Woman of Conscience : Activism’s a ‘Very Personal Thing’ for Leader of Amnesty International, USA

Carole Nagengast’s desk blotter is filled with jottings: “Iraq team special project . . . police and nat’l guard deportations . . . angry people . . . Center for Victims of Torture.” Her office, fitted into a back bedroom of a rustic house in the woods, seems an unlikely place to face the world’s ominous concerns and cruelty.

Nagengast, however, chairs the board of an organization that, she says flatly, raises “a big stink”--Amnesty International, USA.

The 400,000-member group is a branch of the worldwide organization that works for the release of all prisoners of conscience, fair and prompt trials for political prisoners and an end to torture and executions. Currently, Nagengast is preparing for the annual general meeting, scheduled later this month in Los Angeles. About 2,000 members, from many of the group’s 500 community and 1,500 academic chapters, are expected.

But Nagengast’s involvement with Amnesty International has drawn on far more than her organizational skills and ability to run meetings. A member of AI since 1977, Nagengast and her husband, Michael Kearney, a UC Riverside anthropologist, founded the Riverside chapter in 1979.

Their activism deepened their commitment to the point that they housed a former Paraguayan torture victim in that same back bedroom for two years.

In the mid 1980s, Constantino Coronel, secretary general of an agricultural union, had been released from five years of imprisonment and sent into exile. He had been adopted as a “prisoner of conscience” by the Riverside group and, after learning of his release, it found him work with Cesar Chavez’s United Farm Workers in Keene. However, torture had left him severely damaged physically and emotionally and Coronel couldn’t handle a job. He lived with Nagengast and Kearney until the political climate changed sufficiently in Paraguay for him to risk a return, where he remains.

Nagengast doesn’t seem to regard taking a stranger into her home as extraordinary. In fact, she repeatedly points out, AI is an organization of very ordinary people:

“We do behave as if Constantino was a member of our family and we do all the things we’d do if he was our brother or sister.”

Thus, she says, the letters to the Paraguayan government and Coronel; the contact with trade unions and members of Congress; the demonstrations and vigils:

“That’s what we do. It’s a very personal thing . . . .

“I value my own freedom so much--it may sound crazy--but I really feel I’m defending my own rights.”

In 1977, Nagengast, recently divorced and the mother of three young children, traveled to Poland. A graduate student in anthropology, she explored the possibility of field work in a Polish village. A tour of cultural and historical sites took her to Auschwitz. Her life has never been the same.

“It was a seminal experience,” she says. “ Human rights abuse is such an abstraction. But all of those photos--those faces of people who are gone, the bins of human hair. They gave it a reality it otherwise didn’t hold for me--in my gut.”

That same year, Amnesty International, which formed in London in 1961, won the Nobel Peace Prize. Nagengast returned to California and joined the organization through its newly opened Los Angeles office.

A full-time student--en route to a master’s degree from UC Riverside and a Ph.D. from UC Irvine--she was not immediately active. Rather, she took her children to Poland and settled into a village for a year’s research on rural entrepreneurs in a socialist system.

When she returned to Riverside, however, she and future husband Kearney formed AI Group 163 there in 1979. Since then, they have spent almost every Saturday morning at the Riverside meetings.

“We were both activists involved in various political things,” she says, including work with Central American refugees from El Salvador and Guatemala.

One thing led to another. Kearney’s anthropology and activism intertwined, and involved Nagengast. Kearney’s aid to some undocumented Mixtec Indians from Oaxaca in Mexico, in trouble with the law in Riverside, resulted in both anthropologists’ long-term relationship with Mixtecs in Oaxaca. It led Nagengast to research human rights of indigenous people and migrant workers.

Phone calls to and from Mixtec friends in Mexico are frequent, and a family of migrant workers from Oaxaca now lives in a mobile home a few yards from their house.

Nagengast shrugs: “They needed a place to park their trailer.”

Just as casually, she explains Coronel’s two-year residence: “I don’t remember ever talking about it. That’s just what had to be done.”

She laughs: “Michael and I sort of have this lifestyle. We’re human rights activists. You never know who you’re going to find when you walk through the door.”

Nagengast’s involvement has not been all personal contact. Before joining the Amnesty USA board in 1986, she headed the U.S. coordinating group on Turkey. That meant becoming an expert on a country she knew nothing about--other than the fact that a military coup had produced thousands of political prisoners and incidents of torture. Case sheets arrived by the hour, she says.

She studied, made contacts inside Turkey, met several times with the Turkish ambassador and urged Congress to consider human rights abuses when Turkish NATO bases were discussed.

Finally, in 1987, she turned the Turkey project over to another member who lives across the street. The situation has since improved, Nagengast says: There are far fewer political prisoners, but torture remains “a daily concern.”

She says she tries not to let her position interfere with her letter-writing on behalf of prisoners--an action at the heart of Amnesty. She pulls out a recent one to the Turkish prime minister, which names alleged victims, torturers and people making death threats.

Nagengast says the group seldom is certain the extent of its role in a policy change or a prisoner’s release. In Coronel’s case, she speculates: “Was it because of AI? Possibly. Was it because Ted Kennedy got involved? You bet. Was it because the AFL / CIO got involved? Possibly. We just think, if even one person is saved . . . “

Nagengast pulls out a brochure that excerpts a statement from Coronel. He tells of a crumpled letter that had been thrown into his cell one Christmas Eve. “It said, ‘Take heart. The world knows you’re alive. We’re with you. Regards, Monica, Amnesty International.’ That letter saved my life.”

While rewarding her personally, Nagengast’s work with Amnesty may have cost her somewhat professionally. She laughs and guesses that it held up her doctoral degree by two years. Now 49, and an honorary research associate at UC Riverside, she says she’ll look for a full-time job when she completes her 18-month term later this year as board chair.

Amnesty has been more than a full-time commitment.

Paul Hoffman, legal director for the Southern California branch of the American Civil Liberties Union and board member and past chair of Amnesty International USA, has worked closely with Nagengast. He calls her very effective and says in some ways her level of commitment is typical:

“Unlike many boards, people on it have had hands-on grass-roots human rights experience. They work very hard. They’re not on it to make abstract policy, although they have to sometimes. But they want to do something for people. Carole is very much in that mold.”

And in that mold, Nagengast says, she took the grass-roots side of an internal AI debate about democratizing its decision-making. Her side prevailed.

She also supported Amnesty’s decision to oppose the death penalty and to adopt homosexuals as prisoners of conscience incarcerated for their sexual politics or personal practices.

“The debate raged for a decade,” she says of the latter. Members worried about multiculturalism, that groups in certain countries would be offended. Amnesty did lose American members when it made its stand on the death penalty, but decided to take the risk with the sexual preference issue, she says:

“Ultimately we took that position on principle.”

Sheila Dauer, director of country actions at Amnesty USA’s national office in New York, calls Nagengast “a terrific motivator and a good organizer. She’s a very substantive person to work with.”

Both were involved in the effort to have the worldwide organization adopt a campaign against human rights abuses of women. The issue met some resistance, Dauer says, because Amnesty had traditionally not singled out people by categories such as sex.

That resulted in women not being featured frequently in Amnesty’s campaigns, Dauer says, and the organization’s failure to regard gender-specific abuses, such as rape, as a form of torture and human rights abuse. Now Amnesty is part of a worldwide campaign to treat women’s rights as human rights.

Nagengast takes little credit for the women’s rights project, saying Dauer was the driving force.

Rape will be on the agenda at the general meeting this month, she says, as will rights of indigenous peoples in the Americas, and the status of Haitian refugees.

“We are in violation of international law,” she says of United States policy toward people fleeing Haiti. “It is racist in the extreme.”

Throughout her discussion of rape, torture, racism and human-rights abuses, Nagengast doesn’t sound defeated or depressed. For more than 10 years, she has dealt with the most base human behavior imaginable, but she refuses to foucs on such:

“I’m also privy to how terrific human beings are. Amnesty is full of ordinary people who do extraordinary things. That’s its strength. It’s not romantic. We bumble along.

“Most people are extraordinary if given a chance to be, if they see an avenue where they can make a difference. Maybe you can’t as an individual, but as a movement you can.”