"Soldiers and Kings
By Jason De Leon
Viking, 400 pages, $32
A man named Kingston is a Honduran "guide" in Mexico -- a guia, in Spanish. That is, of course, the polite way to describe him. Many of us would be inclined to regard him, instead, as a people-smuggler. His chosen profession is to help undocumented Honduran migrants traverse Mexico to the U.S. border. By any yardstick, he is a bad man. He beat a Russian almost to death in a Mexican bar and was deported from the U.S. for pistol-whipping someone in the Bronx, N.Y. And he's a member of the Bloods gang, which has infiltrated his ethnic group, the Garifuna -- Afro-Hondurans descended from runaway slaves.
Kingston's shadowy story -- and that of a half-dozen other such guias -- is told to us by Jason De Leon in "Soldiers and Kings," a book born of years of fieldwork. In 2009, Mr. De Leon, a Mexican-Filipino-American professor of anthropology at UCLA, founded the Undocumented Migration Project, an organization that seeks to "inspire positive social change about migration issues globally." He is the author of "The Land of Open Graves" (2015), in which he accused the U.S. government of the "weaponization of natural terrain" by funneling cross-border migration through the Sonoran Desert of Arizona. Many die from heat and dehydration, a deliberate strategy, he argued, to dissuade migrants from coming to the U.S.
Mr. De Leon's interlocutors in "Soldiers and Kings" operate mainly in Chiapas, a Mexican state on the border with Guatemala, itself an impoverished country that lies in between middle-income Mexico and destitute Honduras farther to the south. Honduran migrants, writes Mr. De Leon, risk assault, robbery, rape and murder to undertake their odyssey to the U.S. They're entirely at the mercy of the guides and their bosses, many of whom are cold-blooded thugs.
We learn from Mr. De Leon that the most basic smuggler's "package" from Honduras to Houston can cost up to $15,000 per migrant. It involves more walking than riding; sleeping beside railroad tracks or in jungle clearings; atrocious food (often a diet of roasted iguana); and fetid "safe houses." Only a fraction of the money handed over -- as little as $200 -- ends up going to guias like Chino, Santos, Flaco, Papo and Kingston, all of whom Mr. De Leon came to know as he embedded in this murky world. The rest goes to the cartels and gangs who control the people-smuggling routes.
Bribes also must be paid to the police in Honduras, Guatemala and, especially, Mexico, countries that pursue U.S.-funded policies designed to turn people back well before they reach the very north of Mexico. Mr. De Leon is a man of the left: He uses phrases like "deportation-industrial complexes" and accuses "the Global North" of firing tear gas and rubber bullets "at mothers holding their babies." Yet he never mentions Donald Trump in his book, instead blaming the progressive Obama administration for putting in place antimigrant measures that impede the passage of people to the U.S. border. These measures, he argues, empower the people-smugglers, the only ones with the guile, resources and contacts to evade the checkpoints along the way. It's nigh impossible to cross Mexico without a gang-affiliated guide.
While it's easy to sympathize with migrants who flee crushing poverty and gang violence in Honduras, it's harder to like the people-smugglers whom Mr. De Leon befriends and with whom he wishes us to form a bond of empathy. He asks us to accept that these men are desperate and to forgive them their trespasses; guides, after all, make a living as best they can in an infernal milieu where there are no saints, only survivors. "People are always criminalizing what we do," says one guia, "but we are just working for our families." And if the guides exploit the migrants they herd through Mexico -- making them pay more for food or shelter, for instance, than the original deal had envisaged -- they're at least making it possible for some people to escape.
But Mr. De Leon's plainly stated recourse to "participant observation" and his stance of "cultural relativism" -- strategies by which a researcher "hangs with" his subjects and suspends normative judgment to ensure unimpaired trust and abundant material -- lead him to become much too close to his subjects. He sentimentalizes the guides and confesses to crying when he sees them in distress. He visits their families in Honduras. He gives them money, not just for beer, food and marijuana but also for time-credit on their cellphones, vital tools of the people-smuggler's trade.
Mr. De Leon's narrative is based exclusively on what he's told by his subjects: men who have a vested interest in projecting onto themselves a certain incongruous nobility -- for how else do you save yourself from self-loathing other than by persuading yourself that what you do, however squalid, is best evaluated by a broader utilitarian calculus? Put plainly, Mr. De Leon isn't skeptical enough of the hombres who become his homies.
There is valuable material in his book. We learn at firsthand how vulnerable migrants are to exploitation and how near to social collapse their countries of origin. A town called Tapachula, 12 miles into Mexico from Guatemala, teems with thousands of Haitians biding their time before they can afford to travel northward. "No disrespect to my Mexican family and friends," writes Mr. De Leon, "but s--- has to be pretty unbearable in one's home country if you're seeking refuge in Chiapas, the poorest state in Mexico."
For all his sympathetic portraiture of people-smugglers, and his sensitive portrayal of dead-end life in Honduras, Mr. De Leon's analysis is undone by his own ideology. He concedes that smuggling is "exploitative and violent" but insists that, even so, it is "not the problem." Instead, the "monstrous injustices created by capitalism that drive migration are the problem." It's ironic, then, that the people so cruelly wronged (in his view) by capitalism are fleeing in the direction of a dreamland in el Norte whose bedrock is that same confounding creed.
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Mr. Varadarajan, a Journal contributor, is a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and at NYU Law School's Classical Liberal Institute." [1]
1. People-Smuggling As a Way of Life. Varadarajan, Tunku. Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 04 Nov 2024: A.15.
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