Rights Officials Targeted : To Salvadoran’s Widow, Death Was No Stranger

Mirna Perla de Anaya had lived her husband’s death a million times before he finally was murdered.

When Herbert Ernesto Anaya started work at the Human Rights Commission here in 1980, hundreds of Salvadorans were killed each month. Their bodies appeared on roadsides and vacant lots like weeds sprouted in the dew overnight.

Mirna did not need an imagination to picture the ways in which Herbert might be killed. Three of Herbert’s colleagues on the commission were killed over the years and four more disappeared. The commission’s albums were filled with photographs of bullet-ridden and broken bodies, and the couple discussed the likelihood that one day Herbert’s would be among them.

That day came on Oct. 26.

“I always feared he would disappear or die a slow death,” Mirna said. “When I found him and saw he hadn’t suffered, it gave me some consolation.”

As usual, Herbert Anaya had spent Sunday with his family. On Monday morning, he grabbed an extra shirt while getting dressed because he planned to sleep elsewhere that night. It was a security measure he often took.

Herbert left their brick row house at 6:30 a.m. to warm up the car and shouted over his shoulder at Mirna to hurry the kids so he could take them to school. His eldest, 10-year-old Rosa Margarita, was the first to follow.

When Mirna got to the door with the little ones, Rosa Margarita was already rushing back with a face distorted in fear.

“Mami , my Papi is bleeding!” Rosa Margarita cried.

They hadn’t heard the five shots from the parking lot of their housing complex. By the time Mirna reached her husband, he was dead, lying face down in a puddle of blood on the blacktop. The gunmen were gone.

The death-squad-style assassination shocked a nation not easily shocked any more. This sort of killing, the daytime slaying of a prominent government critic, was thought to be a thing of the past. There was supposed to be greater freedom of speech now, and the Central American peace plan had promised less killing.

But while others were stunned by her husband’s death, to Mirna it seemed inevitable.

“When Herbert began at the commission, it was a decision we both took, to offer ourselves to die if necessary,” Mirna said.

Civil war has taken more than 60,000 lives in El Salvador. For eight years, the U.S.-backed armed forces have been fighting a leftist insurgency, the Farabundo Marti Liberation Front. The United States has contributed more than $3 billion in military and economic aid toward that fight.

The Salvadoran army and the U.S. Embassy believe that Herbert Anaya was not just a human rights activist but a guerrilla commander for the Farabundo Marti front. They consider the Human Rights Commission a rebel propaganda arm whose work is aimed at discrediting the government.

While they have never proved their claims, last year the Treasury Police produced a former colleague of Anaya who publicly charged that the commission was a rebel front group. As a result, Anaya and three other commission members were jailed for nine months. In February, they were released with more than 50 other political prisoners in exchange for an air force colonel kidnaped by the rebels.

In jail and afterward, Anaya denied any connection with the guerrillas. After his death, Mirna Anaya also maintained that her husband had never belonged to a guerrilla group.

Human rights activists charge that Herbert Anaya was killed because he stood up for the rights of the poor. They say anyone who criticizes the Salvadoran military is branded a subversive and is a potential target for assassination. Accusations against the commission are an attempt to neutralize their charges, they say.

The U.S. Embassy and Salvadoran government condemned the killing. The government suggested that Anaya may have been slain by leftists seeking a martyr for their cause. Mirna accuses the Treasury Police of killing him. Most diplomats and political observers here assign his murder to a rightist “death squad,” the name for faceless military and paramilitary groups that slaughtered thousands of church and union activists, students and human rights workers in the early 1980s.

The government has launched an investigation and offered $10,000 for information leading to the killer, but there are no leads, and such cases are rarely, if ever, solved in this country. Now, most such crimes have been forgiven under a new amnesty law.

Herbert Anaya’s relationship to the rebels may be impossible to determine as long as there is civil war. His assassins may have killed him in the belief that he was a guerrilla operating in public.

A Message in Timing

But the timing of his death seemed to carry a particular message. Anaya was gunned down as many people, encouraged by the Central American peace plan, were trying to make the transition from underground rebel to open participant in the political system, from exile to returnee.

Under the peace plan, more than 400 accused guerrillas have been released from jail and 4,500 refugees have returned to live in areas largely controlled by the guerrillas. Ruben Zamora and Guillermo Ungo, the most prominent exiled politicians, announced that they would return to the country this month to organize political parties and a legal, democratic left.

After his release from jail, Herbert Anaya had grown increasingly outspoken. He appeared on radio and television and at university forums to accuse the powerful military and government of political killings.

Anaya urged the United States to stop sending military and police aid and charged the armed forces with systematic torture.

With the help of his wife, who is a lawyer, Anaya began to use the legal system to file suits against army officers: One charged a colonel with extorting land from a peasant; another charged that a colonel’s troops slit the throats of four peasants in Chalatenango province earlier this year.

Activists say these are tests of the democracy that Duarte and the U.S. Embassy insist exists in El Salvador. The military says the groups have been taking advantage of democratic openings to serve the guerrillas.

Most important, however, may be what Anaya’s killers are saying. Their message seems to be that there is no room for a leftist opposition in civilian society. They are saying that this eight-year war is a war to the very end.

When Anaya made the decision to work for the Human Rights Commission, it meant that Mirna had to support the family. She was no less committed to helping the poor than her husband, but human rights work did not pay.

Mirna, 32, worked as a judge and university law professor to feed the family and counseled Herbert on legal issues on the side. This year, after he got out of jail, she began to defend political prisoners.

Mirna is a small, round woman whose face and posture bespeak the strain she is under. Since her husband’s death, her children cling to her and frequently break into tears over trivialities. She comforts them and keeps her emotions under control, but her dark eyes are a window into her pain.

Mirna says she cannot explain why some people withdraw in the face of danger and others grow more determined, why some people close themselves off to human suffering as if it were contagious and others choose to confront it, even at great risk.

She believes that she and her husband each made the decision to address the suffering in their country when they were children.

Herbert Anaya was one of four sons abandoned by a drunken father and reared by their mother, who worked as a maid and seamstress to support them. Like most poor children in El Salvador’s western provinces, he spent his three-month Christmas school break harvesting coffee.

Mirna also grew up without a father in the eastern provincial capital of San Miguel. She lived with four brothers and sisters behind a storefront where her mother sold tomatoes, onions, bread and cigarettes.

Mirna said she learned of social injustice at the tiny store, located across the street from a public dormitory for the homeless and cater-cornered from a brothel. Neighbors brought their troubles to her storekeeper mother, who could barely cope with her own.

“When the rent was due, my mother would go around trying to collect the money that people owed her,” Mirna said. “Sometimes she couldn’t get all of the money on rent day. The landlady would pound her fist on the table and tell her if she didn’t have the rent, she should move out. It was humiliating.”

Her family was poor, but not as poor as the hungry women and children in the public dormitory. Mirna remembers a naked 4-year-old named Alejo who positioned himself at the entrance to their store each day to appeal for food with a steady chant of “Bread, give me bread, bread.”

“He was imposing, insistent,” Mirna said. “He did not beg. He demanded. He had such a will to survive.”

As Mirna recalled her childhood and the little boy Alejo, tears streamed down her full cheeks. She cried as she had not cried when speaking of her husband’s death.

“I feel proud of my husband. I know that soon I will miss him, but I feel strength from him,” Mirna explained. “These other things are sad and just make me feel impotent.”

Mirna and Herbert Anaya met during their first year at the University of El Salvador. He had hoped to study journalism and she agronomy. They both ended up in law school because it was the cheapest discipline requiring the fewest books and supplies.

They both scraped by on scholarships for the poor while wealthier students who were awarded grants for good grades used their checks to buy gas for their cars. To press for larger grants, they formed the Student Scholarship Society of the University of El Salvador and thus began their careers of activism.

Like many Latin American youths, Herbert and Mirna found that their politics took shape at the university. For Mirna, one of the key events was a demonstration in July, 1975, to protest army intervention in the university’s western campus. On that day, as the students marched through downtown San Salvador, the military moved in with a pincers maneuver, trapping them between tanks and automatic weapons.

For the first time in a generation, soldiers opened fire on a student march. They killed dozens and radicalized many more students, some of whom eventually took up arms against the military.

Mirna escaped the gunfire by jumping off a highway overpass. She broke her knee, which is still crisscrossed with surgical scars.

The university was closed several times because of demonstrations and subversive activities, prolonging their education. In 1977, Herbert and Mirna were married, and in 1980, Herbert left his studies to work for the Human Rights Commission.

That year, two of the commission’s leaders, Maria Magdalena Henriquez and Ramon Valladares, were killed by right-wing death squads. In 1983, Herbert’s mentor and close friend at the commission, Marianela Garcia Villas, was shot to death. It fell to Herbert to identify her body and collect the remains.

All Bodies Photographed

In those days, a commission photographer went out early each morning in search of the multiple bodies that were sure to have been dumped the night before. He took pictures as evidence and for families to use to search for missing relatives. Herbert’s job was to take statements from witnesses or from people who themselves suffered abuses at the hands of the military.

The commission was an opposition human rights group that made no pretense of objectivity; it did not report rebel abuses. At the time, the commission also was a place where journalists could make contacts to meet guerrillas in the mountains. Today, human rights activists are careful to say they had contacts only, not a structural relationship with the guerrillas.

The commission earned the trust of frightened peasants and poor people who told their tales of abuse. The horrors were ample. Much of the commission’s information was considered accurate, but sometimes it was exaggerated and read like propaganda.

Because of their politics, Roman Catholic Archbishop Arturo Rivera y Damas expelled the group from his church compound in 1984. The human rights workers fought the eviction, arguing that they would be killed without church protection, but they lost.

The commission members were not killed. In fact, attacks against the commission fell off in subsequent years as the overall human rights record of the government and military improved under threat of a U.S. aid cutoff.

The numbers of anonymous death squad killings dropped from hundreds each month in the early 1980s to 45 for all of last year, according to the Roman Catholic Church’s legal affairs office. The commission reported that 25 people disappeared at the hands of the armed forces or death squads from November, 1986, to June, 1987.

Nonetheless, the Anayas continued the precautions they took from the beginning: They moved four times in seven years and rarely left home alone. Mirna was careful in talking on the telephone; Herbert slept away from home most nights and left the country from time to time. It was a difficult life, and the fear took its toll on Mirna, but Herbert did not suffer for his human rights work until he was arrested last year.

The description that accompanies reports of rightist killings and disappearances is nearly always the same: The victims are abducted or gunned down by armed men in civilian dress driving a Jeep Cherokee with opaque windows. Sometimes the attackers drive a pickup truck, also with opaque windows and with no license plates.

On the surface, there often is little difference here between an abduction and a legal arrest. For that reason, when Herbert Anaya was arrested last year, Mirna was certain that he was one of “the disappeared.”

The couple and their three youngest children were on their way to buy sodas from the neighborhood store the evening of May 26, 1986, when two men in tennis shoes and jeans emerged from a blue pickup with opaque windows. They threw Herbert Anaya up against the truck and struck him with the butts of their guns before pushing him inside.

Children Hysterical

The children were hysterical, crying that their father had been kidnaped. A day later, Socorro Juridico, another human rights group, was informed that the Treasury Police were holding Anaya.

The arrest of Anaya and the other human rights activists stemmed from charges made by Luz Janet Alfaro, a 23-year-old former member of the commission. Ten days after her own arrest by Treasury Police, Alfaro publicly announced that she was a guerrilla defector, and she charged that the commission, as well as various committees for political prisoners and the disappeared, were run by guerrillas.

Alfaro accused Herbert Anaya and others of belonging to the Farabundo Marti Front. The more she talked, the wilder and more extensive her charges became. Eventually, she alleged that the Roman Catholic, Lutheran and Baptist churches were infiltrated by guerrillas who siphoned off thousands of dollars of international aid. She said Archbishop Rivera y Damas knew of the guerrilla infiltration and ignored it.

Human rights workers denied the charges. They said Alfaro’s accusations were part of a government counterinsurgency campaign to discredit the work of social agencies.

Alfaro never provided proof, and her charges were never verified. There was speculation that she had been a police plant in the commission, gossip that she was a rebel defector turned spy. Her charges kept Herbert Anaya in jail until February of this year.

“When Herbert was in jail, the kids were teased. Their cousins told them he was a big thief, and they cried,” Mirna said. “I told them he was in jail for doing good work, for defending the poor, but they said if he was going to go to jail, they didn’t want him to defend the poor any more.”

Anaya later said he was tortured by the Treasury Police at the time of his arrest. Reynaldo Blanco, another commission member jailed with him, said their lives were threatened.

In jail, Anaya and his colleagues gathered material for a detailed study on torture. Other human rights groups say the commission’s reporting improved markedly after the the arrests.

“I think they learned some discipline in jail,” said one human rights worker.

It was in jail that Anaya decided to assume a more public role, to become a spokesman for human rights. He decided that since his face and name were known, he no longer had to hide. Mirna agreed and quit her job as a judge to defend political prisoners.

After his release, Anaya often appeared in public to press his charges of police and army abuses. Eight months later, he was killed.

One afternoon last week, Mirna arrived home in the working-class Zacamil neighborhood with three of her children in tow as well as an American woman who was staying with her family “to provide protection.” Mirna readily acknowledges that the slight, unarmed woman offered no protection at all if someone decided to shoot, but she was lending moral support and providing something of a political shield.

A handful of other Americans have come to the commission and leftist labor unions this year to offer such protection. Their idea is that the presence of foreigners raises the stakes of killing, since even anonymous assassins are thought to understand that a dead American is bigger news than a dead Salvadoran back in U.S. congressional districts where votes are shaped on aid to El Salvador.

On this warm afternoon, as a neighbor’s stereo blares through the open living room window and a woman selling eggs hawks her wares from the sidewalk, Mirna is agitated.

She is worried because her housekeeper left early in the day to do errands and has not returned. Mirna fears that she has been arrested, picked up for questioning or kidnaped because of her contact with the Anayas. She calls her mother, who is supposed to know where the maid is; her mother has no clue.

Mirna says armed men in civilian dress have been observing her house. Her telephone rings frequently, but when she answers, no one is there--or the caller remains silent. Mirna has an air of paranoia about her that one might dismiss had her husband not been gunned down two weeks before.

Now that Herbert Anaya is dead, Mirna feels compelled to assume his role as a human rights leader. She marched at the head of demonstrators protesting his murder and spoke at his funeral. She appeared in court and on television for two union members she is defending in a murder case.

Mirna publicly blames the Treasury Police for killing Herbert, and now she, too, sleeps away from home, just as he once did.

She says strangers have approached her shyly since Herbert’s death to tell her how much he helped them. Sometimes, even though they are poor, they offer her a few cents or a dollar to show their thanks.

But Mirna is torn between her desire to serve the poor and a new fear that her five children could end up as orphans.

“I want to follow Herbert’s example,” she said. “He was so brave, and it is important to continue his work. But I can’t leave the children alone.”

Mirna has decided to leave the country for a while and continue her human rights work abroad. She has asked for a Canadian visa.

At nightfall, the housekeeper arrives, explaining there was a mixup over her ride. Mirna’s relief is visible.

Mirna, her two sons and three daughters, whose ages range from 5 to 10, pore over a family photo album. Unlike the albums at the commission, with their photos of the dead, these show Herbert and his family in happier times. Although the children resented Herbert’s time in jail, now that their father is dead, they say they are proud of his work for the poor and want to do the same.

“You’re never going to be alone,” 8-year-old Gloria Maria tells her mother. “I want to work in the human rights office with you.”