Soldiers of fortune, kings of pain

The archaeological anthropologist Jason De León has made a career of studying the things people take with them—and the things they leave behind—when they move. Having founded in 2009 the Undocumented Migration Project, which collects and analyzes thousands of objects left behind on the harrowing journeys northward through the Sonoran Desert, he turned his attention to a community of people almost as vilified as gang members. He began following, befriending, and interviewing human smugglers along the tracks of southern Mexico in the late 2010s and published Soldiers and Kings: Survival and Hope in the World of Human Smuggling in 2024. De León takes a page from the sociologist Matt Desmond’s Evicted, composing ethnographic prose with all the verve and immediacy of a you-are-there novel. The narrator mostly disappears into the background, foregrounding the discourse and context in the present tense. The emphasis here is on vivid, gritty prose, perhaps in hopes that the reader can more clearly imagine herself in this place, feeling the tension, the fear, the anxiety, and the little joys (and boredoms) of a nearly forgotten place: “Mexico is a dark fantasy for sixteen-year-old Chino. A world of restlessness and freedom, a time of exploration and violence that he navigates with an increasingly warped moral compass. The train is his playground. The tracks are his home. He traverses the country in search of something unnamable and, worse, uncontrollable” (74).

Chino, a principal character in this story of migrants-on-the-way-to-becoming-smugglers, appears in this quote in the pupa stage—not fully formed but already far from his early teen self—a Honduran migrant trying unsuccessfully to make it to the US. It seems obvious that De León has taken the liberty of turning an interview transcript into narrative prose, and it’s hard to fault him for doing so, because the result is a book that reads like a chaotic, heart-rending tale of human struggle and (mostly) survival.

Perhaps the most important contribution of this ethnography is that it forces us to take seriously the fact that most of these “human smugglers” and “traffickers” have been (or currently are) simultaneously victims and perpetrators of horrific violence. Some of the key players and shot callers are gang members—the MS-13 plays a significant role in extorting travelers—while others, like Chino, simply began as migrants and, after several tries to make it to the US, had learned enough about the journey and its customs to be useful, both to the migrants needing direction and information and to the shot callers seeking scouts. Just like the gang members in their home countries, the smugglers are at once victims and perpetrators of intense cruelty. We are barely able to come to know them as migrants before we learn that they are also coyotes, a term that aptly conjures the prey-or-be-preyed-upon nature of life as a smuggler.

In this story, young, old, and middle-aged, men and women, set out for the US, then find themselves “tangled” in the web of contractors, subcontractors, and runners—so-called foot soldiers—in the web of human transport. A few, like Kingston, manage to squeeze more than mere survival out of the trade, moving about Mexico and Central America with relative freedom and frequent access to cash for partying as well as for paying off train conductors and police for information and protection. These lucky—or unlucky—few are the “kings” of the trail, even if their kingdom entitles them to more pain than pleasure. Flaco, a Honduran who spent his teens gang-banging with MS-13 in California, only to be imprisoned and eventually deported, returned to Mexico, where he was able to earn respect and a degree of authority in the smuggling community. But his position lies several rungs below the likes of Kingston: “Keep in mind that in practically every other social context, Flaco is a nobody, a poor and uneducated person who lives hand to mouth on the margins. But on the migrant trail he is an authority figure, an expert, a king” (250). Kingston opines that 90 percent of the tracks are controlled by gangs who by nature are attracted to places of desperation and vulnerability. Says De León, out on the tracks “the line between smuggler and gangster becomes blurred” (214). While there is plenty of harrowing violence in these pages, De León avoids the “jungle book” temptation to dramatize the violence or his proximity to it. The author recognizes his privilege and doesn’t try to romanticize (or demonize) the lives lived by his informants: “All I know is that the realities of the undocumented world are complicated” (327). This statement is delivered in response to an audience member inquiring about why we should “care” about Chino’s death and the deaths of smugglers in general. “Humanizing” people like Chino will likely make some readers feel conflicted. We want “cleaner” stories of good and bad actors. Reality—especially the harsh and unforgiving context of global migration in the 2020s—gives us something else entirely.

Identifying the real victims

The political scientist Adam Golob takes a decidedly different approach to understanding the lives of gang members in the “Northern Triangle” of Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador. In Gang Strategies in the Northern Triangle: Coerced Criminality as a Form of Human Trafficking, the author argues for expanding the definition of “human trafficking” such that it includes the “tens of millions” of people who are coerced into doing things they do not wish to do—including youth who perform services for the gang such as serving as lookouts, collecting extortion payments, and assisting in human trafficking (xii). His larger goal aims at expanding the range of persons who could be legitimately described as “victims” of human trafficking.

The research began as a collaboration between the author and an immigration attorney whose access to text from asylum interviews, along with personal testimonies from sources like NPR, provided the data used to build his case. This approach is certainly a novel one, but I would stop short of joining the author in calling it “groundbreaking.” There are also occasional claims that seem to reach beyond the data presented. “Gangs,” we are told, “expand, control, and terrorize like never before,” as difficult a statement to verify as the one arguing that the Northern Triangle is “neither ahead nor behind the average” in terms of the widespread existence of a criminal underworld that exploits human trafficking (1).

Golob’s “nontraditional model” of human trafficking and slavery includes anyone who “is unable to live without fear of force, fraud, or coercion of an oppressor” (12). But the loss of precision in this definition as against what the author calls a “traditional model” seems like a gamble that may not pay off. The expanded definition would presumably include anyone living in an abusive relationship or working for an unscrupulous employer. Neither of these states of existence is to be minimized nor their ugliness diminished, but to equate them with “human slavery” threatens to undermine that term itself and amplify the skepticism already circling around it.

When approaching the topic of gang membership, Golob invests great effort into clarifying the difference between gang membership and gang servitude: “What’s missing is an informed understanding of the critical differences between gangs’ practices of recruiting young people as members versus coercing them into service” (68). And it is certainly the case that some youth are pressed into service of the gang against their will, just as poor and indigenous youth were coerced into joining the army or civilian patrols in the 1980s. Golob’s argument is that these youth should be granted asylum protection even if they have served the gang. But there are many shades of coercion and many shades of recruitment. In some cases, the gang dangles carrots of money and sex for joiners even as it brandishes the stick of violent punishment should a youth rebuff their efforts. What is a barrio teen to do?

At times Golob’s attempt to draw a distinction between those who felt coerced into performing services for the gang (including extortion and trafficking) and those who joined for selfish reasons appears almost as a contrast to De León’s attempt to complicate the distinction between victim and trafficker on the migrant trail. Migrant victims sometimes become traffickers. Marginalized street youth sometimes become gang members, calculating and ruthless. It is a horrible reality created by grinding poverty, hopelessness, and desperation.

Cataloging transnational organized crime

While Adam Golob builds his arguments with testimonies gathered from some of the most marginalized and disadvantaged voices in the region, Evan R. Ellis draws on a very different source when surveying the landscape of organized crime across Latin America in Transnational Organized Crime in Latin America and the Caribbean: From Evolving Threats and Responses to Integrated, Adaptive Solutions. The author comes from the world of defense and security studies. A research professor at the US Army War College, his principal partners in dialogue are those involved in the US Southern Command structure (during the 2010s) and the many leaders and representatives of the armed forces throughout the Americas. Indeed, in the preface, the author points out that many of the insights in the book “come from interviews and interactions with military and law enforcement practitioners in the region,” and he takes care to thank many of them by name. Methodologically, this approach is in stark contrast to the approach taken by most of the academic scholarship addressing similar themes in the region, and in the eyes of this reviewer, that makes this work particularly intriguing. At the very least, one can appreciate this book as a piece of research conducted from an entirely different vantage point than the typical social science monograph. The intention, however, is similar. The author wishes to aid in the development of policies that support human thriving throughout the region.

In a chapter called “The Geography of Transnational Organized Crime,” the author provides a country-by-country elaboration of transnational criminal organizations (TCOs) that quickly starts to feel like a litany: More than 200 tons of cocaine were reportedly seized in Bolivia in 2014, more than 1,000 clandestine airstrips reportedly discovered by Bolivian authorities and 1,400 irregular airstrips found in Argentina. Although illegal mining and human trafficking are mentioned from time to time, the vast majority of attention and space here go to reporting on drug movements across the region in ways that could easily lead readers to believe that TCOs are virtually all focused on drugs. One comes away from this chapter with the impression that governments in the region have deputized their military and police to play a vigorous game of Whac-A-Mole, and the exercise is ultimately futile given that demand remains strong not only in the United States but also in other large economies of the region, such as Brazil and Chile. Credit goes to the author for at least mentioning the clandestine ties some of these TCOs maintain with certain high-level members of the political and military elites. But there emerges a sense that national governments have their hands full—and in some cases, their pockets as well.

Not surprisingly, Ellis believes that the military and judicial structures have much to contribute to the dismantling of TCOs in Latin America. But he is also candid about the limitations of traditional US-sponsored attempts to neutralize these organizations by capturing or killing their leaders: “Empirical evidence to date suggests that a larger number of smaller criminal entities means greater uncertainty and competition between groups, and on average, less experienced leaders more disposed to violence and error. In short, the criminal economy in the region may be evolving in a way that renders old leadership-targeting strategies ever less effective, while generating tendencies for ever more violent, chaotic outcomes” (92).

Let that last sentence sink in for a moment: More, smaller TCOs (which frequently result from “successful” law enforcement efforts to apprehend or kill TCO leaders) often result in more violence, not less. It’s almost as though the police and military game of Whac-A-Mole is not only ineffective—it puts the public in danger. Rather than simply going after leaders of organized crime, the author believes that “whole-of-government approaches” should be employed that, among other things, target financial support for the organizations, reform prisons and improve control of them, and expand bilateral coordination both within the region and with the US. In the closing chapter of the book, Ellis waxes eloquent in his critique of the first Trump administration, pronouncing that “the rhetoric from the administration in the early days of the Trump presidency … raises serious concerns about whether the administration will be able to establish the type of partnerships of mutual respect and trust that effective security cooperation against transnational organized crime in the hemisphere requires” (180). Partway into a second Trump administration, such concerns strike the reader as almost quaint. We no longer need to wonder whether the Trump administration will be able to establish “partnerships of mutual respect.” Presidential pronouncements have made clear that cooperation is no longer a goal.

Violence and networks of migration

Narmala Halstead provides a close-up account of migration networks and some of the ways violence accompanies these networks in Competing Power: Landscapes of Migration, Violence and the State. Halstead has written a book that is at times heavy on social theory and at others heavy on autobiographical aspects of ethnographic research. The book narrates the author’s decades of ethnographic work, focusing on the global and local processes shaping personal experiences of migration for her research participants in Guyana and among Guyanese emigrants in New York. Halstead uses a “case histories method” as well as archival material, court documents, commission reports, and “surveys of emerging social media sites” (11). Fieldwork was conducted from 1995 to 1999. There is an element of ethnographic memoir here, but at times the writing feels more academic and technical than might have been necessary. The author argues that the work “engages collaboratively with processes as they are happening” (11), presumably pointing out that the research is participatory. Curiously, the author reports an intention to “fragment” the data to provide anonymity to her participants, for example, by giving them depersonalized titles such as “Host A” rather than by naming them (15).

Some of the chapters delve into narratives of violence as told to the author by fieldwork participants recalling confrontations that took place as early as the 1980s. In a chapter titled “Amidst Illegality and Violence: Flight and the State,” the author describes attacks by “ethno-bandits” that generated a heightened incentive to migrate. For example, her interlocutors describe being terrorized in the 1970s by a semireligious cult called the House of Israel, which engaged in violent intimidation and occasional targeted killings in collusion with a corrupt state, fixated on scapegoating the local Indian and Muslim immigrant population. Such ethno-political violence ebbed and flowed across the decades, with peaks as recently as the 2000s, when another group, this one organized by an escaped prisoner, engaged in a series of massacres and targeted killings of high-ranking ethnic Indian government officials. Halstead writes, “Narratives of violence through inter-ethnic tension … lost and gained significance in tandem with experiences of outward migration and status and empowerment” (45).

Thus criminal, semiorganized violence ebbs and flows in Guyana, at times with the tacit approval of the government and at other times in direct opposition to it. Meanwhile, migration and asylum seeking serve as an escape valve for a population frustrated and intimidated by the violence. Halstead’s narrative overview of the “landscape” of organized violence and migration in Guyana shows variation from the rest of the region and serves to remind readers of the way organized criminal groups can take advantage of local prejudices to build support and acquire protection from certain segments of the political class.

Assessing the “Medellín miracle”

Caroline Doyle begins her book Researching Crime and Violence in Medellín, Colombia: Truth Versus Truths with a description of the journey that led her to a dissertation on Colombian crime and violence in Medellín. Doyle’s book is not a study of criminal organizations so much as an investigation of the crime-reduction efforts that may or may not have resulted in the “pacification” of a city—the “miracle” of Medellín. Doyle, an Australian social scientist with considerable experience in the region, relies on semistructured interviews with Colombian researchers and violence-reduction practitioners and advocates as she tries to piece together the puzzle of what happened in the late 1990s and the 2000s when the city went from being one of the most violent in the region to being a paragon of tranquility, at least according to the international press.

Not surprisingly, the story turns out to be more complicated than some of the city’s boosters have let on. Not only does criminal violence continue to linger in the city’s popular neighborhoods—eventually causing the researcher to stop visiting certain neighborhoods for research—but determining the cause of the reduction in violence turns out to be a puzzle with many missing pieces: “Over my time in the city I came to understand that it was perhaps ‘truths’ I was looking for and not the truth” (14). Multiple and partially divergent accounts of the violence reduction compete for support in ways not unlike the competing accounts of the country’s civil war. On the one hand, some of her interlocutors argue that it was “social urbanism”—an approach to urban planning and development that aims to enhance equity and maximize user-friendly public spaces open to all—that brought much of the reduction in homicides. Others point out that it was Don Berna, leader of the criminal cartel Cacique de Nutibara, who used the military’s ouster of the milicia guerrillas as a window for constructing a monopoly over the violent bandas and bloques who had hitherto vied for control. A few of Doyle’s consultants argue that the homicide reductions can be at least partly attributed to government action in ousting the milicias and threatening the bloques with painful and expensive consequences if they engage in open, gratuitous violence. One nongovernmental organization leader explains to Doyle that a kind of pact was established between local police and Don Berna in which the latter promised, “I don’t flaunt violence, but you let me do business” (72). This is the “donbernabilidad” produced by Don Berna’s pacto de fusiles. Not everyone buys this thesis. One Colombian researcher describes the pacto de fusiles thesis as overly simplistic and lacking in empirical evidence, and instead points to research that makes a data-backed case to suggest that actions such as lighting streets and parks and building public libraries had a measurable impact on violence rates. Such research would coincide with the work of US crime reduction researcher Patrick Sharkey, who used data on the presence or absence of nonprofit community development projects to demonstrate a statistically significant link between local, active investment in a community and a reduction in homicides in that same community.Footnote ²

Two things become clear by the book’s conclusion. First, Colombian researchers and practitioners have invested considerable time and energy in trying to develop a grasp of what brought on the reduction in homicides and the broadly agreed-on improvements in public safety. Doyle’s book is essentially an attempt to collect and synthesize these perspectives for an English-reading audience. Second, members of this community of crime observers and researchers, who graciously donate their time and expertise to the author’s quest for a causal explanation, differ considerably on which aspects of an undoubtedly multicausal story contributed the most. That they do not arrive at a consensus should surprise no one. One need look only to the ongoing arguments about the “great American crime decline” in the US to find a parallel.Footnote ³ In effect, crime reduction amounts to a complex and organic process. Even when some of the causes are fairly evident, it remains impossible to verify how much each factor contributed to the whole.

Navigating criminalized governance

If Caroline Doyle’s journey toward understanding Medellín’s crime reduction raises as many questions as it answers, it at least points to causes for hope in the study of Latin America’s experience of organized crime. Nicholas Barnes’s Inside Criminalized Governance: How and Why Gangs Rule the Streets of Rio de Janeiro brings us back to the more common experience of never-ending cycles of violence woven into the fabric of society and its governing structures. Barnes has written a thorough and unflinching account of life in the favela that relies on over two hundred interviews with gang members, nonprofit workers, and residents, as well as a review of hundreds of archival documents and over twenty thousand hotline denunciations of crime. He spent about half of his three-year stay in the Complexo da Maré, the country’s largest network of popular neighborhoods, and by the end of the book, readers have a feel for its geography, its history, and the names and habits of its controlling gangs. Maps, photos, bar graphs, and diagrams help readers unfamiliar with the landscape acquire an understanding of the way Brazil’s favelas emerged in the 1950s and 1960s as planned and unplanned spaces for the landless.

Of particular interest in this study is how gangs govern. In other words, Barnes refuses to reduce the gangs to purveyors of violence and intimidation. Instead, he points out that gangs govern spaces through a combination of two key strategies: coercion and provisioning. This distinction allows him to compare gangs not only by their level of violence but also by the degree to which they provide “benefits” to their residents through income and services sought out or expected by non–gang member residents of the favela. A few of the services provided by Brazilian gangs to the residents in their jurisdiction include dispute settling, providing financial aid to individuals or households experiencing acute need, disciplining incidents of domestic violence, planning and carrying out bailes funk (giant block parties complete with opportunities for residents to profit from the sale of food and drink), and making cocaine and other drugs available to the community. Because this is a comparative study of gang organizations, Barnes seeks to compare gangs by their violence and their provisioning. He concludes that gangs vary significantly in the extent of services provided to residents. Furthermore, he finds that this variation is best explained by the level of police threat faced by a particular gang. A gang that faces no threat from the police will provide few, if any, resources to its community, while a gang that faces a significant threat from police will seek to diminish the threat through providing significant services, in effect “buying” the support of the community.

The same cannot be said about coercion, the other half of gang governance. After all, gangs do not merely provide services and resources for their residents. They also coerce, discipline, and occasionally execute residents, often to enhance their own safety and longevity as a gang. But variation in such violence is better explained by interaction with rival gangs than by interaction with police who rarely, if ever, pose an existential threat to the gang. When a rival gang makes an active attempt at takeover, the existential stakes cause the gang’s dono to seek absolute and total control of force within his territory, meting out actual and suspected information leakage with severe violence or death. In short, if you want to understand why gangs vary in their level of violence, look to the context of local gang competition for territory. But if you want to understand why gangs vary in their “generosity” toward residents (however self-centered that may be), look to their relationship to the police.

Barnes’s theory is elegant in its simplicity, though how accurately it describes realities beyond Brazil is difficult to fully assess, even with his careful explanation and abundant data. In Central America, for example, the transnational gangs seem less eager to obtain the good graces of the residents in their territories, regardless of the degree to which police pose a threat. What does seem certain is that increased competition between gangs brings about the threat not only of intergang violence but also of the gang’s violent coercion of its local populace. This finding helps explain the claim by Evan Ellis that “successful” police targeting of gang leadership often leads to the splintering of groups and a rise in levels of violence as the resulting groups seek to establish territorial control in a power vacuum.