ABSTRACT
This chapter examines human rights activism and advocacy in South America. Human rights activists and lawyers continue to drive the agenda when it comes to accountability for past crimes, given that the state generally remains reluctant to probe its own crimes. The chapter focuses on the plethora of existing and emerging human rights groups that responded to the unprecedented wave of state terrorism and violence that swept the region during the second part of the twentieth century. Human rights NGOs across the Southern Cone no doubt helped to develop and later consolidate a culture of human rights throughout the region due to their historical struggle for accountability during the unprecedented violence unleashed by dictatorial regimes and in the long aftermath. Impunity, which had dominated under dictatorship, persisted thus as an enduring variable that activists would still have to confront even after the long-desired return to democratic rule.
