'About 4,000 migrants died or missing on way to US'

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 US in 2010 in part because of gang threats, just as thousands are doing today in the migrant caravans headed north, including men from the same neighbourhood.

But en route in Mexico, again like so many others, Wilmer Gerardo Nunez disappeared into the vortex of drug violence that he was trying to escape in the first place.

Left in limbo, his anguished mother prayed for an answer. "I am between a rock and a hard place," she begged God through the years. "I know nothing about my son, whether he's dead or alive."
"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."
Posadas has a mantra for survival in Planeta: "If you saw it, you didn't see it. If you heard it, you didn't hear it. And everyone keeps quiet."