WASHINGTON (Tribune News Service) — With shaking hands, Karen Cruz Caceres manages to hit record on the call. “How many days have you gone without food?” she asks into the phone. Tani, her younger sister, is heard sobbing. “Help me,” she gets out. Cruz Caceres assures her: “I am going to pay today. I’ll make another deposit.” The April 1 call ends abruptly, and Cruz Caceres stops recording. A week before the recording, Cruz Caceres, a single mother from Honduras who won asylum in Tennessee, had gotten another call that upended her already precarious life: Kidnappers in Nuevo Laredo, Mexico, had abducted her pregnant sister Tani and Tani’s 4-year-old son, and they wanted more than $20,000, according to a video recording of the call and messages reviewed by the Los Angeles Times. The family asked The Times not to use her sister’s last name, for fear of retribution from the kidnappers in Mexico and gangs back home.