Mom waits 8 years to find out fate of lost migrant son
SAN PEDRO SULA, Honduras — Haydee Posadas had waited eight years for her son to come home. On the last night of her long vigil, she was too agitated to sleep.
Her son had fled Honduras for the United States in 2010, in part because of gang threats, just as thousands are doing today in migrant caravans, including men from the same neighborhood. But en route in Mexico, again like so many others, Wilmer Nunez disappeared into the vortex of drug violence that he was trying to escape in the first place, leaving Posadas in limbo.
“I know nothing about my son, whether he’s dead or alive,” she pleaded with God through the years.
In the past four years alone, almost 4,000 migrants have died or gone missing along the route through Mexico to the U.S., the Associated Press has found. That’s 1,573 more than the previously known number, calculated by the United Nations. These migrants are among about 56,800 worldwide who died or disappeared over the same period.
When Posadas lost her factory job in the 1990s, Nunez left for the U.S. He sent money home, and called his mother almost every day. He was deported twice but returned.
In 2007, he had a child, Dachell, with a Mexican woman, Maria Esther Lozano, now 38. In July 2010, Nunez was deported a third time. This time, his Ciudad Planeta neighborhood in San Pedro Sula was so dangerous that Nunez barely went outside the home.
After just a few days and an apparent threat from gang members, he left earlier than planned.
Nunez, his nephew and two neighbors struck out for the Mexican border with Texas. About a week after he left Honduras, he spoke to his mother for the last time.
About two weeks after he left, when Posadas turned on the television news, fear suddenly seized her. The corpses of 72 migrants had been found on a ranch in Tamaulipas state, across the border from Texas. They had been killed by gangs,
In 2013, the Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team reached an agreement with Mexican prosecutors to identify more than 200 bodies from three massacres.
A DNA test quickly identified Nunez.
“My heart hurt so much ... most of all because of the death he suffered, not even knowing who killed him, with his eyes blindfolded, hands tied ...” Posadas said, her voice trailing off, tears in her eyes.
But eight years and three months after the last hug from her son, Posadas says she feels peace for the first time.