(24 Jun 2019) Two months before Tamara Lagos was born in October 1984, her father was killed by agents of the Chilean dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet.
Soon after, her mother took her into exile in Argentina.
But when Lagos finally returned to Chile five years later, she was unable to secure a birth certificate with her father's surname because he wasn't alive to claim her as his child.
The quest for redress would eventually lead her to the Supreme Court, which finally ordered the Chilean civil registry to correct Lagos' identity document in April.
Even so, she doesn't have a sense of closure, saying the ruling is not enough to repair it or to become a source of joy.
Like many others, Lagos is one of the Chilean dictatorship's so-called "posthumous children" who lost one or both of their parents during the 1973-1990 dictatorship.
Some have fought decadeslong legal battles demanding to be recognised as offspring of victims, while others have struggled to obtain accurate identification with the names of their biological parents.
Chile's Human Rights Program declined to give The Associated Press the number of cases similar to that of Lagos.
But there are nine instances listed in the 1991 records of a Chilean truth commission that quantified the number of people killed and entitled their direct relatives to compensation.
Since the Supreme Court ruling only applied to Lagos, others are facing difficulties in the pursuit of justice for Pinochet-era crimes.
During the dictatorship, at least 3,095 people were killed, according to government figures, and tens of thousands more were tortured or jailed for political reasons.
Chilean courts have made progress by appointing special judges exclusively dedicated to cases of human rights violations, with 447 defendants sentenced and an additional 1,328 put on trial between 2000 and 2018.
An amnesty law issued by Pinochet in 1978 shielded offenders who committed human rights abuses during the dictatorship's first five years, but it has not been applied since 1990, leading to the prosecution of hundreds of others.
Despite the strides, however, Chile has continued to uphold deep barriers against the children of leftist dissidents killed during the brutal regime.
In 1994, Lagos was formally recognised as an illegitimate daughter.
That allowed her to pursue a university degree for free and obtain a monthly pension of about 57 US dollars while she studied - one of the benefits granted to the relatives of dictatorship victims.
But the designation still suggested she had been born out of wedlock.
In 1998, legislation passed by the Chilean government retracted the requirement that children's status at birth be listed on their legal document.
The law, however, only applied to children born after that year, leaving many, including those orphaned for reasons unrelated to the dictatorship, at a loss.
For a long time, Lagos focused on a lawsuit against the government aimed at securing justice over her father's execution.
A court eventually ruled that two assassins were involved in the killing, but said it could not determine who took the fatal shot.
That case is currently being appealed.
Separately, Lagos filed a formal suit in 2018 against the Chilean civil registry over the exclusion of her father's name on her identity document.
Rodrigo Bustos, head of the National Human Rights Institute's legal department, said the institute helped with the case because Lagos "was suffering an infringement on her human rights".
The civil registry declined repeated requests for an interview.
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