Alva Review-Courier -

SEATTLE (AP) — The call came at mealtime — an anonymous threat demanding $5,000 or her son's life.

So Blanca Orantes-Lopez, her 8-year-old boy and his father packed up and left the Pacific surfing town of Puerto La Libertad in El Salvador and headed for the United States.

Two months later, she sits in a federal prison south of Seattle. The boy, Abel Alexander, is in custody at a children's home across the country in upstate New York. She has no idea when she might see him again.

"I still haven't been able to talk to him," Orantes told The Associated Press in Spanish as she wept through a telep...