First Appeal Pledge Program
Run from a small office in Colorado, an agile AIUSA program protects human rights defenders in danger and signals abusers to back down.
By Doug Cosper
Bertha Oliva de Nativí had received death threats before. Dark-hearted enemies come with the territory for the outspoken Honduran human rights campaigner. But the telephone voice that found her in her Tegucigalpa home at 5:30 p.m. on Sept. 26, 2003, chilled the soul of the mother of two.
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Ellen Moore and Scott Harrison with AIUSA staffer Natasha Nummedal in Colorado. © Kevin Moloney |
"Doña Bertha?" a man inquired.
"Sí."
"Hoy le matamos a su hija (Today we kill your daughter)." Then the voice dissolved into laughter.
"To threaten my daughter ... I believe is their way to stop me so I don't continue to fight for the full defense of human rights," said de Nativí, a 22-year veteran of the human rights movement and coordinator of the Committee of Relatives of the Disappeared in Honduras (COFADEH).
De Nativí swiftly informed her staff, and they put out word of the threat. The news found its way to Amnesty International's London headquarters seven days later, but unfortunately it arrived just as the office was shutting down for the weekend.
It would fall to a small network of Amnesty International USA members, based in a tiny town in Colorado, to act, and act quickly.
That response would rely in part on Eleanor Pansar, a former Boston social worker who, at the moment de Nativí was rushing to the side of her 9-year-old daughter Marcela, was coaxing a big-wheeled lawn mower through tall grass at her family vacation farmhouse in the sleepy inland village of Cornish, Maine. Pansar, who is now 57 years old, had visited Central America in the turbulent 1970s and felt solidarity with victims of injustice there. But as she cut the grass, she was unaware that a safety net was being spun in her name and the names of 11 others to safeguard de Nativí and her daughter Marcela.
Pansar is one of about 450 subscribers to the First Appeal Pledge Program: an AIUSA initiative that celebrates its 30th anniversary this year. FAPP is designed to tap the good will and dollars of everyday people who are dedicated to human rights but who are too busy to take part in traditional letter-writing campaigns such as AI's global 80,000-strong Urgent Action program.
AIUSA's Ellen Moore calls FAPP "Amnesty's best kept secret — a program for people with more money than time."
FAPP subscribers' monthly pledges of $10 or $20 allow Moore to send faxes or telegrams in their names to officials quickly — often within minutes of receiving word of distress — warning authorities that the world is watching.
"People of good will are totally bummed about what they see happening in the world. This is an action they can take. A letter in their name goes right to the bad guys," said Moore, who coordinates FAPP from AIUSA's Urgent Action office in Nederland, Colo., a funky mountain town of 2,000 souls west of Boulder. Her husband, Scott Harrison, directs the Urgent Action Program, and they work together in a cozy home office where volunteers' dogs sleep amid whirring office machines.
When word of the threat to de Nativí reached Amnesty International's London headquarters on Oct. 3, a member of the AI's Central America, Mexico and Venezuela research team saw the email describing the danger.
"I stopped what I was doing to deal with the case," recalled a London team member who was familiar with de Nativí's work in Honduras on behalf of families of the disappeared. She immediately phoned Tegucigalpa to check the facts on the email and listened with trepidation as de Nativí asked AI to intervene on her behalf.
"She is a very strong woman," said the London team member. If de Nativí asks for help, "it must be serious."
"The problem was that it was after 4 p.m. Friday," said the London staffer. The case clearly qualified for an Urgent Action, but it was too late in the workday to process a dispatch to the worldwide Urgent Action Network for a traditional letter campaign. The earliest AI could start the process was Monday morning — perhaps not soon enough for de Nativí and her daughter.
With her hands tied in London, the London team member turned to Moore and Harrison in Colorado. They were preparing to drive down the mountain for dinner and a movie when the London team member's email arrived. For some reason it had taken the message more than five precious hours to reach Harrison's computer. Just before they walked out the door for dinner, Harrison checked his email one last time. He turned to his wife.
"We've got a WARN."
It was the Worldwide Accelerated Response Network (WARN) alert that the London team member fired off before leaving her London office. The 120 WARN members around the world whose names Harrison keeps on his computer have pledged to act immediately to send an email, fax, or telegram to appropriate officials in response to detentions and threats of torture. These "off-hours Urgent Action" alerts carry less detail and activate far fewer people than a UA but strike more quickly. Harrison, an AIUSA staffer for 28 years, developed the Urgent Action program in the United States in 1975; he and Moore launched the WARN program in 1986.
That October evening, when Harrison received the WARN about de Nativí and her child, he emailed the global network so that members could begin firing off personal emails, telegrams, and faxes.
WARN gets results, but some members will be asleep, out of town, or not have their computers on. That is when FAPP plays a critical role.
Instead of sending the messages themselves, FAPP members delegate Moore to compose and send letters on their behalf around the globe, almost instantly. Once a telephone tree, FAPP has evolved into "something approaching elegance" thanks to computer software, said Moore.
So before most WARN subscribers had a chance to act or even check their computers, Moore had already commanded her FAPP program to randomly select 12 subscribers. She composed four different messages of about five sentences each and designated Honduran officials to receive them. She then dispatched the FAPP data to a company that instantly turned them into faxes, telegrams and telexes bound for Honduras in subscribers' names.
Within about two hours, the Honduran minister of security received a telegram signed by Eleanor Pansar of Maine: The message read, "On Sept. 26, Bertha Oliva de Nativí received several threatening phone calls on her private phone number in Tegucigalpa and on her cell phone. Please act at once with courage and compassion to protect one of Honduras's human rights defenders."
FAPP was working as designed. Honduran officials were on notice that they were being watched.
"We turn the tap on, and then the offending government officials know that this trickle will become a waterfall in a few days if the situation isn't rectified," said Harrison. "The system is designed to respond within minutes, hours at most."
While the FAPP alerts were arriving in Honduras, Moore and Harrison took in a late movie, and the London team member went home for the weekend. Pansar was playing Scrabble with her family by kerosene lantern light at the Maine farmhouse, following a church supper of ham, beans, and cherry pie, still unaware of the action taken in her name.
Back at work the following Monday, the London team immediately initiated the extensive Urgent Action process for de Nativí's case. Harrison and Moore and 90 offices around the world received the detailed UA and dispatched it to network members. Within an hour, AI members received the plea by email or fax and were set to make their personal pleas to Honduran officials. Others received the action later by mail.
These personal pleas on de Nativí's behalf let flow Harrison's "/magazine/spring_2004/first_appeal/waterfall." But thanks to Pansar and other FAPP subscribers, the Honduran government recipients of the messages already knew that AI members around the world were monitoring them.
The situation is still dangerous for Honduran human rights defenders, but de Nativí has received no more telephone death threats. She said she believes that the messages offer protection.
"The authorities in my country worry a lot when there is an intervention by Amnesty," she said.
A London team member said that the FAPP program is often seen as a lifesaver by researchers at the Amnesty headquarters who are caught during off-hours by an urgent appeal for help. "It's very important. Otherwise, nothing happens until Monday," the London team member said. "In this case, we told [de Nativí] that we were going to support her. That means starting immediately. We have to express solidarity. It's important for people to know that other people around the world know what's going on with them."
The FAPP program fits the needs of victims of human rights abuses like de Nativí and her daughter, and those of busy people like Pansar who care about them. But Moore thinks the time is ripe to expand FAPP and to double or even triple the subscriber list.
"If we had 1,000 or 1,200 subscribers, we could send 40 to 50 messages per case" instead of a dozen or two, she said. "If the government gets 50 messages, they would not be able to ignore them."
Amnesty International USA has more than 320,000 members. Moore would like to see some of them move up from basic membership to FAPP, which "allows us to send these messages in real people's names. That's the power of it," she said.
Pansar, who directs three separate programs at the John F. Kennedy Family Service Center, first learned of her intervention in de Nativí's case by receiving a notice from Moore. Pansar called herself "a lazy person" who nevertheless cares deeply about justice and human rights. Her busy schedule doesn't allow writing letters to government officials, so she opted to subscribe to FAPP seven years ago, she said.
"I do this because it is the easiest way to do the most good." 
