Honduran mother waits 8 years for lost migrant son to return

R A S » 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, and even the AP’s estimate is likely low. These migrants are among about 56,800 worldwide who died or disappeared over the same period, the AP found.

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.

“He seemed very pensive,” said Posadas, 73. “‘I’m afraid,’ he told me.”

After just a few days and an apparent threat from gang members, he left earlier than planned.

“I have to get out of here now,” he told Lozano, without further explanation.

Nunez, his nephew and two neighbors struck out for the Mexican border with Texas. Nunez, then 35, called Lozano every day, sometimes from the phone of the migrants’ smuggler. About a week after he left Honduras, he spoke to his mother for the last time, and then a day later to Lozano.

After that, Lozano talked to the smuggler a couple of times, who told her they were still waiting to cross. Then the phone went unanswered. At first, Lozano and Posadas weren’t too worried. But 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, the report said. It turned out that they had been killed by gangs, and an Ecuadorian managed to escape and alert authorities.

“I started to weep like a crazy person. There were no names, but I was shaken,” said Posadas.

A list of victims released days after the massacre included the names of Posadas’ grandson and the two neighbors traveling with them. But there was no trace of Nunez.

Hoping against hope, Posadas and Lozano tried jails, detention centers and hospitals. Nothing. Lozano gave the Honduran consulate names, photos, and descriptions of Nunez’s tattoos, including one of Dachell and another of the number 8. She went there every day.

Still nothing.

Then they heard that the Ecuadorian survivor said another man — a Honduran — also had escaped the massacre. But authorities refused to give Lozano any more information because the man was under protection.

Lozano even hired a lawyer to help relatives search prisons in Tamaulipas. The lawyer said he saw a man resembling Nunez in one of the prisons. Posadas asked herself, “Has God heard my pleas?”

Posadas spent nights awake, and days were just as desperate.

“I felt like I was falling into a terrible depression,” she said.