Excerpt from Soldiers and Kings by Jason De León, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Introduction

Roberto's murder doesn't warrant much attention. This is not surprising in a place like Honduras, where homicide has become woven into the fabric of daily life. Still, a local newspaper in San Pedro Sula manages to give him three sentences, although it gets his first name wrong:

José [sic] Roberto Paredes died Friday night at Mario Rivas Hospital. Family members reported that he had tried to travel mojado [illegally] to the United States but in Chiapas, Mexico, was stabbed during an assault and admitted to a hospital. After his discharge, he returned to Honduras and a few days later his condition worsened and he was brought to Rivas Hospital, where he died after several days.

The story gets most of the basic details right. Roberto was in Mexico illegally when he was stabbed. He later died in Honduras from his wounds. But he wasn't a migrant headed to the United States, at least not anymore. He'd given up that fantasy a while ago. For the past few years, he'd lived as a street urchin making a little money guiding fellow Hondurans on the Mexican train tracks as they made their way north toward the American dream. What he did for a modest living goes by many names in English and Spanish: smuggler, coyote, pollero, pasador. Interchangeable terms that refer to a person who is paid to help someone get across a geopolitical boundary while avoiding detection by immigration agents. Roberto, like many others in his situation in Mexico, preferred to call himself a guía, a guide: a designation with potentially less negative semantic baggage and one that more directly reflects the work. He is the one you follow, the one who can potentially lead you through danger. The one thing you can't call Roberto is a human trafficker. People who are trafficked have that happen against their will, usually through force, fraud, or coercion. Those Roberto smuggled were willing participants who actively sought him out and paid for his services. I repeat, human smuggler and trafficker are very different things, a concept that popular media and the general public often fail to grasp.

One only needs to turn on the news to get the simple point that we are living in a worldwide migration crisis where poverty, violence, political instability, and climate change are forcing millions each year to leave their homes in search of a better existence. Given the rate that global inequality is growing, coupled with rising sea levels, increased drought, and the appearance of environmental monsters like super hurricanes, you don't need to be a soothsayer to predict that things are about to get a lot worse for all of humanity. The response of the Global North has increasingly been to harden its borders and pour money into migrant detention and deportation- industrial complexes. Build barricades. Fire tear gas and rubber bullets at mothers holding their babies. Put children in cages. Deny due process to asylum seekers. But history has shown us that border walls are no match for human determination and the will to live. Our species' survival has long been reliant on our ability to move across the landscape in search of resources and new habitats. Human mobility cannot be stopped. The human spirit cannot be broken.

As countries like the United States (and now places like Mexico) attempt to beat back migrants from their front door as if in a scene from P. D. James's The Children of Men, the human smuggling industry has ballooned. Sneaking people past border guards has grown from a mom- and- pop business into a billion- dollar global industry that will only become more important as parts of our planet grow to be less and less livable. Roberto, the guía, was a tiny cog in the behemoth economy of human smuggling. The media often portrays people like him as "bad guys" who prey on the innocent. But the story is not so simple. As countries make it harder to cross their borders, migrants find it necessary to contract the services of someone like Roberto who can provide protection and safe passage. Arrest and deportation by law enforcement, robbery, kidnapping, extortion, and murder at the hands of transnational criminal organizations: these are the dangers migrants increasingly face. Many have come to see the labor of people like Roberto as necessary and sometimes lifesaving.

Excerpted from Soldiers and Kings by Jason de Leon. Copyright © 2024 by Jason de Leon. Excerpted by permission of Viking. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.