and tears, looking at your empty chair – We will weep – Tirelessly, in grueling shifts

• so that the weeping does not cease -
• because there are not many who still weep -

like me, who weeps quietly in front of the window open to the road by which you will never return, on any sunset, Jacqueline. We will weep until the end of time or the consummation of justice. And when there is not one left to weep, the one they call Supreme will be... engulfed by his loneliness.

And as there is no hidden crime, sooner or later, we hope, according to the unmanageable alchemy of mystery, that terror squads of seagulls besiege the executioner's family on vacation, That a cloud of black butterflies consumes his house in a long night, That vultures assault him in the garden, or that the tears of his pretentious lamps melt and ruin his tapestry.

For your martyrdom, Jacqueline, and countless others of the same infamous making, we know that supreme innocence compels the invention of the supreme crime. The engineers of malice designed the satanic conceptual artifice: The synonym: disappeared - dead.

Creatures who, the longer they are invisible, the less they will be - subjected to ontological deconstruction, to the quicksands of induced amnesia, devouring the immolated being. Nevertheless, you, my little Jacqueline, and myriads of our beloved brothers, have defeated the death-blow of death, lighting our evocations with life, filling memory with love, given that the most secret life of our memory is animated by love, making it indestructible.

Source: Santiago Bell - October 2004

For a mass in the year 1991, Jacqueline's mother wrote this card: Everything must be different.

Slowly. Now time is divided into "before and after" the Forcibly Disappeared. The new generations, after the victims, since the tortures, will think like them: the human being is the most important thing, in their right as such.

Greed feeds some, but it also spills, suddenly, into misery. And it is inconducive to a better world. Our souls are broken, but not our thinking: firm. Not vengeance, but justice. We carry a broken heart and a soul in twilight, but we will continue forever.

It has already been discovered that perversity is not a lie: There are those who gave the orders. Those who carried them out. Those who promoted them. And those who involved themselves in helping or with applause.

But here are Marcelo Salinas Eytel and Jacqueline Drouilly Yurich, husband and wife. He, 30 years old, Electronic Technician, detained on this date. She, 24 years old, finishing her degree in Social Work, three months pregnant.

They and all the forcibly disappeared will make those present remember this sad truth so that the horror that lasted so many years does not happen again. So that it never happens again. We will care, we will demand, and we will arrive. Norma Yurich de Drouilly. October 30, 1991

Source: Norma Yurich de Drouilly. October 30, 1991

Date: 30-10-1991

It is placed on record that in a letter sent by Jacqueline Drouilly to her father, dated May 13, 1974, she relates in detail that on Friday the 3rd of the indicated month and year, at 14:45 hours, three subjects appeared at the former residence of the affected parties, who identified themselves verbally as members of the Military Intelligence Service (S.I.M.), and asked if a certain person lived there, whom they did not know.

They proceeded to raid the residence and interrogate Marcelo and Jacqueline. In a closed closet, they found some documents that belonged to the former owner of the property, a socialist lawyer, and which corresponded to files from the legal defense of a known MIR militant.

The entire operation lasted about an hour and a half, and the subjects left after giving the order not to leave during the afternoon, as they would return. Indeed, the subjects returned that afternoon, with a softer demeanor, as they had apparently requested references for the affected party at the School of Social Work of the Universidad de Chile.

They pointed out that the person involved was the former owner of the house, but that they would take Jacqueline anyway, to see if she was recognized or not by a detainee. Thus, on May 6, 1974, the affected party was taken by three subjects to the home of the detainee's wife, located at stop 14 of La Florida, who did not recognize her.

After this procedure, Jacqueline was returned to her home, with instructions that if they came or called asking for the person they were looking for, they should inform them. The subjects continued calling the residence of the affected parties for some time.

Source: archivochile.com no date

Nicole and Viviane Drouilly Yurich, sisters of Jacqueline Paulette Drouilly Yurich, Forcibly Disappeared. Born December 3, 1949, in Santiago. Social Work student at the Universidad de Chile, in Temuco and later in Santiago.

Married to Marcelo Salinas Eytel, electrical technician, born... Detained on October 30 and 31, 1974, at 23 years old and... My sister and her husband were renting a room from a fellow student in Santiago.

On the night of October 30, they arrived at the house to detain my brother-in-law; my sister was alone at that moment. They were DINA agents; they took her up to the room and were with her for several hours, where they tortured and raped her while waiting for my brother-in-law.

The night passed and he did not arrive because there was a curfew. Then they took her to the clandestine detention center at José Domingo Cañas. When he called on the phone in the morning to let her know he was going to pick her up in a taxi, he spoke with the fellow student, who was being threatened by the agents.

When he arrived, the DINA agents shot at the taxi and detained him to take him to the same detention center where they were savagely tortured. From there, they were taken to "Venda Sexy," another terrible place of torture... finally to Villa Grimaldi and then to Cuatro Álamos.

There, their trail is lost and they disappear; we no longer have more testimonies from people who were with them, but the evidence, unfortunately, points to the fact that the people who were at Cuatro Álamos were thrown into the sea.

That is why we, as a family, have very little hope of knowing where the remains of Jacqueline and Marcelo are. My sister was three months pregnant at the time, and we also do not know if that baby was born...

My mom traveled immediately to Santiago when she found out they had detained her and arrived at the room and had to see the destruction alone. In that room, without my dad or us, the bed was undone, the pillow thrown, wrinkled, everything was on the floor, and the watch was also lying on the floor, broken.

During the days that followed, my mom packed all her things; the pillowcase, the sheets, etc. The agents stole the charango and other valuables they had. Jacqueline liked to surround herself with pretty things; the yellow watch was striking, a replica of an antique watch.

She had a hard time waking up in the mornings, but with that shrill noise, I am sure that many times she did not wind it so it wouldn't ring. The conditions in which my mom found it are tragic because it brings us the feeling of the violence against her and against us as a family.

I wish time had stopped for her, as the watch shows, but it continued and she was subjected to terrible torture. Many things about her have been erased from us, that is why we live surrounded by photos so as not to forget her features, because we don't remember her features... it has to do with a post-traumatic process that we have suffered as a family, so objects have an important role, not only because they remind us of Jacqueline and the living person she was, but also because we want her to feel that she is part of our lives and that we live with the things that lived with her.

We have her present all the time, despite how painful all of this has been... The last time we saw her was for her wedding, in August of '74. The next day, my father invited us all to eat at a Chinese restaurant; we were her younger sisters and we admired her a lot because she was a person of great charisma, very attractive, very intelligent, and extraordinarily entertaining, so we loved being with her.

I have only beautiful memories of her...

Source: parquedelacultura.cl no date

Your absence has become something stony. Life and our lives have changed. Our mom and dad have died. Of your sisters, the three of us are still here. You have 5 nephews and 6 grand-nephews. Sometimes we scrutinize our nephews, children, or grandchildren, trying to find in them something of your character, or a gesture, or the color of your skin.

I look at my son's hair, which he has let grow long, and I recognize your light-streaked, wavy brown hair. The nose, no, yours was unique, with a slight bump that you hated; you always said it was the result of falling from a window onto a cactus, a version that seemed extremely curious to all of us.

If I could describe you, I would say that you are energy itself. And you have a characteristic that you surely got from my mom, the "gift of people." Everyone likes you: kids, adults, old people, grumpy aunts, teachers, friends' moms, friends' brothers, friends' dads (even if they are police prefects), men in general, etc.

Even now, I find people who tell me how pretty and nice you were. A former schoolmate told me she will never forget that they were preparing everything for a fundraiser party, and suddenly they realized there was no mayonnaise.

You said, "But it's no trouble for me to make it." And driven by a supernatural energy, you took a bowl, 3 yolks, and 2 forks to whisk, and you started. Everyone watched you because the mayonnaise was rising like a chemical experiment, and you looked like an animated monkey.

Do you remember the aluminum mold with a removable bottom in which you made your famous lemon pie? Well, after inheriting it from my mom and using it for years, I even took it into exile, I gave it to Alejandra, your niece, so she can continue the tradition and remake that famous pie.

When you were at the university, in Social Work, you went with your class to Bolivia. You arrived very, very tanned, and you brought back many souvenirs, among them a typical blouse made of white fabric, embroidered and with netting on the sleeves.

You wore it one Saturday, braided your hair with colored wool, and went out to the center. Jacqueline, Temuco in the early 70s, provincial in all its splendor. And you, super proud, with your tanned legs and this mini-skirt.

My dad, who was having a coffee in a café, saw you and came out like a flash. He grabbed you by the ear. "Jacqueline, how can you walk around like that? Go home and put something on." "But Dad, what's wrong with it?

It's what the Bolivian cholitas wear." "Yes, of course, but with a skirt!!!" You love to scandalize, and that nonchalance you have is so funny. When I pass by your old university in Temuco and see a kind of small roundabout at the exit, I remember you spinning like crazy while you were learning to drive in our green Citroën.

Every time we meet with my sisters, new stories appear where you were the protagonist. How many times have we imagined that you had the baby you were expecting, and that she would be in some corner of Chile and that one day we would cross paths with her and recognize her instinctively.

But no, we read in the file that you had lost it while you were in one of those terrible places. The holidays would pass, and each time I told myself, for Christmas she will be here. Or for my birthday.

You wanted to marry Marcelo as quickly as possible; the situation was already very grave that August of '74. You got an appointment at the civil registry at 8 in the morning. And you returned married. You decided to have a small party in the afternoon.

And it was the last party you threw, we threw, before the fateful day. Jacqueline, our beautiful sister, did you know that your light still transcends? Michele – Nicole – Viviane

Source: museodelamemoria.cl 2021

Letter from Jacqueline's father to his forcibly disappeared daughter.

Temuco, October 17, 2001

Despite finding myself affected by a memory illness, the passage of my daughter Jacqueline Drouilly Yurich through my life has not been forgotten. The presence of my daughter in my life lasted exactly 24 years.

Now in October, another year passes without knowing where she is or how she died. I believe that for many years I kept all the emotions resulting from the disappearance inside, and verifying daily that a member of the family is missing, could anyone remain mentally healthy enduring the loss of a daughter without there being damage, and even more so in unjust conditions? trampling on the rights of every human being.

I write these lines with difficulty but with much affection and respect for the reader. (signature) Jorge Drouilly ID 604250-3

Source: provided by the family

The play “Jacqueline” by the Colectivo El Deseo will be presented this Thursday, April 21, at 8:00 PM at the Teatro Diego Rivera in Puerto Montt.

JACQUELINE is a theatrical proposal that recounts the story of Jacqueline Drouilly Yurich, a young social work student at the Universidad de Chile, and her partner Marcelo Salinas, both militants of the MIR and detained in 1974 by DINA agents.

The story is told by Tomás, a clerk at the 11th Criminal Court of Santiago, who, in 1998, finds case file 2681, corresponding to the case of Jacqueline and Marcelo.

From that moment on, the scenes revolve around one of the most terrible historical moments in our country, intertwined with Jacqueline’s family history and an infinite love blinded by hatred. A question then arises that changes the clerk’s vision of justice: is justice perhaps impossible?

Verónica Arellano, director of the Colectivo El Deseo, invited the community of Puerto Montt and its surroundings to attend and fill the Teatro Diego Rivera, as the performance will be at full capacity.

“We are very happy as a company to return to the Diego Rivera and we hope to reach the theater's capacity, which exceeds 400 people. We are back on stage and we hope for a good turnout from the public, with a play that speaks to us from the love between Jacqueline and Marcelo, to reflect on the present and the future.”

The play is directed by screenwriter and choreographer Verónica Arellano, with dramaturgy by Óscar Petrel, art direction by Alonso Escobar, musical composition by Víctor Oyarzo and Tomas Ferrada, and general production by Marlene Rodríguez.

Performers: Jorge Ferrada – Carolina Contreras – Iván Álvarez De Araya – Camila Cortés – Alfredo Castro – Paulina Aburto – Sibbil Subiabre – Eliana Antar and Julia Bjorkstrom.

The performance of Jacqueline is on Thursday, April 21, at 8:00 PM at the Teatro Diego Rivera in Puerto Montt. Tickets cost $5,000 pesos and are available at the theater box office prior to the performance or by sending a DM to the Instagram account @colectivoeldeseo.

Source: elcalbucano.cl 4/20/2022

Date: 04-20-2022

Epistolary of Memory - Letter to Jacqueline from her sisters, Michele, Nicole, and Viviane.

LETTER TO

Jacqueline Drouilly Yurich

FROM

Michele Drouilly Yurich, Viviane Drouilly Yurich, and Nicole Drouilly Yurich

We are going to pretend that you are sleeping, or in a hospital bed in a coma, without knowing if you will wake up, and if so, when?

Your absence has become something stony. Life, and our life, has changed. Our mom and dad have passed away. As for your sisters, the three of us are still here. You have 5 nephews and 6 grand-nephews. Sometimes we scrutinize our nephews, children, or grandchildren, trying to find in them something of your character, or a gesture, or the color of your skin.

I look at my son's hair, which he has grown long, and I recognize your light-streaked, wavy brown hair. The nose, no, yours was unique, with a slight bump that you hated; you always said it was the result of falling from a window onto a cactus, a version that seemed extremely curious to all of us.

If I could describe you, I would say you are energy itself. And you have a characteristic that you surely got from my mom: the “gift of gab.” Everyone likes you: kids, adults, old people, grumpy aunts, teachers, friends' moms, friends' brothers, friends' dads (even if they were police prefects), men in general, etc.

Even now, I meet people who tell me how lovely and friendly you were. A former schoolmate told me she will never forget that they were preparing everything for a fundraiser party, and suddenly they realized there was no mayonnaise.

You said, "But it’s no trouble for me to make it." And, driven by a supernatural energy, you took a bowl, 3 yolks, and 2 forks to whisk, and started. Everyone watched you because the mayonnaise was rising like a chemical experiment, and you looked like an animated monkey.

Do you remember the aluminum mold with the removable bottom in which you made your famous lemon pie? Well, after inheriting it from my mom and using it for years—I even took it into exile—I gave it to Alejandra, your niece, so she could continue the tradition and remake that famous pie.

When you were at the university, in Social Work, you went to Bolivia with your class. You arrived very, very tanned, and you brought back many souvenirs, among them a typical blouse made of white fabric, embroidered and with netting on the sleeves.

You wore it one Saturday, braided your hair with colored yarn, and went out to the city center. Jacqueline, Temuco in the early 70s, provincial in all its splendor. And you, super proud, with your tanned legs and this mini skirt.

My dad, who was having a coffee in a confectionery, saw you and came out like a flash. He grabbed you by the ear: “Jacqueline, how can you go out like that? Go home and put something else on!” “But Dad, what’s wrong with it?

It’s what the Bolivian cholitas wear.” “Yes, of course, but with a skirt!!!” You loved to scandalize, and that nonchalance you had is so funny. When I pass by your old university in Temuco and see a kind of small roundabout at the exit, I remember you spinning like crazy while you were learning to drive in our green Citroneta.

Every time we get together with my sisters, new stories appear where you were the protagonist.

How many times have we imagined that you had the baby you were expecting, and that she would be in some corner of Chile and that one day we would cross paths with her and recognize her instinctively. But no, we read in the file that you had lost her while you were in one of those terrible places.

The holidays would pass, and each time I would tell myself, "For Easter she will be here." Or for my birthday.

You and Marcelo wanted to get married as quickly as possible; the situation was already very serious that August of '74. You got an appointment at the civil registry for 8 in the morning. And you returned married. You decided to have a small party in the afternoon. And it was the last party you threw, we threw, before that fateful day.

Jacqueline, our beautiful sister, did you know that your light still transcends?

Michele – Nicole – Viviane

Source: epistolariodelamemoria.cl 09/11/2020

Date: 09-11-2020

Court of Appeals ratifies conviction for the kidnapping of Marcelo Salinas Eytel

The ministers ratified the first-instance conviction by Judge Alejandro Solís, who on April 17, 2008, determined: 15 years and one day in prison for General (ret.) Manuel Contreras Sepúlveda.

The Santiago Court of Appeals ratified the conviction for the aggravated kidnapping of Marcelo Salinas Eytel, which occurred starting October 31, 1974, in the Metropolitan Region.

In a unanimous ruling, the ministers ratified the first-instance conviction by Judge Alejandro Solís, who on April 17, 2008, determined: 15 years and one day in prison for General (ret.) Manuel Contreras Sepúlveda; and 10 years and one day for the former head of the DINA’s Metropolitan Intelligence Brigade, General (ret.) César Manríquez Bravo.

The same sentence was also given to Brigadier (ret.) Pedro Espinoza Bravo and former DINA agents Maximiliano Ferrer Lima and Miguel Krassnoff Martchenko. Meanwhile, Orlando Manzo Durán was acquitted due to lack of participation.

History Marcelo Salinas Eytel, a radio and television technician, was 31 years old at the time of his detention on October 31, 1974, in front of his home on Calle Alberto Decombe, in Providencia. He was a member of the MIR.

Days earlier, his wife Jacqueline Drouilly Yurich, a Social Work student and also a forcibly disappeared person to this day, had been kidnapped by the DINA to be held as a hostage until Salinas Eytel appeared.

A "mousetrap" (stakeout) was set up at their home, and the agents forced Salinas Eytel’s sister to tell him that everything was fine and that he could arrive at the house without problems.

The technician arrived in a taxi, but upon seeing something suspicious, he told the driver to continue, at which point the agents fired at the vehicle's tires. Beaten, Salinas Eytel was taken first to Cuatro Álamos and then to Villa Grimaldi, from where he disappeared. According to witnesses, both Salinas Eytel and his wife were brutally tortured by Osvaldo Romo Mena.

Source: Tuesday, January 6, 2009 El Mostrador

Date: 01-06-2009

Judge issues 100th conviction against DINA leadership

The usual convicts: Brigadier (ret.) Pedro Espinoza, General (ret.) César Manríquez Bravo, Lieutenant Colonel (ret.) Francisco Ferrer Lima, and Colonel (ret.) Miguel Krassnoff Martchenko.

The 100th conviction against the leaders of the former National Intelligence Directorate (DINA) was issued yesterday by the special judge of the Santiago Court of Appeals, Alejandro Solís. This time it was for the aggravated kidnapping of MIR member Marcelo Salinas Eytel, who disappeared in 1974.

The former director of the DINA, General (ret.) Manuel Contreras Sepúlveda, was sentenced to 15 years in prison, which was added to the 57 he is already serving for other cases. However, Contreras awaits final sentences in 15 other cases that would raise his imprisonment to 197 years.

Another of those convicted by Judge Solís is Army Brigadier (ret.) Pedro Espinoza Bravo, second in the DINA hierarchy, sentenced to 10 years and one day in prison.

The same sentence was received by Army General (ret.) César Manríquez Bravo, former head of the DINA's metropolitan brigade; Lieutenant Colonel (ret.) Francisco Ferrer Lima, the "intellectual" of the repressive organization, because he asked for more "intelligence and less blood"; and Colonel (ret.) Miguel Krassnoff Martchenko, alias "The Russian," head of the MIR extermination brigade at Villa Grimaldi.

José Manzo Durán, former head of the Cuatro Álamos detention center, was acquitted.

Judge Solís's ruling is part of a process that began in January 1998, parallel to the trials against former dictator Augusto Pinochet that were in the hands of Judge Juan Guzmán Tapia.

That year, relatives of the forcibly disappeared filed complaints against Pinochet and other former officers of the Armed Forces and Carabineros, but Judge Guzmán decided to open another process for the aggravated kidnappings that originated at Villa Grimaldi.

On October 14, 2002, the Santiago Court of Appeals decided to reorganize Judge Guzmán's investigations due to the large volume of this process. Four ministers were appointed, including Alejandro Solís, who has issued 20 of the 100 convictions affecting the DINA leadership.

Marcelo Salinas Eytel, a radio and television technician, was 31 years old at the time of his detention on October 31, 1974, in front of his home on Calle Alberto Decombe, in Providencia. He was a member of the MIR.

Days earlier, his wife Jacqueline Drouilly Yurich, a Social Work student and also a forcibly disappeared person to this day, had been kidnapped by the DINA to be held as a hostage until Salinas Eytel appeared.

A "mousetrap" was set up at their home, and the agents forced Salinas Eytel’s sister to tell him that everything was fine and that he could arrive at the house without problems.

The technician arrived in a taxi, but upon seeing something suspicious, he told the driver to continue, at which point the agents fired at the vehicle's tires. Beaten, Salinas Eytel was taken first to Cuatro Álamos and then to Villa Grimaldi, from where he disappeared. According to witnesses, both Salinas Eytel and his wife were brutally tortured by Osvaldo Romo Mena.

Source: April 18, 2008 Lanacion.cl

Date: 04-18-2008

Judge indicts seven military officers (ret.)

Special judge Juan Guzmán Tapia indicted seven military officers (ret.) for the crime of aggravated kidnapping, for the disappearance of 23 people at the Villa Grimaldi torture center during the military government.

The former uniformed officers are the former director of the DINA, Manuel Contreras Sepúlveda; Colonel Marcelo Moren Brito; Brigadier Miguel Krassnoff; non-commissioned officer Basclay Zapata; agent Osvaldo Romo; retired Carabineros officer Conrado Pacheco; and agent Pedro Alfaro.

Manuel Contreras Sepúlveda for: Jacqueline Drouilly, César Negrete Peña, Marta Neira, Alfredo Rojas Castañeda, Jaime Vásquez Sáenz, Juan Molina Mogollones, Alej. Avalos Davidson, Sonia Rios Pacheco, Elías Villar Quijón, María Isabel Gutiérrez Martínez, Horacio Carabantes, Fabián Ibarra Córdova, Carlos Rioseco Espinoza, Alfredo García Vega, Abel Vilches Figueroa, René Acuña Reyes, Carrasco Matus, Hugo Rios Videla, Martín Elgueta Pinto, Agustín Martínez Meza, Juan MacLeod, Julieta Ramírez Castro, and Luis Palominos Rojas.

Marcelo Moren Brito for all of the above except Elgueta, Negrete, and Neira. Miguel Krassnoff for Negrete, Neira, Drouilly, Rojas, Vásquez, Molina, Avalos, Acuña, Carrasco, Ríos, Elgueta, Martínez, and Palominos.

Pedro René Alfaro Fernández for: Ríos, Villar, Gutiérrez, Carabantes, Ibarra, Rioseco, García, and Vilches. Basclay Zapata for: Rojas, Vásquez, Molina, Acuña, Carrasco, Ríos, Elgueta, and Palominos. Conrado Pacheco Cárdenas for: MacLeod and Ramírez.

Source: La Tercera, July 22, 2002

Date: 07-22-2002

The terrible truths - By Carmen Lazo

Among the villainies committed by the dictatorship, one does not know what is more terrible than the other.

I have the great privilege of inspiring confidence in so many who have been hurt by the regime; for that reason, I am going to transcribe a conversation that, apart from saddening the heart and filling it with rage, produces immense vicarious shame.

The lady who spoke with me for more than an hour must have been very beautiful. As we spoke, slow tears ran from her eyes, and she really wanted not to cry. She shows me the photo of her daughter, a lovely young woman, telling me: "She was detained on October 30, 1974, around 11 at night, from her house located at 1191 Calle Alberto Decombe.

Those who detained her told the person living on the first floor that they were from the Military Intelligence Service and that she, Jacqueline Paulette Drouilly Yurich, was being taken as a hostage." She had been married for three months to Marcelo Eduardo Salinas Eytel.

30 years old, an electrical technician. She was 24 years old and studying Social Work at the Universidad de Chile. She was pregnant.

On October 31, a commando waited for the husband and detained him around eight in the morning along with the taxi driver who was bringing him. The young man had warned that due to the "curfew" he would arrive in the morning.

Nothing more. From that day on, the pilgrimage began that has been that of thousands of Chilean mothers trying to find out the whereabouts of their children. The family was from Temuco. Upon learning of the detention, the parents moved to Santiago.

At the Comité Pro Paz, they were pointed toward the possible sites where the couple might be held. Long lines on long days, but with the hope of finding them.

While we talk, she takes out an envelope full of papers, official documents, the address of the National Detainee Service that operated then, as a terrible irony, in what used to be the Chamber of Deputies of Chile.

They were unable to find out anything, until some time later an uncle of the young woman who resided in Lima received a communication from the International Red Cross notifying him that his niece was in Tres Álamos.

Why all these details when Chile is saturated with testimonies of the forcibly disappeared? Why does the mother show even the copy of the marriage certificate of the young couple celebrated at the Civil Registry of Ñuñoa on August 2, 1974?

Simply because in 1978, the representative of Chile to the United Nations, upon learning of a list of almost 200 forcibly disappeared persons, affirmed that those people do not exist, that they are not Chilean, that they are invented names.

A friend who accompanies this mother comments to me: "So I was never a girl in Temuco and I never played with Jacqueline Drouilly!"

The representative of Chile who made such reckless statements aspires to be president of Chile. I wonder if he is capable of saying that they deceived him and if he will ask for justice for so many young people who met the same fate.

Source: Fortín Diario – March 19, 1989

Date: 03-19-1989

LETTER TO: Jacqueline Drouilly Yurich FROM: Viviane Drouilly Yurich

Jacqueline, you were like an idol to me, and I would like you to read this little letter I am writing to you, just as you sent me one from your vacation spot when I was 7 years old, which surprised me a lot since I felt small and worthless, but I liked it a lot and I would like to know you now at your current age since I was left with your image of 24 years old, the age you were when they unjustly snatched you away, leaving us devastated to this day.

I think we would be good friends, the two of us, and you would have liked my children a lot, I am sure of that, just as it would have been spectacular for me to know your little son who could not be born, for the same reasons as above.

So, when my children were born, I would have already had that experience of knowing a baby, and that is yours. The latent memory is how happy I felt when you came to Temuco from Santiago; I would wait for you in the morning, wanting to see you so much, and I felt like your favorite.

That smell of Santiago, a mixture of pollution and gas from the pipes, is distinctive to me of your house at the Estadio Nacional. Breathing that air from your window upstairs and seeing the roofs of the houses and many cars fascinated me, and I have the sensation very clearly.

And when I go to Santiago, I never stop remembering and seeing you at that window, and the patience you had with me to take me for tea with your friends after so much insisting, and the phrase that was never missing: "Behave yourself, don't make me look bad, and please don't steal the little spoons." Well, the bad thing is that I don't remember your voice; that makes me sad.

This is when one says the phrase "how I would like to turn back time," even if it is a cliché, we know it cannot be done and one thinks one can change events. At least I have the dream of thinking that I can. Nothing more, just that I have missed you a lot. Your little sister, Viviane.

Source: museodelamemoria.cl (undated)

Account presented in tribute to Jacqueline Drouilly Yurich

During the presentation of this, her niece Argelia Dominguez Drouilly dedicated these words to her:

Today is Jacqueline's birthday; she would be 73 years old.

From the day she was detained while pregnant along with Marcelo, her husband, our family was fractured and separated. Jacqueline and Marcelo were always present in our lives; my mother and grandmother made sure we knew them through stories so we would know what she was like, but on this occasion, I will tell the part that followed this tragedy.

I was born in 1977, and as the eldest daughter, I had to live through all the sadness and desolation of my mother and my grandmother Norma.

My mother and I were present at many marches, running a great risk, listening to news all day, going to school without saying anything about the situation that was occurring, and all with great fear, without fully knowing what was really happening.

We spent entire days at the Vicaría de la Solidaridad helping with any task, and I saw many women crying desperately, supporting each other, and I knew them all; a profound sadness was reflected in their gaze, and so many more stories over many years.

There is a phrase that causes me annoyance, when they have told me, "What would you know, you weren't even born yet." That phrase hurts in the deepest part, since for years I had to live the anguish, the fear, the melancholy, and the helplessness that my family lived through and that affected me at my young age.

I also lived through part of that tragedy that no one can understand, only the people who lived it. To this day, I have thousands of memories of that time. I am grateful to the collective "El Deseo" for this wonderful play, to the Museo de la Memoria, and to all those who made donations so that the play "Jacqueline" could be presented in Santiago.

Source: Provided by the family, 12/3/2022

Date: 12-03-2022

Oh, my dear ghosts, forgive our comfortable cowardice

In memory of my companions and colleagues Cecilia Labrín and Jacqueline Drouilly (), murdered by the DINA in 1974.

IT WAS NOT a pleasant reminder—nor a pleasant journey. On the contrary. It was painful. A nostalgia transformed into tears born of rage more than of the sorrowful memory marked that day. At least, that is how it happened to my spirit.

People pass in front of the beauty of their daily surroundings and do not see it, do not feel it, nor value it. The routine of day-to-day life makes it difficult to soak in that which the tourist admires.

Something similar happens with the ugliness, with the sadness, and with the wounds of a history still close that will take another twenty decades to properly close. New generations build upon the ashes of those who fought to ensure them a future less harsh than the present that they had to live.

But those generations do not know this history; perhaps they intuit it thanks to the stories—already dilapidated and worn out by the excess of verbosity and tears—that very old people (almost grandparents) insist on never forgetting.

Perhaps. But for many people, the above slides off their bodies like the soap of a morning shower. For them, the horrendous, the terrifying, is better to isolate, to dodge, and not to acknowledge that something truly inhuman and bestial occurred in that place.

It is then that the poorly named "national humorous streak" arises, a kind of soft slap thrown with the glove of indifference. One must laugh at the dead, at the victims, and, especially, at the victimizers.

Why continue throwing twigs of canelo and walnut into that bonfire of divisions? I have heard the same phrase so many times... and those same times I have committed myself, stubbornly, not to fall into the game of forgetting.

For this reason, on a random day, I made a quick tour of those Santiago streets where once—not many years ago—there were centers of detention, torture, and death. The idiosyncrasy of the Chilean allows them to point with precise accuracy to the distortion of reality.

Everything must be mocked, even death and murder. They transformed Pinochet into a poor circus buffoon, just as they left Toribio Merino leaning on the bar of a dive bar, of that same death that he installed on the decks and holds of ships like La Esmeralda and the Lebu.

Then, supposedly comic or bizarre nicknames emerged to subtract drama from the genocide. La Venda Sexy, El Palacio de la Risa, La Matinée del Diablo, Yucatán, Cuartel Ollagüe... and so on and so forth. All of this very convenient for the murderers. Mocking the tragedy is ignoring it. Perhaps it is worse, since in reality, one is insulting the fallen.

I passed in front of some of those properties where death reigned, and I wondered if the spirits of those who died under unspeakable torture would wander through hallways and rooms on moonless nights. A useless question, really, since death remains there attached to the walls like a tapestry of horrors.

The ghosts of our comrades continue to take shelter in the hope that one day, those of us who transit through concrete life will strip ourselves of our comfortable cowardice and decide to do true justice so that they can, finally, leave those places of pain and move to more pleasant dimensions.

I have always been a supporter of justice that encompasses the complete reality, which means a sanction in accordance with the punishable act. Punta Peuco does not convince me as an exemplary punishment for those criminals who abused a power that no one gave them.

Nor does it convince me to send them to public prisons, since these are privatized and their owners, in some cases, turn out to be partners or friends of close relatives of many of the detained uniformed officers.

Why not imprison those bestial troglodytes in the same places where they caused pain, death, and tragedy? Let them spend thousands of nights there visited by the ghosts of those they murdered. Let them remember again and again, day after day, the aberrations committed, and that every night, next to the reigning darkness and the fear that smears the soul, they hear the voices, the footsteps, the screams, the crying, and the oaths of all those beings whose lives they cut short without mercy.

May madness take hold of their minds, poison their arteries, and tear their hopes to pieces.

I imagine, and it satisfies me, the desirable suffering of the deranged criminals trembling with terror, wallowing—every night—in their feces and urine in a corner of pestilent rooms permeated by the stench of death, tormented by the presence of a thousand spirits that flagellate them with their presence and with the inquisition of questions lacking answers, of spells and predictions regarding the torments of the underworld that await each and every one of the genocidaires in future lives.

I would be pleased to see those murderers impaled by terror, their minds absorbed by an incurable madness, biting each other and attacking one another with the viciousness of zombies. Yes... that would definitely be a good sentence, a necessary and just sentence. Would those who lost their lives in such places agree with it?

Once, in what I consider his best poem, Vicente Huidobro wrote:

Oh my ghosts! Oh my dear specters! The night has left night in my hair Where was I? Where have I walked? But was that absence or was it greater presence?

My dear ghosts, many like me—millions in reality—have never abandoned you. Forgive our pusillanimity. We continue trying to do justice and perhaps we will die in that attempt, but we have never forgotten you... despite the efforts that your and our former comrades have made to hide not only the memory of your struggles but also their own shame as traitors and corrupt individuals, since at an early hour they surrendered docilely to the whim of the enemies of always.

My dear ghosts, know that new challenges, new struggles are coming. We will be in them too. Our action is aimed at structuring a Constituent Assembly, a new and democratic Political Constitution, and, of course, building in Chile that necessary true democracy where everyone, before the State and the law, is equal while maintaining our particular differences.

Only then will the broad avenues open to receive the new Man. That is where we are. The struggle has not ended, it only begins.

(*) Cecilia Labrín and Jacqueline Drouilly, murdered in 1974 by rabid dogs wearing caps, boots, bayonets, and a flag.

Source: By Arturo Alejandro Muñoz, published October 17, 2012

The day they notified us, it had dawned beautifully in November, with a gentle warmth and spring filling our heads, with birds rehearsing their songs for the summer and people dreaming of vacations. But after that, everything changed; from then on, the colors were darker and the days sadder; even the small, familiar things became threatening.

It was a beautiful November day when they notified us. It has been so long, Jacqueline. And the years have slipped through our fingers. And I refuse to accept that all that remains of you are a few blurry photographs, a distant memory, a forgotten echo, an unfinished piece of knitting, some embroidery threads, that telegram you sent me, do you remember?

And a name on a list. No, Jacqueline, but what am I saying! It is not that only that remains, but that that remains as well. There is not a single day, since that one, that I have stopped remembering her.

Always, in the morning or at night, or in unforeseen moments, preceding anguish or after having thought about that precarious thing called happiness. To be able to write all this that I desire as it deserves, I would have to accompany my words with laughter, aromas, photos, vacations, tenderness, letters, fear, sorrow, bureaucratic procedures, and above all, hope.

My sister (and I write this with such pride), who since October 30, 1974, ceased to be a 24-year-old woman, 4 months pregnant, a Social Work student, a militant of the MIR, married, beautiful and young, friendly and scatterbrained, to become a forcibly disappeared person.

I cannot stop thinking that what I am writing does not belong to me. I don't know, but I still don't believe it. It has been 5 years and I still wake up thinking it was nothing but a nightmare. There were four of us, with Mom and Dad.

A normal family, in a normal country, in a normal situation. But like in a game of chess, our friends began to fall, followed by terrible stories of torture. Torture? But that is something that does not belong to our era!

And the fear begins—that cold thing that runs through the body and tightens the stomach; that makes the legs falter and makes one feel helpless—and the exorcising magic that the word "mom" holds, which serves to ward off dangers, no longer works for us.

The fear, the fear of the doorbell ringing, of the military, of cars with antennas, of people asking questions, of those suspected of being informants, of the people with whom we had argued about politics.

Fear, in short, of everything. A year passes like this, and in July 1974, two cousins fall along with Bárbara, the partner of one of them. It was our own sister who told us the terrifying and incredible story, in which DINA agents, as a way to pressure them to talk, burst into my aunt's house with one of the two brothers, who was very mistreated by the torture, and repeated to her: "Don't you see, ma'am, if he would cooperate this wouldn't happen to him; now we will have to take him again to try to make him talk." Even then they did not succeed; he was released after two and a half years, but his brother and his sister-in-law are on the list of the forcibly disappeared (Edwin Van Yurick and Bárbara Uribe). The danger was drawing closer. In October, a friend of Jacqueline's falls. It was terrible, but selfishly, I thought that at least it hadn't been her. On the night of October 30, they knock on her door; it was Jacqueline's sister-in-law who had come to tell her there were problems. From the darkness, two DINA agents appear and ask her for Marcelo; she replies that he is not there, to which they respond that they will take her as a hostage. They tell me they began to beat her and kicked her up to the second floor. Upstairs, they searched everything for more than two hours, until finally they forced her to leave; before doing so, she grabbed a pink cardigan to keep warm. The agents would return later to wait for Marcelo, whom they detained in the morning, after waiting for him the entire night, which they used to break everything and steal. What rage it gives me to think that they touched Marcelo's charango and then took it away. It was a charango that had its own history. On a study trip Jacqueline took to Bolivia, with almost no money, she managed to buy it, and after countless adventures, she managed to arrive with it to where Marcelo was. If you think about it, it was a fetish, but also something like love turned into music. Jacqueline used to embroider, she embroidered a lot, and it was in an old tin cookie box that she kept her multicolored threads, on which, to protect herself from potential thieves (us, her sisters), she had written on the lid inside a heart drawn by herself: "Forbidden to open this box." And that box remained among the things our mother kept of Jacqueline's. So much time has passed... when I had to leave Chile, two years later, when I had no other choice but to leave Chile, my mother decided to open that suitcase to take out the box and give it to me, since I was the other one who embroidered. I brought it to Algiers, and I kept it with love and respect, but when one day I wanted to take a thread from it, I realized that what she had written had been erased. I tried to perceive the phrase or whatever might remain of it; I avidly searched for pencil marks, a small change in color, a faint trace of that heart drawn by her; but no, everything had been erased. And I felt how time had gone by, and how, despite our efforts, we had not been able to stop it. And what happened to the "Forbidden to Open this Box?" Did you take it with you, just like our warm life, our assured future, and all our laughter? And one begins to live a new and strange experience, in which nothing was known but could be suspected. Mom travels to Santiago (where the detention had occurred). Two weeks later, the rest of the family travels to meet her, and I am left alone. One day I receive a phone call in which my mother tells me that they finally have something concrete to communicate to me (I clarify that in those situations, the worst is always something concrete, and the best is only a hope). She tells me she is very happy because, through a military officer known to my father, they found out that my sister is in a concentration camp, alive although incommunicado. Incommunicado? Concentration camp? I am afraid, it cannot be! Christmas time arrives, and the world, oblivious to these tragedies, thinks about gifts to give and turkeys. It is then that I receive another call in which they tell me that the military officer, a friend of our father, had promised to take Mom on Christmas Day to see Jacqueline (even now I feel a chill when I remember that). That man had a business in the elegant sector of Santiago; it was there that he summoned my mother to agree on how they would make the visit—a beautiful illusion. The 24th finally arrived, and my mother tells me that upon arriving at the friend's business, to leave from there in search of my sister, he gives her a box of chocolates as a Christmas gift, but moments before leaving, he asks her to blindfold herself since they would be going to a secret military facility. However, time passes, and he, who does not stop telling her that it will be very soon before she sees her daughter, asks her to tell him what she is going to say to her, which increases her expectations. Unfortunately, when there were no more than five minutes left until midnight, the guy tells her that he is truly sorry but that he has received an order at the last minute, and that they will not be able to go... If only we had known that, but we learned later from other prisoners that Jacqueline was at that moment in "Cuatro Álamos," and that the "friend" military officer was actually from the DINA and was in charge of a torture house. We resisted believing it, but Radio Moscow confirmed it; it even gave the address of that tenebrous house that the cursed man ran. That, and in that way, was how we became convinced that we had fallen into the tragic and sadistic game of a torturer. We only wait for the day when justice takes charge of him. Then, companions from "Tres Álamos" begin to be released. And we begin to learn different details of our sister's detention. One day we received a statement made by a commission of the "International Red Cross" during a visit made to "Cuatro Álamos" on November 20, 1974, the text of which said: "Fears are held for the life of the couple composed of Jacqueline Drouilly and Marcelo Salinas." Sometimes when we were doing paperwork, and the inevitable question came, "What is Jacqueline's age?", I always hesitated; it is just that doing math has always been hard for me. Besides, for me, she stayed at 24, so even now I cannot answer that question mechanically without first stopping to think and do calculations. Twenty-five, twenty-seven, what does it matter! You are ancient and you are born every day. I remember your hands, your laughter, you wanted to do everything, you wanted to live everything, your material is indestructible, you are immortal, you are so strong that you can withstand that, that which breaks and tears, that which degrades and sublimes, that which tests and measures. And you are always by my side, all day, all night, I feel you so close, so close that I can touch you. If my words were of any use, I would write the entire life! If my tears were of any use, I would dry my eyes crying! If my love were of any use, I would love until I died! But I know that it is only useful to follow your example, and my life I have already filled with it. Do not fear, nothing will be in vain. My cousin, who had been detained in July 1974, told us that he had spoken with Jacqueline through a crack in one of the barracks and that she had told him she was fine, but that Marcelo was in bad condition due to the torture. My cousin would declare that same thing in Algiers in 1978 before the "Tribunal of the Commission of Inquiry into the Crimes of the Military Junta in Chile." But happily, he was saved; of the fate suffered by his brother and by Bárbara, his wife, there is only certainty that they are part of the list of the forcibly disappeared. The need for Jacqueline forced us to invent her, and we found her everywhere. Every time my mother saw a police van, she insisted that they were carrying her in the back, and when we managed to see who they were carrying, we often found girls with pale and haggard faces who, like my sister, were suffering like her, but it was not her; she appeared only in dreams with her pink cardigan—that, the dictatorship could not prevent. Last night I dreamed of you, Jacqueline, I dreamed that we were in our old Citroën, and when I asked you if it had been hard, you smiled, but not with that smile so well known to us, which filled the house and made one feel the scent of spring. No, it was not that smile, it was a sad smile, an apologetic smile, it was like asking me for forgiveness for only coming in dreams. I want the hours to pass quickly, I want the day to pass quickly and I want the night to come, to return to dreaming of you, Jacqueline. One afternoon we were lucky enough to receive a girl who had just been released and who had been with Jacqueline. What she told us was a mixture of things that caused us both sorrow and joy. She did not know my mom personally, but she did through references from my sister. She would take her hands and say: "But Normita, I know you so well, Jacqueline talked to us so much about you..." and she would begin a long list of stories and anecdotes that only we could know, as they were part of the folklore of our home. But along with those tender things, she also told us that Jacqueline had lost her baby. Perhaps what hit us the most was what she told us about a day when our sister had told her, very happily, that one of the DINA men had notified her that she would be released, which would mean they would acknowledge her detention, and afterward, the most likely thing was that they would expel her from the country in freedom. Of course they took her out, but nothing was ever found of her again. Not a trace, not a leaf, not a breath, not a hair, not a flower to mark her passage, not a crumb of bread to indicate the path, not a cry nor a sigh. She only left a cosmic route to be able to reach her, with a memory, a dream, an example. Meanwhile, we were working at the "Committee for Peace"; we had realized that we were not the only ones in this situation, and that allowed us to step out of our own margins and understand the problem in its full impact. That year was particularly hot, and the good weather lasted until long after the summer. The state of the weather became an obsession for me. I thought that as long as the good weather lasted, there would be fewer days that Jacqueline and Marcelo would be cold. Therefore, every sunny day was received by me with infinite gratitude. Furthermore, imagining when Jacqueline would return turned into a masochistic and tragic game for me. I mentally had a list of all the important dates like Christmas, September 18, birthdays, and I would tell myself, "No, this Christmas she will be here," but Christmas would pass and she would not be there. The cruelty of Jacqueline's disappearance mocked all the lists of dates of her foolish and naive sister, who believed she could dominate the terrible power of the machine of terror with exorcisms of empty and stupid anniversaries. Our father became unemployed. A small paper from the DINA talking about his dangerousness was enough for that (for the DINA, all relatives of the forcibly disappeared were dangerous extremists). And he had to leave. But my mother said that no one would take her out of Chile until she knew about Jacqueline. So she remained there with my younger sister, and the other half of the family left, moving ten thousand kilometers away. But our objective did not change. Even if only one flower, one mirror, one stamp remains in the world, I will continue asking for you. Even if the sea recedes, the birds grow sad, the lamb becomes ferocious, I will continue searching for you. Even if scissors united, bureaucrats loved, and clocks confused time, I would continue dreaming of you. Even if the truth lied, love hated, and courage terrified, I would continue thinking of you. Even if there were only one mouth, one ear, one heart, I would continue speaking of you. Even if all that happened, even if I no longer existed, I would continue, I would continue, I would continue, Jacqueline. Sometimes, when reading the news regarding the discovery of so many murdered people, upon finding in a hidden paragraph the phrase: "...along with the first two human remains taken from the Lonquén oven, pieces of remains of pink fabric could be distinguished," I have cried with sorrow and desperation, remembering that my sister Jacqueline, when she was detained, was wearing a cardigan knitted by herself in that color, and it is with it that I still see her in my dreams.

Source: By her sister Michele, Algeria 1977

WE WERE ALL GOING TO BE QUEENS - Excerpt

WE WERE ALL GOING TO BE QUEENS - Excerpt

Study on nine pregnant women who were forcibly disappeared in Chile - Truth and Justice Series - Volume 1 -

CODEPU

• 1990

JACQUELINE PAULETTE DROUILLY YURICH

Jacqueline was 24 years old when she was detained on October 30, 1974. The following day, her husband, Marcelo Salinas, was also detained. Jacqueline was three months pregnant.

She was born in Santiago on December 3, 1949, and was the eldest of four sisters. Her mother is Norma Yurich and her father is Jorge Drouilly. Jacqueline’s childhood and adolescence were spent in Temuco, a city to which her father, an architect by profession, had been transferred by the Ministry of Public Works.

She studied at the German School in that city. According to her mother, Jacqueline spoke German perfectly:

“She completed her final years of secondary school at the Baptist school in Temuco. Then she entered the Social Work program. My daughter grew up amidst the rain of the south, until she returned to Santiago already married.”

Upon arriving in Santiago, she enrolled in the Theater School of the University of Chile, hoping to resume her Social Work studies.

Her mother describes her

“Tall, thin, with wide hips, very graceful, like a gazelle in her movements. She drew attention for her physique, but above all, what stood out in her was her spontaneous joy. She had boundless energy; wherever she arrived, everything changed.”

Some of her friends describe her as someone who loved parties, simple and cheerful, good at telling stories and jokes; her joy and laughter were contagious. She had a desire to help everyone; poverty distressed her, and she was always collecting clothes and toys for the poor children of Temuco.

People who knew her when Jacqueline was a little girl recall her as a whirlwind—cheerful, laughing, and playful.

Jacqueline had married Marcelo Salinas Eytel on August 2, 1974. He was 32 years old, an electrical technician, and a member of the MIR. At the time of her detention, Jacqueline was living with Marcelo on the upper floor of the house of María de la Luz Varela, a university classmate who later provided testimony and details regarding the couple’s detention.

On October 30, 1974, near midnight, individuals in civilian clothes arrived at 1191 Alberto Decombe Street. Jacqueline was on the ground floor doing machine work for the university with her classmate. The individuals asked for Marcelo Salinas.

Jacqueline told them he was not there, but identified herself as his wife. They immediately began to interrogate her and brusquely forced her to the second floor, where they beat her brutally while searching the premises, demanding she reveal Marcelo’s whereabouts.

Jacqueline managed to put on a wool coat and a hat, and they took her away. The captors told María de la Luz Varela that they were holding her as a hostage.

At 6:00 a.m. the following day, October 31, 1974, the men returned, heavily armed and in several vehicles. They stationed themselves in the house to wait. At one point, the phone rang. It was Marcelo calling.

They forced the homeowner’s daughter to answer, instructing her to say that Jacqueline was in the bathroom. Marcelo asked her to tell Jacqueline that he would come to pick her up in 20 minutes. He did so, arriving at the residence in a taxi; upon seeing the military personnel, he thought to drive past, but the men fired at the car’s tires. Marcelo and the driver were detained.

..............

JACQUELINE DROUILLY

was taken along with her husband Marcelo Salinas as well as Cecilia Bojanic and Flavio Oyarzún to the house at José Domingo Cañas.

“This house had a room in the courtyard separated from the main house, apparently made of wood. Next to the room, there was something like a closet; that is where they put those who had just been tortured.

In another room, they kept the female prisoners who were collaborating with them (at that time, Marcia Merino Vega and Luz Arce). When they took us out for interrogation, we crossed the courtyard, always blindfolded, of course, and to enter the house, one had to climb three steps,” recalls a political prisoner from that time.

Amanda de Negri, a lawyer by profession, ID 4.930.155 from Santiago, detained on October 9, 1974, by Marcelo Moren Britto himself, relates that on October 30, when she was already at Tres Álamos in the "free talk" section, she was taken back to the José Domingo Cañas house to be subjected to a new interrogation.

“After they interrogated me and applied electric shocks without being able to confirm anything they asked me, they took me to the room where they had all the political prisoners crowded together. Because of the shape of my face, I could see by tilting my head back; in that way, I distinguished a young girl sitting in a corner, somewhat plump, wearing a wool jacket and a skirt.

She was quiet and remained quiet throughout the night; she only said in a low voice that she had been detained along with her husband and that her name was Jacqueline Drouilly. She also told us she was from Temuco and that she studied Social Work.

When dawn began to break and we were all trying to encourage one another, Jacqueline remained quiet; only at midday did she begin to speak and say funny things that made us laugh. They had Marcelo in the closet, and it appeared they had tortured them. I think that the joy and confidence she tried to instill in us was perhaps a defense mechanism for her.”

Amanda de Negri was transferred after 6 days back to Cuatro Álamos. Jacqueline and Marcelo Salinas remained at José Domingo Cañas.

Cecilia Jarpa Zúñiga, ID 6.399.677-7, who was detained by the DINA on October 1, 1974, relates that on October 30, while still at José Domingo Cañas where she had been interrogated and tortured, she met

Jacqueline Drouilly

“She arrived at night. After a few hours, they took her out again and brought her back later. I was with her for 15 days, then they transferred both of us together to Cuatro Álamos. There, we were in room 3.

Jacqueline was always talking, saying funny things, and was very witty; she managed to make us laugh. Furthermore, she was ingenious; she managed to find out where they were holding Marcelo at Cuatro Álamos, and with a small mirror, which I don’t know where she had gotten, she signaled to him with the sun through a window.

One day, they began to call out the names of some prisoners; those called left their rooms and lined up in the hallway. It was a long list. All of them are now forcibly disappeared, among them Jacqueline and Marcelo.”

........................

In the case of JACQUELINE DROUILLY, who was detained on October 30, 1974, while three months pregnant, her child should have been born during the month of April 1975. (According to Jacqueline’s mother, she had been examined by an International Red Cross Commission inside the Tres Álamos detention camp, where her pregnancy had been confirmed).

The name of Jacqueline Drouilly and that of her spouse Marcelo Salinas Eytel appear on the list of the 119 Chileans who allegedly died abroad. Between July 22 and 24, 1975, the Chilean press, loyal to the dictatorial regime, widely published two lists—one with 60 names and the second with 59—reporting their deaths in various parts of Argentina, Colombia, Venezuela, Panama, Mexico, and France.

This news had allegedly been extracted by the Chilean press from two newspapers published simultaneously: one in Brazil, "O'Día," and the other in Argentina, "LEA." It was later proven that the magazine "LEA" had been published only once and that its almost exclusive content was to report the deaths of MIR militants.

The magazine "LEA" was allegedly printed at an Argentine state publishing house under the Ministry of Social Welfare, whose head was José López Rega, private secretary to President Estela Martínez de Perón and linked to the anti-communist organization "Triple A." As for the newspaper "O'Día" of Curitiba, Brazil, its existence was never proven, and international news agencies established in Brazil could not find the source of the news; nevertheless, the Chilean press cited it extensively in its reporting.

Thus, the newspaper Las Últimas Noticias, under the direction of Fernando Díaz Palma, reported in large headlines: "New plan in practice among miristas: bloody internal vendetta in the MIR. Disappeared in Chile resurrect in Argentina, but are now killed by their own comrades."

For its part, El Mercurio, under the direction of René Silva Espejo, reported: "They were claimed as disappeared. Miristas killed were being sought in Chile."

These reports were absolutely false. As lawyer Hernán Montealegre related at a seminar held in Santiago on November 14 and 15, 1989:

“My audacity consisted in the fact that, since it had been said that these people had died in confrontations in Argentina and Brazil, I decided to personally travel to Argentina and Brazil to uncover this problem of the deaths and the confrontations.

I encountered the news of the forgery that occurred with the magazine Lea and the newspaper Día, both in Buenos Aires and Curitiba. In reality, that was the fundamental motive for my detention; what was done to me when I was detained was to punish me.

From the moment I was detained at my house at 5:00 a.m., the DINA personnel immediately asked me, ‘Where is your passport?’ I replied, ‘I turned my passport in at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs; I do not have a passport.’ They told me, ‘No, sir, we want the passport you use to travel to worry about the 119 children of good conduct.’”

All the foreign countries mentioned as the places where the miristas had allegedly killed each other categorically denied the news, including Argentina. Faced with the evidence of the lie, an explanation was requested within Chile itself and by international organizations.

On August 20, 1975, General Pinochet himself announced that the Government had ordered an investigation into the facts through official channels and within the country. This investigation was never carried out, or if it was, its results remain unknown to this day. Abroad, Sergio Diez, the military regime’s representative to the United Nations, declared that the forcibly disappeared did not exist.

Since the beginning of 1974, the search for detained or kidnapped persons who never appeared again had begun. Their families had turned to the Committee for Peace for advice. For all of them, as we know, writs of amparo (habeas corpus) had been filed that were never accepted.

Faced with these facts, the Church asked the Supreme Court for a visiting minister to investigate the situation of these people. The besieged dictatorship planned the fabrication that 119 of these sought-after people had killed each other abroad.

Among the 119 names that appear on this list, 19 are women who were forcibly disappeared. The first of them is Barbara Uribe Tamblay, kidnapped on July 10, 1974. Number 12 is Jacqueline Drouilly, and No. 52 is Marcelo Salinas Eytel. This list does not include Cecilia Labrín, Gloria Esther Lagos, or Cecilia Bojanic, who also disappeared in 1974.

Why Jacqueline appears and not the other 3 pregnant women who were detained and disappeared in 1974, nor the other 5 women detained and forcibly disappeared during that year, still has no explanation. What happened to them? And at the same time, what happened to Jacqueline Drouilly?

Furthermore, there is serious evidence that will be made known in due course by Amnesty International, the German government, and the lawyers handling the Colonia Dignidad case, indicating that the 119 forcibly disappeared persons were at some point transferred to Colonia Dignidad along with other prisoners and there, on a date that is still unknown, were murdered and their bodies hidden.

If that were the case, one would have to investigate: what happened to Jacqueline Drouilly’s child, if he was born before his mother disappeared? And if so, where is he?...

Jacqueline’s mother, Mrs. Norma Yurich, has told us: “I will search for her until the last day; after her detention and disappearance, her father and two of her sisters went into exile; the family was destroyed.

I will search for her until the last moment of my life... Every day I wake up and go to sleep thinking of her. One cannot live without this ghost inside; one cannot touch it, but it is there... it is there.”

Later, Mrs. Norma adds

“If I had the perpetrators in front of me, I don’t know what... (she cries in silence) I would prefer not to see them; but those who gave the order, them I would, and justice will finally have to know what it does.”

Jacqueline Drouilly | Pregnant and Disappeared Women by Gabriel Rodríguez https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bkpUD_86VVg

Source: youtube.com 2019

Letter to Jacqueline Drouilly from her mother (Norma Yurich)

Daughter of my heart,

Remembered Jacqueline, Luckily, I have had a rest from you for a few days at least. Of course, I have the slight feeling that we miss you, especially for going to the pharmacy. Do not take this the wrong way, because the truth is that we need you much more... to come down and open the front door, especially when the ringing is from the mischievous kids who have nothing to do and dedicate themselves to going around knocking on houses.

If you notice something strange in this letter, for example, certain errors in the writing, it is because I am writing as usual; while Michele climbs on the desk, Nicole cries with her huge mouth, the baby screams asking to be picked up, Clorinda asks silly questions (for example, where to hang the clothes from the wardrobe or with which hand to open the drawer where we keep the money), the phone rings, the heater has gone out, the door opens with the wind, a plane passes by, or the driver arrives to take the kerosene cans that they pour into that thing I mentioned above, to be clearer; the one that appears on the eleventh line, penultimate word on the right-hand side; well, you already know that movie, right? ...

Moving on to something whiter and more radiant, yesterday we went to the wedding of the Oyarzun girl, the eldest, the one with the face of a kitten at five in the morning, thin as an arm of yours or mine, who is named like the song Michele used to sing... “Eliana, your name is very beautiful.” We had a wonderful time, great.

And so that you die of envy and hunger, I will tell you what there was: A pile of little things, delicious, like walnut, like meringue with cream, like nun’s sighs, delicious, delicious, but delicious...! – Regarding things with salt, they had roasts of various types: cow, bull, ox, calf, in short... of the whole family (of the cow, not the Oyarzun family). (I explain this well so there are no misunderstandings); Green bean salads, red—no, the red ones were the tomatoes—also other things that the earth gives, the ordinary earth, don’t go thinking it’s about Tierra del Fuego.

There was yellow ice cream and that dreadful symbolic cake that you tried once. Many things in bottles completed the list. Surely I have forgotten some, but since we already ate it, it has not the slightest importance.

The bride wore a white dress (strange, right?) and the father a black suit; the rest of us were wearing all colors. The trees were the same ones you know. Forgive me, I forgot to tell you that this happened at the Quepe estate, with everything, with everything, civilians and priests to marry those I already told you about, and it was at one in the afternoon.

I had to run out to buy myself a dress, which when you see it, you will die laughing. Your father also arrived in a new suit, with pants that look like Pecos Bill, like Elvis Presley’s.

Look, I would quite like you to behave yourself; otherwise, you would turn out to be an embarrassment to the family. – Your first letter filled me with joy, but not your father’s, because he said that it seemed to him that what you wanted was a few crazy pesos.

Michele and Nicole are very cute, but in parentheses, I will tell you that they are also becoming more like hairy spiders every day, because they fight, now, even when they are sleeping. Viviane is a sweetheart, and she looks precious when she lifts the little toe of her right foot, luckily, because we wouldn’t like it to be the left foot, right?...

Hey, I don’t want you to start crying like a ridiculous girl, but we miss you sometimes; that is to say, we miss the earthquake of your person, or rather, the tidal wave, so you don’t feel it so much.

Michele went out yesterday, very fancy, and full of absurd manners, to Valerie Langdon’s house, to the birthday party; what can I tell you, Nicole still cannot recover from not having been invited. She returned at seven in the morning, because the party was with drinks and rock and roll.

At these moments (seven-thirty in the evening), your father is reading the script for the audition you know, because the thing is that we are going to do it directly today, Sunday. I think he is more nervous than when he had to take exams at fifteen. Before that, he took a nap from six in the morning until... a little while ago. I think I am going to have to start giving him sleeping pills.

Since I don’t like to comment on anyone, I will tell you that Clorinda is more "cuckoo" every day. But despite everything, she has behaved well. She has had to stay alone sometimes and has done more or less okay.

I was already forgetting to tell you the main thing about the wedding where we were. Since the time (one in the afternoon) and the day (Saturday) were a bit complicated, it turns out the guests were confused, not knowing how to dress for this occasion, so they were dressed in all kinds of ways.

Some ladies with fur coats, thinking it would be cold later, others in sundresses, some young ladies in pants, gentlemen in their underwear, kids in swimsuits, little girls in sleeping bags, old women in balloon dresses, babies with high heels, and in short, everything one can imagine, but the worst thing that happened among the one hundred and fifty people we were, was that when we were sitting ten on a long bench, waiting for the second course, among them me and Jorge, suddenly... plop!... one leg broke and we all fell to the ground, into the grass; I don’t know how to tell you what happened, but there was general laughter for about half an hour. --- They asked me about you and the little girls. I played the piano as if it were the last time in my life I would play. There were a bunch of kids who wanted to dance and I played "La Plaga" for them for about twenty minutes ………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….

All those little dots don’t mean that I forgot what I was going to tell you, but that was the time we were broadcasting. Luckily, the Control room congratulated us, telling us that the program had turned out great........ And these others; that we stopped to have coffee, taking advantage of the fact that you weren’t there.

Hey, don’t show this letter to your classmates, male or female, and even less to the teacher, because they might find it boring; now, if you find it funny, then I give you permission. You know, I’m going to tell you a very silly joke: “There was a group of people talking about their children, and suddenly one says to another: - It’s clear you don’t have children, because you are so quiet; then the other replies: ‘You are wrong, because I have one.’ - Ah, he must be good then, does he smoke? - No. - Does he dance? - No, and is he a wanderer then? - No. - That means he is admirable, how old is he? - 2 months.”

Here I make a list of what you must do: 1.- wash yourself well, especially your neck. 2.- be respectful to your teacher. 3.- be on good terms with all your classmates. 4.- talk just enough. 5.- keep your clothes tidy. 6.- COMB YOUR HAIR. 7.- do your homework, 8.- organize your books.

And many other things that I have told you millions of times --- List of what you must NOT do: 1.- Put a scarf around your neck instead of washing it. 2.- Answer your teacher like a carter would answer another carter. 3.- Get into hair-pulling fights with the crowd. 4.- Talk at all hours without anyone managing to make you shut up. 5.- Hang that expensive jacket under the bed. 6.- Walk around all day with a huge "messy hair," as if you were Brigitte Bardot in poverty. 7.- Store your books with your shoes inside. 8.- Start drawing thousands of identical girls with blown-out hairstyles, because they look big-headed, instead of doing your duties.

I imagine you will listen to what I tell you above. In any case, take it into account and also communicate it to your friends in case it helps them, because with this we do them a favor and to their mother.

You know that I love you very much and that is why I want you to study so that you are something more than a housewife, because that job can also be done by a maid without knowing how to read or write.

Well, dear daughter, if I keep writing to you, even you will think that I am an idle mother, because they don’t know that here, while everyone sleeps, I am with your letter. It is two in the morning.

Receive at this moment many kisses from me and some that your daddy left me in charge of, also other loves from Michele and Nicole.

Clorinda sends her regards.

We are all anxiously waiting for next Saturday to go and wait for you, because I and the little girls love to see trains.

At the moment of closing this edition, I remembered some money I want to send you; patience, it will reach your hands soon. DO NOT WASTE IT. It is better that you return it to me.

I greet everyone I know. Special affection to those you know I love the most. BEHAVE YOURSELF.... BEHAVE YOURSELF.... BEHAVE YOURSELF.... BEHAVE YOURSELF.

Bye, beautiful,

YOUR MOM AND YOUR DAD

Temuco, Nov. 20, 1961

Source: Letter provided by her family