Book Review: ‘Soldiers and Kings,’ by Jason De León

SOLDIERS AND KINGS: Survival and Hope in the World of Human Smuggling, by Jason De León

The anthropologist Jason De León dedicated five years to studying migrants who tried to make the deadly crossing into the United States over the Sonoran Desert, hiking hundreds of miles of the trails himself so that he could better understand the dangers faced by the people he interviewed. His intensive fieldwork made its way into his 2015 book, “The Land of Open Graves,” and in 2017 he was granted a MacArthur fellowship. Yet he could see that he was still missing a crucial part of the story.

His new book, “Soldiers and Kings,” is an account of the nearly seven years he spent with the people hired by migrants to help them get to the border — smugglers, that is, though their preferred term is guía, or “guide,” as in “the one who can potentially lead you through danger.”

De León is sympathetic, and can sometimes verge on sentimental. He begins his book by arguing that far from being cruel kingpins getting rich off other people’s desperation, smugglers are like the migrants themselves: poor people trying to escape the same violence and hardship. But the reality he portrays is far more complicated; however victimized they are by the forces bearing down on them, smugglers wield undeniable power over the vulnerable migrants in their care.

As treacherous as border-crossing can be for Mexicans, the journey for Central Americans is even more perilous. They cover larger distances, and must avoid detection by law enforcement in multiple countries. De León spent a lot of time in Pakal-Ná, in Chiapas, Mexico, a key stop on the migrant trail for those entering the country from neighboring Guatemala.

There, he befriended several guías from Honduras: low-level smugglers like Chino and Santos, who say they would rather make a living doing something else; Flaco, a tall-tale teller with “obnoxious charisma” who hires foot soldiers like Chino and Santos; Papo and Alma, a couple who are trying to get humanitarian visas to stay in Mexico but are also trading information for a local chapter of MS-13; and Kingston, seemingly the highest-level smuggler of the bunch, who tells De León that “real guides” have to be ready to navigate violence on the trail. They have to be willing “to get their hands dirty,” or, as Kingston puts it, “to be down with crazies.”

The smugglers De León talks to have certain things in common, including experiences with crushing poverty and horrific violence. A few lived in the United States for a while: Santos worked in construction in Phoenix; Kingston even obtained a green card in New York as a teenager, long before 9/11 turned border enforcement into a military operation, but he was deported back to Honduras after moving up in the ranks of the Bloods and bashing someone’s face in with a .22.

But the smugglers’ motivations and aspirations vary. Santos wants a life that is safe and stable, and he eventually leaves the guía business: “I’d rather be struggling on the streets than taking orders from people who could end up killing me.” Kingston, who seems to sense the kind of thing that De León might like to hear, says he wants to open a shelter for migrants because he can “really help people.” Such declarations sit uneasily alongside Kingston’s boasts about money. “I’m making it! $1,500, $5,000, $10,000. Goddamn!”

Much of “Soldiers and Kings” is devoted to strikingly candid oral history. Given that De León spent years getting to know people as a participant and an observer, doing what he calls “deep hanging out,” his subjects start to trust him and begin to reveal themselves — no small feat, considering that suspicion and mistrust are a matter of professional (and physical) survival.

At the same time, there are some people De León doesn’t really want to talk to. “I avoided those who gave off a bad vibe,” he writes, recognizing that migrants cannot afford to be so choosy. I also wondered what this methodology meant for his sample, composed mostly of smugglers who feel conflicted about the work they do. Still, he keeps up a text exchange with Payaso, “the Clown,” an enforcer for a midlevel smuggler who charges a toll to migrants passing through Pakal-Ná. Payaso has a reputation for committing acts of grisly violence when people don’t pay up; he also happens to be an “avid knitter.” After he is charged with murder, he embarks on some knitting projects in prison, including a SpongeBob SquarePants bag for De León.

De León explains that he mostly avoided interviewing the migrants who had hired the smugglers he spoke to, “because of worries that they would say something that could anger their guide and put their trip at risk.” His caution is understandable, though it largely prevents him from corroborating what the guías tell him about their work. “I want my kid to see me working,” Flaco says. “I’m not robbing people. I’m not doing bad things to be able to feed them.” A few pages later, however, De León gets a call from a young Honduran migrant, who says through tears that he’s stranded in Mexicali because Flaco took his money “and never came back.”

It’s an upsetting moment, pointing to the merciless market in moving human beings that’s been fueled by ever-tightening immigration laws. American border control turns out to be good for the smuggling business. Cartels and gangs have seized their piece of the action, too, offering “protection” from violence often generated by gangs themselves. “A major component of smuggling is extracting as much as possible from clients and their families,” De León writes — in other words, “fleecing people.” In this way, smuggling, he says, is a symptom of global inequality and therefore of “capitalism itself.” Smuggling captures some of capitalism’s cruelest features — ruthlessness and profiteering — like a magnifying mirror.

“Human smuggling is exploitative and violent,” De León writes. “It also cannot be stopped.” He points to the “monstrous injustices” that drive demand for the guías’ services, including relentless poverty, the drug trade, climate change and gang violence. Smuggling, he says, “is not the problem.” But as his own book memorably recounts, in a world with no shortage of problems, it’s nevertheless one of them.

SOLDIERS AND KINGS: Survival and Hope in the World of Human Smuggling | By Jason De León | Viking | 367 pp. | $32