Ciudad Planeta in San Pedro Sula

looks like an ordinary working-class neighborhood, with onestory concrete houses with metal roofs. Only the bars that hem in nearly every porch let on that it is one of the most dangerous neighborhoods in one of the world’s most dangerous countries.

This is the neighborhood Nunez left for the first time in the 1990s to go to the United States at 16, when his mother lost her factory job.

“He did not say anything to me. One day he simply left,” said Posadas, a diminutive 73-year-old grandmother known in the neighborhood as “Mama Haydee.”

Nunez was not the oldest of the 10 children in the family, but he was the one who looked out for the others. He sent money home, some of which Posadas used to build metal bars around the porch. And he called his mother almost every day.

Nunez was deported twice but returned to the U.S. each time. In 2007, he fell in love with a Mexican woman, Maria Esther Lozano, now 38, and they had a child, Dachell. When Lozano was about to give birth to another child, in July 2010, Nunez was deported a third time.

Posadas was happy to have him back home. He would make lunch with her, stewing meat, kneading tortilla flour and frying up ripe bananas.

“He cooked better than a woman,” Posadas said, her face lighting up at the memory.

But the neighborhood had grown more dangerous, with organized crime moving in and frequent bloody raids. All of Posadas’ children left except for one