How Milwaukee’s Latin Press Handles the Missing

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For Victor Huyke, owner and president of El Conquistador Latino Newspaper, missing people became personal for him.

“One of my friends growing up, Richard Guerrero, eventually it was found out that he was” a victim of serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer, Huyke said.

“So many years later, Marty Guerrero, Richard’s brother, is missing,” Huyke added. “There is not enough spotlight in the community.” After the interview, Marty Guerrero was found alive 12 days after his disappearance.

Victor Huyke
Victor Huyke.

Huyke has mixed feelings about the press as a whole.

“I don’t know if it is communication or just a lack of interest from the general media about our community,” he said. “My anger says it is a lack of interest on the general media’s part: my intelligence questions it to say that maybe that people didn’t reach out and say hey we need help to look for this individual.”

“In other cases, people do reach out, but it goes nowhere,” Huyke said. “They don’t hear anything. People may be featured once in the news, that’s it: after that, it’s gone.”

For the Latin press in Milwaukee, there have been different responses to missing people. One expressed care and interest; Media Milwaukee attempted to reach another for comment, with no response.

Salvador Gomez, senior bilingual producer of Telemundo Wisconsin, was contacted by phone multiple times but never responded.

Huyke, president of El Conquistador Newspaper, said it’s unlikely he would have any archives pieces on Manuel Ordóñez and Susan Nuñez, two missing people of Latin descent in Milwaukee.

“As far as any archives I have… I don’t think so,” Huyke said. “If someone comes to us, we’ll put it in the paper. It is not like a log is kept of it.”

“There was a person who was found: It was her own doing of running off,’” Huyke said. “There is a whole list of others that have disappeared that have not been heard of. I am not talking about recently; I am talking about this has been years.”

This story is part of a semester-long investigative reporting project into missing people’s cases in Milwaukee and Wisconsin. It was created by an advanced reporting class in the Journalism, Advertising, and Media Studies program at UW-Milwaukee. Other stories from the project are available here.