Byline: Paul Davis
Oct. 8--After Victor Blanco disappeared at sea, his wife turned their dining room into a shrine. She didn't go to her job at a machine shop. Instead, she placed a framed picture of Victor on a table in their two-story home in Providence's Mount Pleasant neighborhood. She lit a candle next to a glass of holy water. At the base of her husband's photograph, she placed two small wooden figures, a fisherman and a boat.
"Always there is the fear that something can happen," says Alba Chavez-Blanco, her dark eyes wet with grief.
As a young man in El Salvador, Victor had worked on shrimp boats in the waters off Nicaragua and Costa Rica. Alba lived ...