Many human rights defenders continued to engage in activities seeking truth, justice and reconciliation for the victims of past crimes. While in many countries perpetrators were tried and truth commissions established, the relationship between HRDs providing legal representation to victims and their governments, old or new, were often tense. In Guatemala, the election as president, of a candidate who had been a general during the civil war was a cause of concern. In Colombia, despite a changed discourse in relation to HRDs under the new presidency and the dismantling of the scandal-marred Departamento Administrativo de Seguridad (DAS), little has changed in terms of a secure environment for HRDs, with reports of continued systematic attacks. Honduras has not yet recovered from the 2009 coup d’état, and impunity and the excessive use of force continued to be the cause of great danger for human rights defenders.

Many HRDs were killed because of the threat their work was perceived to pose to interested parties. In 2011 Front Line Defenders reported on the killings of 11 human rights defenders and family members in Brazil, El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras. In Brazil, Sebastião Bezerra da Silva was murdered in February for his work on extrajudicial killings; land activist Adelino ‘Dinho’ Ramos and environmentalist José Cláudio Ribeiros da Silva and his wife were killed in May; environmentalist and community leader Joao Chupel Primo was murdered in October. In El Salvador, Juan Francisco Duran Ayala, who worked on the environmental risks of cyanide contamination as a result of gold mining, was killed in June. Also in June, community leader María Margarita Chub Che was murdered for her work on illegal evictions in Guatemala. In Honduras, journalist Héctor Francisco Medina Polanco was killed in May, followed in August by Secundino Ruiz, Pedro Salgado and his wife Reina Mejia. An increased number of killings was reported in Colombia.

Impunity for these and previous killings remained pervasive. The authorities also failed to protect witnesses. In Mexico, a key witness into the December 2010 killing of Marisela Escobedo Ortiz was gunned down in his home in Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua together with two family members, just before his court appearance in March.

HRDs have survived physical attacks on their person across the region. The year began and ended with two brutal attacks: in January, a human rights defender from Honduras was kidnapped and tortured by a group of unidentified individuals, before managing to escape. He had been actively defending the rights of campesinos in the Aguán region. In December, a woman human rights defender was shot five times in Ciudad Juárez as a result of her work fighting for justice for the victims of femicide and their families in the State of Chihuahua, Mexico.

The homes and offices of human rights defenders were also often targeted. 2011 saw break-ins reported in Brazil, Colombia, Guatemala, Honduras and Mexico where confidential and sensitive information regarding human rights violations was stolen and property damaged. In a particularly vicious attack Front Line Defenders Award nominee Jackeline Rojas Castañeda was bound and gagged and a gun was held to her daughter’s head, during a break-in at her home in November, in Colombia. The assailants asked for the whereabouts of her son and her husband, stole two laptop computers, USB memory sticks, cellular phones and documents. In Mexico, in February, the home of a WHRD was set on fire as she attended a hunger-strike and protest in front of the offices of the Chihuahua State Attorney General in Júarez.

There were numerous instances of the criminal justice system being used against HRDs in order to prevent them from carrying out their work. Cases of unfair trials and fabricated charges were reported in Colombia, Ecuador, Honduras, Mexico, and Peru. Peruvian HRD Estinaldo Quispe Mego was sentenced to two four-year prison terms, charged with two counts of usurping public office, in connection with two separate boundary disputes in which he acted as intermediary. In Ecuador, a complaint was filed against two HRDs linking them to the disappearance of a sign relating to a community meeting, an allegation made on the basis that they were the two who had opposed a mining company operating in their area.

Human rights defenders were subjected to smear campaigns' or labelled as terrorists or rebels in Colombia, Honduras and Venezuela. In the latter, the director of an NGO working on prison conditions was defamed in a number of media outlets following statements made by the Government that accused him of instigating violence in prisons. In Colombia, HRDs were publicly called accomplices or sympathisers of armed groups, while at the same time they continued to receive threats from those armed groups and paramilitary structures, leading to a severe risk of attack from either side. In October, old charges were revived against Principe Gabriel González, who was arrested for rebellion and association with the FARC armed group. Security laws were used in Honduras, where Miriam Miranda Chamorro was arrested in March and then provisionally released on charges of sedition.