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
