A vivid and eye-opening ethnographic work that directly challenges the usual narratives around migration and smuggling.

Much of the fearmongering around migration centers on the US-Mexico border, but De León turns his attention to the journey from Honduras to Mexico, showing how migration is entangled in a deep history of violence, poverty, and exploitation.

De León writes with clarity and empathy. Each scene feels incredibly real without tipping into melodrama. The people he gets close to are intensely human, but he approaches their stories with the respect their intimacy deserves, and his highlighting of specific experiences is intentional and provocative. He approaches his research with ethical care, never sensationalizing but never dipping into dehumanizing pity. Instead, he showcases their complexity. The line is blurry between migrant and smuggler, criminal and asylum-seeker, helpless and powerful.

What struck me most was how the smuggling world becomes a microcosm of suffering under capitalism and the long-lasting effects of global colonialism. They aren't outlaws and criminals by nature, but workers forced to operate in an underground economy that demands deception, aggression, risk, and cruelty because legitimate structures refuse to sustain them. People are forced into predatory roles, and violence becomes a condition of survival. That same violence, in turn, produces more displacement, more poverty, and more migrants, creating an unending feedback loop that sustains violence in perpetuity.

De León doesn't excuse cruelty, but contextualizes it as part of a broken system brought on by global capitalism, colonialism, and reinforced through modern militarized border policy. As he becomes more and more entrenched in the smuggling business, he has to re-examine himself, his own positionality, and the privilege of being able to opt out and leave at any time. He comes face-to-face with the depth of struggle faced by migrants and smugglers, and forces the reader to reconcile alongside him.

Soldiers and Kings gives voice to the voiceless, allowing some of the most demonized people in the world to show the nuance of the conditions they are forced into. One of the most necessary books on migration I've read, it refuses the binary of "good migrant" and "bad smuggler", exposing both as symptoms of systemic rot.