Hopping Across the Line

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.