Fleeing Honduras' violence to an Iowa church pulpit: a faith journey
Enna Antunez's life story includes seeing her father get murdered, yet she felt called to a ministry that eventually brought her to Tiffin, Iowa
Enna Antunez and I are sharing lunch when Antunez, a United Methodist pastor, takes the conversation to Olancho, Honduras’ largest department. A department is the equivalent of a state in the United States. Antunez grew up there.
“People from Olancho are very proud of themselves,” Antunez says. “We are the cattle ranchers. People have a lot of land. But people kill for land. Doesn’t make sense. But, yeah, people kill in order to own our land.”
Excuse me, what? I ask Antunez, pastor at Grace United Methodist Church in Tiffin, Iowa.
The bustle of a noon-hour lunch crowd goes on around us as she tells about watching in horror when one of those landowners was murdered. He was her father, Ignacio Velasquez. A bullet grazed her shoulder and upper chest during the shooting, singeing her and sending a spark to her nose, where you still can see the mark.
She was 5 years old.
This is part of the Rev. Enna Antunez’s childhood that eventually led her and her husband, Marco Cabrera, to move to the United States in 1989. Cabrera’s father was murdered, too, also over land, when Cabrera and his father were ambushed.
“In 2012, the country became the most violent in the world with a rate of 86 homicides per every 100 thousand inhabitants,” a 2025 article, “Olancho: three thousand dead in a decade of violence without end,” from a Martin Mowforth book, “The Violence of Development,” states. Olancho’s rate of 92.5, coming from 491 homicides, was higher, although the number of violent deaths there dropped to a still staggering 264, the article states.
Violence is down in the country under the term of President Xiomara Castro, a November report from the independent Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project (ACLED) stated. However, that trend has not extended into Olancho.
“While gang violence levels have substantially decreased in urban settings, other coastal and rural areas have experienced an increase in organized crime activity during Castro’s presidency,” the report stated. “For example, the departments of Colón and Olancho experienced a 27% and 44% increase in violence, with a worrying trend involving the targeting of farmers.”
In those two states, the report said, “farmers cooperatives that have been waging long-standing battles for more equitable land distribution often confront criminal groups seeking to expand their activities to accommodate illegal airstrips, coca crops, and intensive livestock or palm oil cultivation.”
Antunez, 63, had not been back to Honduras for 34 years because she owns land there and feared for her life when leaving the crime-ridden area, she told me during that April lunch. I caught up with her a month later, and she had some news.
She and Cabrera decided to return to Honduras at the end of May to see their families. She said she did not want publicized when in order to have a safe trip.
Antunez said she cannot explain why she is willing to go home now after all these years.
“I don’t know, I don’t want to think,” she said. “Some days I’m willing to go, some days I’m not willing.”
MARRIED YOUNG
Antunez lived with her grandmother when she was young.
“I was very happy because my grandma spoiled me, because I was the only child home with her, and we did a lot of things together,” she said.
Her grandmother eventually gave her coffee plantation to Antunez.
“So I have a wonderful life. Maybe that’s why I didn’t miss my father.”
Eventually, she and Cabrera met.
Marriage works differently in Honduras than in the United States. Antunez was 16 when Cabrera, five-and-a-half years older, wanted to marry her.
No go, Antunez’s mother said. If you want to marry Enna, you have to pay for her to finish high school, she told him.
Cabrera was happy to do that.
“It wouldn’t be unusual just to have some married women in high school, so I got married when I was 16,” Antunez said. “I couldn’t get pregnant because they would throw me out. So we waited until I graduated from high school to have my first child.”
LONG JOURNEY TO TIFFIN, IOWA
Antunez was 27 and had a daughter, one of two children from the marriage, when she and her husband came to the United States in 1989.
“We could not go back,” she said. The danger was too real because she still owns property there, she said.
Antunez was a social worker in Honduras. She came to the United States on a scholarship for a four-year course of study while Cabrera remained in Honduras, but she completed her studies in psychology, sociology and social work in two years.
Adding the years she also spent in Honduras, she has been in this country for 37 years on various immigration documents that need to be renewed.
They need to be renewed because she never sought U.S. citizenship.“We were originally from Olancho, so we have land,” she said. “I am just a legal resident of the United States. I don’t want to become a citizen because we have land in the mountains … I have a coffee plantation over there, so I don’t want to give that up.”
She continued: “I am a legal resident. From that point, I can become a citizen anytime. Well, I have to apply and pay and wait some time, like five years.”
This is one of the many interesting parts of her story, as she continues to provide necessary work in the United States but keeps herself grounded in the home country she felt she had to leave for more than three decades.
Antunez came from a family of 10 children, all born before her father died, and her mother — a petite woman named Carminda.
Carminda, still alive and now in the United States with Antunez, although she lives in Honduras normally, never remarried. She worked hard, however, selling part of the family farm and cattle raised there to get all of her children into Christian boarding schools and college. Her grandmother helped with money from the coffee plantation, Antunez said.
HOW MANY IMMIGRANTS ARE IN IOWA?
She said she does not dwell on her father’s death from all those years ago, although she speaks about it when telling her story.
“I miss my father, but it wasn’t something terrible I couldn’t survive — that’s how I put it,” she said. “Maybe I studied psychology and sociology and social work in order to help myself.”
Antunez and Cabrera moved to Iowa, where she graduated from the now-closed Iowa Wesleyan College.
“I couldn’t read. I could write, I could not speak. So, I said, it doesn’t matter. I don’t need to speak. I will do my study and I get good grades.”
She was interested in ministry and earned a master’s degree in divinity from the University of Dubuque.
Coming to the United States was not easy.
“My husband brought some money. Yes, he sold some things, but money disappear,” Antunez said. “And, second, we buy a car, and pretty soon we didn’t have much. And my mom was the one who poured us with money in order for us to live here,” she said.
“Immigration is a pain. People don’t understand how hard it is to get a status in this country.”
But, she said, she likes being in Iowa.
“I’m glad I don’t like the big cities. Iowa has been very comfortable.”
She developed a love for the Bible and ministry and has served United Methodist churches in Des Moines, Laurel, Perry and Ankeny, as well as other stops in Iowa.
She became Grace Tiffin’s pastor in 2023 and started a Spanish-speaking service at the church.
“In my life, I’m always thinking that I’m going back to Honduras. In the back of my mind, I’m going back. So when I became a pastor, I wanted to be an ordained pastor in the United Methodist Church because I knew that, being ordained, I could serve in Honduras, too.”
ESCAPING THE MURDER DANGER
Back to that lunch. It was at a North Liberty restaurant.
We had talked about having lunch so I could hear her story.
Antunez said she doesn’t think much about seeing her father murdered, although she grieves for those in danger in Honduras.
“Are there laws against this?” I ask her about the killings. “Is it just lawlessness, or is it a way of life?”
“No. Lawlessness. Lawlessness. You kill one of mine, I kill one of yours. The whole family is destroyed. And that’s silliness. Do you understand what I mean?”
“Yeah, in a very perverse way,” I respond as I think, “No.” “I understand the logic, even though it’s what we would not consider to be a logical way to behave,” I tell her.
“Exactly, exactly, and yet we are very friendly and all of that,” she says about the people of Olancho. “We feel like friendly people and people that you can trust.”
“Even though, even though,” I stammer.
“Yes, exactly. And sometimes the one who comes in is the one who doesn’t have property,” she continues. “So that one who came in is the one who will kill in order to get land.”
I struggle to give Antunez’s story some kind of “immigrant-finds-dream-in-the-United-States” identity.
This is not a rags-to-seeking-fortune story. She says she had a happy childhood.
She is not exactly a refugee, given that even though she was escaping a death risk, it was because she owns property.
It would be hard to argue that she is taking someone’s job, unless a lot of people are being turned down to be pastors at a time when churches struggle to find people willing to answer that calling.
If only her and Cabrera’s stories could be as simple as people in the United States would like immigration issues to be, regardless of where they stand on those issues.
But shoving her story into some neat category is difficult because, while parts of her life are not unique, the sum of those parts is.
The person who defines this story is Antunez herself, not someone else.
AUTHOR’S NOTE: The section of this story about when Antunez and her husband are leaving for Honduras was changed on May 15, 2026, for safety reasons.
READ MORE
IMMIGRANTS ARE WELCOME HERE, by Robert Leonard
IOWA UNITED METHODIST BISHOP CALLS ON IOWANS TO USE THEIR PRIVILEGED STATUS TO HELP IMMIGRANTS, by Lyle Muller
GO ASK ALICE, CEDAR FALLS WOMAN ‘ANSWERED THE CALL’ IN A NEW WAY, by Pat Kinney
Lyle Muller is a member of the Iowa Writers’ Collaborative. Check out some of the collaborative’s most recent reporting in this week’s summary.
He also wrote a book.
Interesting story which I just read the old fashioned way (still my preference).
thank you, Lyle, for sharing the story of my friend Pastor Enna! Holding Enna and Marco in prayer as they visit their beloved homeland.