Neier: It looked as though the Reagan administration might launch a war against the Sandinistas in Nicaragua. There was a—not a war but a—an ongoing conflict in Guatemala and all of these would have—loomed large in American foreign policy.

So at that stage, I decided it was time to get into the game directly, and I let Bernstein and Schell know that I would be willing to take over the Helsinki Watch. But on the condition that I would also launch an Americas Watch, and that that would be a step in the direction of organizing a global human rights organization, and they agreed to that. So I left New York University and moved into what we were then calling the Watch Committees and established an Americas Watch, and I got into significant issues right away. There was a visit to the United States planned by the leader of the Argentine military. The president of the junta that then governed Argentina, and I organized press briefings about the human rights situation that was taking place in Argentina and got a fair amount of attention to those briefings and organized a committee that oversaw the activities of the Americas Watch.

Fairly quickly, we got involved in El Salvador, Nicaragua, Guatemala, Chile, and Argentina. Those were the five countries in the region that were the initial focus of the work, and I did a lot of this on a personal level.

From Oral History Interview with Aryeh Neier.

Fanton: It grew organically, and it grew in a kind of measured way. I give Aryeh credit for not taking on every issue everywhere all at once, he remained very focused on geographic areas, and particular issues, and trying to get some results. I think too often these NGOs (non-governmental organization), with all the good intentions, nonetheless grow too fast and their focus gets blurred, and so they’re source of lots of press releases and so forth. But what I learned from Aryeh was that you really had to understand how power worked, and you had to build a relationship with not just the dissident community, but with Western governments that could apply pressure. You had to be looking in countries of interest for members of the government or who were past government members who were sympathetic, sort of a gray zone.

So, I was very impressed with his ability to understand how power works and how change happens. So, I want to say he set the culture that Human Rights Watch was going to be research-based, fact-based, and it was going to get the facts right. If we weren’t sure about a human rights abuse, we were not going to publicize it until we had the evidence. So Human Rights Watch really worked on the ground, people got out in the field and developed a network of local people who could help verify and give us information.

I think in all the years I’ve been a part of Human Right Watch; I can’t think of any time when we got a big fact wrong, and that’s pretty remarkable given all the places we were working. So, I think Aryeh’s focus, his insistence on getting the facts right, the multiple reviews that every report would go through before it got released or published, meant that we became a trusted source. As the news media began over the years to have fewer people out in the field, they began to rely more on this trusted source at Human Rights Watch for information. That, of course, amplified our impact.

From Oral History Interview with Jonathan Fanton.

Roth: As I was saying, the Helsinki Watch methodology was about trying to protect dissidents in the former Soviet bloc. So, it was about spotlighting the dissidents trying to create space for them to operate, trying to get them out of prison. But the facts were not in dispute. The Americas Watch methodology evolved in the deeply factually contested situation of Central America where everything was in dispute and so you needed to be accurate, because if you weren’t accurate and right, you’d be blown out of the water. So it was that factual precision in a contested circumstance that defined the Americas Watch, and ultimately the Human Rights Watch, methodology. Then, Aryeh took it to the next step, which is that he deployed that information in Washington to influence policy. The Salvadoran government, the Guatemalan government, were difficult to address themselves, they didn’t have a great reputation to begin with.

But Washington couldn’t be seen to be sponsoring atrocities. So if in Washington, you could show that the US surrogates were committing war crimes, you generated real pressure on the Reagan administration to force them to clean up their acts. This was the second real innovation that Aryeh pioneered, which is the use of powerful, third-party governments to exert pressure on the target government, focusing, in his case, on using the United States government.

But there were enormous battles in Washington. And because Human Rights Watch or Americas Watch was able to come in with facts that were not effectively disputed, we were able to put real pressure on the Reagan administration first because they were embarrassed to be seen as sponsoring these atrocities. But then, to get rid of the bad press, they had to force their surrogates in Central America to get rid of the bad conduct. That was the second key part of the strategy, which is using media attention and then pressure on an important, influential third-party government to exert influence on the ultimate target.

From Oral History Interview with Kenneth Roth.

Méndez: Yes, it was a sort of a practice that we kind of perfected as we went along. Originally, we just walked—came to a place with just a notepad and pencil and took testimony as best as we could. It was kind of elementary and rudimentary, if you will. Later on we took photographs and things like that, but it was not part of our work to do that because we didn't have the capacity to publish photographs anyway, at least not early on, I mean. Later on, of course, we did. But when we came back and wrote a report, there was a sort of informal mechanism by which we challenged each other on; how do you know that? Who told you that? And how do you know that the person who told you this was—knew of it or had only heard it second and third and fourth hand? 

On that basis, we started perfecting our methodology. At some point, we actually trained our own people when we were larger and had more people joining us, and particularly people with some professional experience, but not necessarily experience on the ground. When we started training our people to do fact-finding on the ground, we used our experience, but also what we had learned from, what does it mean to have corroboration or not, and what follow-up questions you need to ask from anybody who tells you something about human rights violations. To do so at the same time without seeming to be inquisitorial or asking questions that might put them in trouble.

We perfected the idea of how we laid out our purposes in interviewing so that they could tell us what they wanted to tell us, under the conditions that they wanted to tell us. For example, if they wanted parts of it to be off the record, we honored those things, and we were very careful to honor those requests.  By and large, we made ourselves responsible for the information.

From Oral History Interview with Juan Méndez.

Manz: The one trip with the GAM was one trip with Aryeh where it was quite dangerous, too, because the American embassy mentioned that there were credible death threats, and that it was not wise for us to be there. But we felt we were supported by having two US [House] Representatives with us. At the last minute, [Thomas P.] Tip O’Neill [Jr.] said it was too dangerous—imagine, it's dangerous for them, but how about for us—it was too dangerous for these two representatives to go to Guatemala, so he prohibited them from going. They were in El Salvador, that was the end of their trip, they came back to Washington.

Aryeh and I decided we could not not go, we had to go, so we went. And we met with a few leaders of the GAM, and the next day, it truly brought tears to my eyes when we’re walking down a few blocks, all the stores were closed, the streets deserted. Aryeh and I and a few women  were walking to where the demonstration was supposed to start. We had no idea if it would just be us, and two or three other GAM leaders.

From Oral History Interview with Beatriz Manz.

Simon: I’m not sure Aryeh had already planned to come down to Guatemala, but he came down really fast. And he came down right on the cusp of a huge protest march that was organized in the wake of these two murders five days apart during Holy Week. Aryeh came down with Jemera Rone, who then was head of the Salvador office. Jemera sadly died some years ago from cancer. And they were at this march. Aryeh was there. Even though some congressmen from the States were supposed to come down and the embassy said they couldn’t guarantee their safety, so the congressmen pulled back, but Aryeh came. I have a picture of him at the march. It’s this huge march. 

And he met afterwards with Nineth and Isabel and me. His bunker was this Pan-American hotel, which I absolutely hated. He adored it because it was all cute and had all these little weavings and stuff all over it. And so Aryeh got to know the GAM leaders really well. He also did something incredible on that trip. There’s a girl Ava Morales [phonetic], she had thirteen disappeared people in her family. And we ended up featuring her on a book I wrote for Americas Watch on the GAM. She called me while Aryeh was there and she told me—she lived in a slum—that her little house had been surrounded by people she thought were government informers. 

So, Aryeh got in a taxi with Jemera and Beatriz Manz, an anthropologist, and they raced out and brought back Ava and her grandmother, her tiny old grandmother, and her younger brother, this six, seven-year-old, Estuardo [phonetic] back to my hotel. And Aryeh took them out to lunch at the Ritz Continental. It wasn’t the Ritz but it was called the Ritz. And Ava ordered the biggest plate of shrimp you’ve ever seen in your life. Aryeh was her hero, justifiably. That was Aryeh in Guatemala. I was with Aryeh a lot in Guatemala because he came down several times on fact-finding missions. I was also with board members in Guatemala. If he was planning a board mission to Guatemala, I would organize it and accompany them. So, he was in and out of the place quite a bit.

From Oral History Interview with Jean-Marie Simon

Neier: Well, until then, the human rights movement had been concerned with prisoners who had some political activity that resulted in their imprisonment. And I wanted to deal with prison issues more broadly, again as I had done at the ACLU. And so the Prison Project was distinctive in the international human rights field in dealing with common prisoners who are, of course,

the vast majority of the prisoners everywhere in the world rather than just political prisoners. And at the ACLU, we had been able to proceed through litigation. Essentially, that was not possible in the international field. There was no international law or international legal body that could have had an effect or a significant effect on prison condition. So it had to be documentation and reporting. And as naming and shaming has—had been the major approach in the international human rights field, that also had to be the approach in dealing with prisons.

From Oral History Interview with Aryeh Neier.

Weschers: But soon in 1989, there was this big wave—the whole year was big in different places—Poland, wasn’t yet completely free, but there was an agreement signed with the Communists, and there were elections being prepared. And I knew that prison conditions were horrible. And I think the elections were in June, and suddenly everything changed, and the new head of the prison system was someone I had met when he was an underground person. I told Aryeh that this is the time we can do a report on prison conditions in Poland. And I went on that trip with Herman Schwartz. And we had a piece of paper that allowed us to go to every prison we to without previous notice.

So, kind of as an accident, we suddenly had begun to have a body of work on prison conditions. And it was extremely unique and interesting because it was at the time when human rights organizations didn’t care about prison conditions. They cared about political prisoners. So, literally people in Human Rights Watch would ask me, other colleagues, “Why are you going?” That was another trip I was taking to Brazil, and that was a second prison study. And they would say, “But there are no political prisoners in Brazil.” I said, “Yeah, but people are still treated horribly, and the fact that they may have committed a crime—and very often not even that because it would be pre-trial—doesn’t mean that you can essentially torture them.” And that’s how the prison project kind of came to being.

From Oral History Interview with Joanna and Lawrence Weschler.