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HOPPING ACROSS THE LINE  
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John Washington
December 19, 2024
The New York Review
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_ In Soldiers and Kings, Jason De León uses the anthropological
method of “deep hanging out” to offer a complicated portrait of
migrant smugglers. _

No puedo pasar (Performance Documentation at Tijuana / San Diego
Border), 2005, Ana Teresa Fernández/National Museum of Mexican Art,
Chicago

 

Reviewed:

Soldiers and Kings: Survival and Hope in the World of Human Smuggling
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by Jason De León
Viking, 367 pp., $32.00

In 2018 I paid smugglers to sneak me across the border between
Guatemala and Mexico. I was researching my first book and following in
the footsteps of an impoverished Salvadoran man who, along with his
five-year-old daughter, was fleeing to the United States to ask for
asylum after receiving death threats from two different gangs.

I’d heard for years from people in Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras,
and Mexico about how human smuggling worked, how it was changing, how
it differed from border to border. But none of that settled my nerves.
Before hiring anyone, I checked with some locals I’d been put in
touch with in the remote Petén region of northern Guatemala—a vast
and sparsely populated jungle bordered by Mexico to the north and west
and Belize to the east—and talked to migrants who had crossed in the
same area. _They’ll find you_, I was told. But I looked more like a
tourist than a migrant, and I was dubious that a smuggler would
approach me with an offer.

_Don’t worry_, my contacts said. _Just ask_.

_Ask who?_

_Anybody._

A few patient sources counseled me about the safest approach. It was
simple, they said: I might get robbed, but that would probably be the
worst of it. After paying for a seat in a little combi on a crowded
market street in Flores—a small, charming city on Lake Petén
Itzá—I told the driver something cryptic yet unmistakable. _I need
to cross_. _Who can I talk to?_ He gave a knowing nod and said
he’d make an introduction once we got to the border town of El
Ceibo, a bumpy five-hour drive to the northwest.

They looked like kids—Fredy and Gerónimo. They wore flip-flops and
oversize T-shirts, and they both claimed to be twenty-one. They seemed
curious about why a gringo needed to sneak across the border, but I
just told them I was a journalist, and they didn’t press. We ducked
down a path off the main drag of El Ceibo, not too far from the
official border crossing, and as we entered the shaded jungle,
mosquitoes zeroed in. My guides hardly swatted at them, while I
struggled to stop smacking at my face, neck, and bare arms. Howler
monkeys screamed above our heads, and at times Fredy and Gerónimo
walked off the path to avoid patches of mud-slicked trail. But the
trip was anticlimactic: all I was paying for was the _brinco
nomás_—hopping across the line—and we did so in just forty
minutes. I gave a decent tip, and we exchanged phone numbers.

I know things have changed in El Ceibo. Look away from a border for a
few days and, with all the new policies and shifts in migration
patterns, you already have to play catch-up. One trend, though, has
held for decades across the globe: more walls, more detentions, more
deportations. Much of the blame is cast on the people uprooted and
unroofed, who are compelled to cross borders and are then scapegoated,
vilified, and often imprisoned, abused, sometimes tortured, sent back
to their countries of origin. But among humanitarian workers, NGOs,
and bleeding hearts, migrants have their defenders. It’s the
smugglers who have none.

At a Border Patrol press conference this past spring in Yuma, Arizona,
the chief patrol agent of the Yuma sector, Sean McGoffin, read from
prepared remarks:

While you may be familiar with the slang term of coyotes, the
criminals who smuggle migrants across the border of the United States,
Border Patrol refers to them as smugglers. Smugglers aren’t just
impoverished locals who are forced into a life of corruption just so
they can survive. They are criminals who have chosen to embrace a
lifestyle that harms others. Smugglers have no concern for the safety
of others. They treat humans as cargo or a commodity, and they do so
without remorse. They will sacrifice the well-being of others for
their own profit. Should a child or pregnant woman struggle to make
the trip, the smuggler won’t think twice about leaving them behind
to suffer or face death in remote terrain.

As I listened to McGoffin I thought of Fredy and Gerónimo, how
excited they were to show me the monkeys in the trees. I think now of
the many tales I’ve heard about smugglers—some described as
nefarious thieves and abusers, some as good-hearted and even heroic.
One smuggler I met on the US–Mexico border would occasionally call
or leave me WhatsApp messages, worried that the migrants in his charge
were hungry, thirsty, or injured as he led them for ten miles or more
across mountainous desert scrubland. I know he was trying to use aid
networks I was connected with to ease his burden—getting those
migrants provisions or sometimes medical care—but his concern seemed
genuine. Plus he had his own threats to fear, both from the Border
Patrol and from his bosses in the Sinaloa Cartel.

“Smugglers promise the world but they only deliver sorrow,”
McGoffin said. Lessons from a new book by the anthropologist Jason De
León, _Soldiers and Kings_, offer a variation on McGoffin’s
formulation: smugglers chase after the world but find only sorrow. De
León is a MacArthur fellow, the director of the Undocumented
Migration Project—an organization engaged in “long-term
anthropological analysis of clandestine border crossings between
Northern Mexico and Southern Arizona”—and the author of _The Land
of Open Graves: Living and Dying on the Migrant Trail_ (2015). That
book_ _combines high theory with gross reality as De León chronicles
the suffering and death of migrants along the US–Mexico border to
understand how they are reduced to “bare life”—a philosophical
term denoting human life at its most basic, without dignity or
potential. For _Soldiers and Kings_ he spent almost seven years with
a group of Honduran smugglers, or _guías_ (guides) as they prefer
to be called, ferrying people through Mexico.

_Soldiers and Kings_ starts with a series of photographs of guides in
various states of dishabille. In the jungle or in small southern
Mexican cities, they pose while getting tattooed, smoking pot,
chopping up an iguana for hobo stew. One image shows a young man in a
Puma baseball cap and a Brigham Young University T-shirt, holding his
arms out in a posture that suggests both the thug life and
late-adolescent bashfulness. On the inside of his left arm is a tattoo
of the word _catracho_—slang for Honduran. We soon learn that he
was named Roberto and that he died at the age of twenty after being
stabbed in Mexico.

De León describes Roberto’s abridged life as if writing a displaced
Dickens novel: he was a “street urchin” who, after pausing his own
dreams of migrating to the US, spent several years guiding fellow
Hondurans “north toward the American dream.” Right away De León
draws a crucial distinction between smugglers like Roberto, who are
“paid to help someone get across a geopolitical
boundary”—providing a basic, albeit subversive, service—and
traffickers, who use “force, fraud, or coercion” to move someone
against their will.

The book traces the peripatetic lives of Roberto and several other
young Honduran guides whom De León originally meets in the migrant
pass-through town of Pakal-Ná, near the tourist hub of Palenque in
southern Mexico. We learn the backstories of each—impoverishment,
violence, lack of opportunity in Honduras—and follow them as they
swing between swagger, despair, exhilaration, and death. They are bit
players in a larger smuggling network whose complexity De León
alludes to but doesn’t fully lay out. Their job is to pick up
migrants who have just crossed from Guatemala into Mexico and ferry
them a few states north. Sometimes they go farther, but as the
territories are divided between cartels and middle-manager smugglers,
the people De León profiles usually stick to the south, traveling to
Coatzacoalcos or maybe as far as Mexico City. They have to be ready at
a moment’s notice to meet a new “load” of migrants and run them
through a gauntlet of checkpoints, crooked cops, roving immigration
patrols, predatory cartels, and rival guides.

We hear a little about these parts of the journey, but most of the
book involves sitting around in bare apartments or hugging shade in
train yards, where De León observes the smugglers drinking beers (and
occasionally joins them), getting high, and recounting close shaves
with violence or hopes for the future. Some of these moments involve
Kingston, a charismatic “veteran gangster turned guide” who leads
a younger crew, and who as a teenager witnessed his best friend being
shot in the head. De León describes how, right after it happened, the
killer asked Kingston what he was going to do about it:

This question is both real and philosophical, paralyzing and
energizing. This is the moment that breaks his young world open,
forging a dark chasm that he will try to fill for the rest of his life
with blood, hatred, drugs, and self-loathing.

These ramshackle settings are where De León is at his best, capturing
the personalities of the smugglers. His heavy use of the oral history
style lets the reader listen in as they reveal intimate experiences or
jolts of wisdom:

Kingston: Well, you start out just fucking around. You start out
thinking you are playing. But you soon realize that you can’t change
the train tracks, but they can really change you. The tracks are like
a dog you keep fucking with. You keep fucking with it again and again
until eventually it bites you and then it’s over.

Kingston, Roberto, and the other smugglers were all once—and still
sort of are—migrants. They have made it across multiple
international borders but have also been caught and sent back, trapped
in a cycle of poverty, hunger, and payday, the last of which typically
launches them into drug-fueled benders. Most of them harbor a hope of
finally making it north themselves.

“History has shown us that border walls are no match for human
determination and the will to live,” De León writes. “Our
species’ survival has long been reliant on our ability to move
across the landscape in search of resources and new habitats.” The
central paradox of closed borders is that they create more criminals
than they impede: that border closures beget and then bolster
smuggling networks is basically understood by scholars, though
mulishly denied by immigration restrictionists.

The shifting patterns and quotidian intricacies of these networks are
what De León investigates. But as you read his moving—albeit
sometimes mawkish and meandering—account of these few young
smugglers you wonder how representative this small group is. De León
explains that he’s committed many years to building rapport, trust,
and even friendship with the crew he focuses on. Among anthropologists
the method is called “participant observation,” but De León and
others also call it “deep hanging out”—a term more in line with
the spirit of _Soldiers and Kings_.

De León has extensively documented the plight of migrants in previous
projects, but curiously, for this research into smugglers, he decides
not to hang out at all with migrants because, he says, he’s worried
they might tell him something that would “anger their guide and put
their trip at risk.” Despite his willingness to walk the tracks and
kick back with the guides, or drive them to the store for coconut milk
for iguana stew, he also has his limits. He doesn’t board the Beast,
as the cargo train migrants often ride is called; he doesn’t follow
along with the guides when they’re actually moving migrants; and he
steers clear of those who have a “bad vibe.” But his limits blur.
As anthropologically worthy and politically urgent as the topic is, in
getting ever closer to his subjects, De León also inches himself into
an ethical quagmire.

At one point in a bar, after “rough words are exchanged in
Spanish”—a rather typical passive construction—a man shoves De
León. In response, Kingston savagely pummels the man, repeatedly
punching him in the face. After they race out of the bar and drive
off, one of them takes a deep huff of paint thinner, and De León
looks at himself in the rearview mirror, asking, “Who do I think I
am? What is it that I think I am doing here? When will I know that I
have gone too far?”

The complexity of these relationships is revealed even more starkly
when De León describes how he financially supports his subjects. “I
found myself paying for a whole range of things,” he writes of
Kingston. “I covered the cost of transporting his murdered
nephew’s body from northern Mexico all the way back to Honduras. I
bankrolled his attempt to start a food stand out of his apartment,”
among other expenditures.

De León clarifies that he wants to make sure he “could be relied on
in emergencies, but I didn’t want to be viewed as an endless supply
of cash.” Nonetheless, a paragraph later, he admits:

It’s like I’ve completely forgotten all of my own rules. I’ve
become a pushover and practically open my wallet whenever he asks,
which is often…. I can’t help it. He’s charismatic and likable,
and when things are good, I love being around him…. I’ve gazed
into his difficult past and I feel for him.

The ethics of De León’s approach get even more knotted when
Kingston pretends to be kidnapped to try to extort more money from
him. (The “ransom” decreases from $1,500 to $250, and after he
supposedly is released, he only asks for $25 for a bus ticket.)

“Ethnography comes with a price,” De León writes (meaning a
metaphorical price, though a reader might be mistaken)—“a hangover
that lasts forever.” De León “like[s] to imagine that my presence
does something positive for those I interact with: it provides them
with a sympathetic ear…a lifeline they can use when things get
really bad.” That’s a worthy sentiment, but there’s a difference
between a book being _about_ someone and being _for_ someone.

What more does he, or do we, learn from scene after sad scene of
intoxicated and often maudlin youth running from the past, scraping by
in the present, and pawing at a future? We glean a few more details
about their lives but not much more insight into how smuggling works.
If De León were able to offer the reader a clearer understanding of
the workings of migrant smuggling, rather than an impressionistic,
often beautiful, sometimes rather jumbled account of a seemingly
random group of pals he’s made, his impressive commitment, deep
empathy, and questionable derring-do might seem more justified.

And yet in some ways this is what smuggling is: relatively small and
atomized groups operating in their niches without a full view or
comprehension of how other groups work, or of how migrants ultimately
get from home to their destination. As one survey of smuggling trends
in Turkey notes, there is no “international umbrella organisation of
migrant smuggling.” Rather, there is “a de facto network” that
functions “horizontally from the beginning to the end of the illegal
process.” So De León’s snapshot of this small group of smugglers
is idiosyncratic and yet also indicative: smuggling varies too much
from place to place and year to year to be a single thing. Still,
there are patterns and parallels, and following a linear progression
of someone being guided could have been more revealing than a tight
focus on a single part of the picture.

In his research for_ The Land of Open Graves_, De León killed five
pigs, dressed them in human clothing, dropped them in the desert, and
set up cameras to document how their bodies were picked apart, eaten,
and dragged around by scavengers, bearing witness to the way hundreds
of people are not only killed by border policies every year but often
disappeared by them. “One body,” De León writes, was
“skeletonized in less than a day.” All that was left of the pig
were “two polished leg bones and a moist pair of blue jeans.”

De León continued his research on death in the borderlands for
several years. “We have a humanitarian crisis and we need better
scientific data,” he told _The Arizona Republic_ in a 2018
interview about it. A report by that newspaper the year before had
found that the Border Patrol “significantly undercounts migrant
deaths because the agency tracks only bodies encountered by its agents
and not those found by others.” The investigation also found that in
several states “migrant deaths exceeded the official count by 25
percent to nearly 300 percent.” De León’s pig experiments brought
more than just shock value to those statistics, underscoring the fact
that not only are migrants and their families disgraced by brutal
deaths and the lack of customary burials, but the rapid
disarticulation and decomposition of bodies in the desert contributes
to this severe undercount.

As De León describes in _Soldiers and Kings_, a similar fate—bones
splayed out in the desert—lies in store not only for migrants but
for smugglers as well. He writes of Roberto: “Death is breathing
down his neck. He wants to run away and invent a life for himself that
doesn’t include guns or knives or desperate people doing desperate
things.” Roberto, too, “asks me for help to escape his
nightmare.” (Even smugglers need smugglers.) The twist—both
narrative and ethical—is that the person Roberto asks to guide him
out of that precarity is De León. The first line of the
book—“Roberto’s murder doesn’t warrant much
attention”—retrospectively reads like a self-indictment. In De
León’s prose you can feel the buckling weight of those he’s
trying to lift onto his shoulders.

“The tendency to look at migrant smuggling more as a pathology than
as a social phenomenon has…long influenced the foundational research
questions,” Luca Raineri writes in a chapter of the _Routledge
Handbook of Smuggling_, explaining why perhaps the topic hasn’t been
seriously assessed outside of academia, though human smuggling has
persisted for millennia. Despite the dearth of books tackling the
subject head-on, there are noteworthy contributions, including Ted
Conover’s _Coyotes _(1987), Marianne S. Wokeck’s _Trade in
Strangers_ (1999), Patrick Radden Keefe’s _The Snakehead_ (2009),
David Spener’s _Clandestine Crossings _(2009), and Peter Tinti and
Tuesday Reitano’s _Migrant, Refugee, Smuggler, Savior_ (2016).

The United Nations Protocol against the Smuggling of Migrants by Land,
Sea, and Air, adopted in 2000, defines smuggling as

the procurement, in order to obtain, directly or indirectly, a
financial or other material benefit, of the illegal entry of a person
into a State Party of which the person is not a national or a
permanent resident.

As much as that reads like poorly punctuated supranational
gobbledygook, there is at least some attempt at precision. Typically
there’s little nuance in how smugglers are portrayed and prosecuted.
The European Commission, in announcing late last year a new “global
alliance” to combat smuggling, declared that “migrant smuggling is
a criminal activity that disrespects human life.” In the United
States, Biden’s Department of Justice has baked anti-smuggling
vitriol into policy, calling high-level smugglers, in a recent press
release announcing a newly repackaged strategy of increasing
prosecutions, “the worst of the worst.”

In _Soldiers and Kings_, De León does not romanticize or absolve
smugglers, but he does give a fuller picture of people typically
flattened into two-dimensional villains. Criminalizing an act as
fundamental as human movement not only subverts justice but is also
futile. “It’s simple,” Chino, another smuggler, says to De
León. “Immigration gets tougher and we invent new routes.” Those
new routes are inevitably more difficult and more dangerous—as well
as more dependent on smugglers.

In the epilogue De León describes how it felt to present his research
about Roberto and the other guides to a mostly academic audience in a
university auditorium: “I stand here in front of a crowd peddling
stories of other people’s misery.” The self-criticism fits with
the depressive mood De León sinks into by the end of the book. A few
pages earlier, detailing his long-fizzling breakup with Kingston, he
writes, “Perhaps we both extracted as much as humanly possible from
each other and there is nothing healthy left between us.” But after
admitting that smugglers may be “unlikable, if not outright
detestable,” De León pivots and wonders if “perhaps it’s not
just smugglers we should be directing our ire toward.” Rather, the
focus should be on the “larger forces at play that create the
violent system of clandestine movement.” Such sweeping conclusions
verge on the abstract, but without a doubt he has given readers a new
and intimate view of this chaotic and often dangerous profession
forged by immigration restrictions.

Shortly after Fredy and Gerónimo smuggled me into Mexico, I paid them
to guide me back into Guatemala. I needed to cross the border again,
this time officially—because I could, because I was born in the
United States, and because otherwise I’d be in Mexico without
authorization and I’d probably have to pay a fine or hire a lawyer.
Here’s another inequity created at the crossroads of migration and
law. For some to cross borders they must pay officials or lawyers.
Others pay a different set of people.

More by John Washington

Eyes on the Border December 14, 2024
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The Return of Trump—III November 10, 2024
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‘We Got Kidnapped Again’ October 25, 2024
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_JOHN WASHINGTON is a staff writer at Arizona Luminaria
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border politics, as well as criminal-justice issues and the arts. He
is also an award-winning translator, having translated Óscar
Martinez, Anabel Hernández, and Sandra Rodriguez Nieto, among others.
His most recent book, The Case for Open Borders
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Haymarket Books in February 2024. Find more of his work at:
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