He was born in
San Salvador in 1954. During his law study in the 1970s Herbert Anaya joined the student organisation AGEUS and was later one of the founders of the human rights organisation CDHES. In the 1980s he became active in the
Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN). In addition he worked for the committee of the families of persons murdered or disappeared. On May 26, 1986, he was arrested, along with
Reynaldo Blanco (future president of the CDHES) by members of the Treasury Police jailed in the
La Esperanza prison for nine months where he was interrogated and tortured. In jail Anaya worked on a human rights record which included testimonies of 430 of the 432 inmates describing methods of torture applied to them. The 160 pages record and a video showing torture signs were smuggled outside and sent to the
Marin County Interfaith Task Force. The human rights abuse record is now housed at the Archives at the
University of Colorado at Boulder Libraries. On February 2, 1987, Anaya was released as part of an exchange of prisoners. Herbert Anaya was accused at that time by both the US government and the Salvadoran army of being a leader of the FMLN guerrilla organisation. They claimed that the CDHES was a "rebel propaganda arm", although no conclusive evidence was brought forward. After his release, Anaya began to denounce human rights violations and asserted that the
death squads were directly under the orders of the military. These allegations were proved right by human rights NGOs. ==Assassination==