Defending Human Rights in Latin America

I have a new post up on Defending Human Rights in Latin America at Al Jazeera.It's been about two weeks since I wrote it so it sounds a bit dated already.

Time Magazine recently named The Protester as its person of the year 2011. If I were to confine the choice to Latin America, I would have to support the human rights defender. While there have been previous successes, 2011 seems to have been a watershed in which nearly every country has made some progress in bringing those responsible for some of the worst human rights abuses to justice.

What do you think? On balance, was it a pretty good year for holding human rights violators accountable?