By Catherine E. Shoichet, CNN

(CNN) — The nuns inside a migrant shelter in southern Mexico gave Jason De León an ominous warning: “Whatever you do, don’t go outside. That’s where all the bad people are.”

De León sensed there was more to the story.

“Of course, the first thing that I did was go outside and find the ‘bad people,’” De León recalls. “You know, the ‘bad people’ were just a bunch of young men hanging out on the train tracks.”

The men asked De León what he did for a living. He told them he was an anthropologist — “like a journalist, but I’m more annoying, because I stick around longer and I keep asking the same question for years.” The professor soon learned what the young men did for a living, too. They were human smugglers — or, as they put it, guías (guides) for migrants traveling through Mexico and trying to reach the US.

De León had thought he was done writing about migration. He’d documented deaths along the US-Mexico border in his first book, and it was devastating. But that conversation along the train tracks in southern Mexico in 2015 led him in a direction he hadn’t been planning to go.

One of the young men asked a simple question: “Why don’t you write about us?”

That young man — Juan Roberto Paredes — would end up becoming a central character in De León’s next book, “Soldiers and Kings: Survival and Hope in the World of Human Smuggling.”

De León, who’s a UCLA professor and director of the school’s Cotsen Institute of Archaeology, spent seven years shadowing smugglers to tell their stories, which the scholar argues are far more complicated and less glamorous than typical media portrayals suggest. His work won last year’s National Book Award in November.

The risks for migrants are intensifying, with robbery, kidnapping, extortion and murder becoming increasingly common along the journey north, De León says. He argues that smugglers, too, are often destitute and dealing with many of the same dangers.

Roberto’s story was one of many that took an unexpected turn during De León’s research. The “skinny, banged-up Honduran kid…knew how to guide people along the train tracks and through the jungle because he came of age in those dreadful places,” De León writes. Eventually, the young man tries to escape the smuggling business — and meets a tragic end.

De León’s book begins at Roberto’s grave.

The author spoke with CNN recently about what he misunderstood about smuggling before beginning his research, why Mexico is becoming more dangerous for migrants and how Trump’s return to power is likely to change the smuggling world. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Were there any assumptions you made when you first set out to write this book, that you realized were not true?

I went into it going, I really want to understand this in all of its complexity. So I was not surprised to learn that smugglers are complicated people, that nobody chooses to be a smuggler, that it’s a kind of brutal occupation. I kind of intuitively knew all those things.

What I didn’t expect was, it’s not very lucrative. I was imagining that these guys were going to have more money, more often. And it really was not the case. It literally was kind of boom or bust. And the book ends with a lot of these guys who go from boom to total bust.

And I think the other thing was I just was expecting a lot more consistency within (the smuggling organizations), internally. I had given people a lot more credit in terms of how organized it was. And I think that’s partly because, when you listen to Customs and Border Protection or Border Patrol, they talk about these organized smuggling rings, and they make it seem like it’s really well built, and it’s not.

So many smugglers I knew were always worried about getting killed because they didn’t know someone, because communication lines were bad. That really surprised me. But then it became very, very clear that there’s nothing you can do to ever stop this machine, because it just keeps rebuilding itself over and over again, which has got to be frustrating both if you’re law enforcement trying to stop smuggling, and also frustrating if you’re in that system and you’re trying to make it work. There’s no guarantee that tomorrow you’re going to have any kind of job security, because of all the things that can happen overnight.

And the Border Patrol always talk about how these smugglers are high on drugs. I get why they’re high on drugs. They’re just trying to cope with the ongoing catastrophes by any means necessary. It literally is one of these jobs where you can be in jail, or dead, or something in between, in the blink of an eye.

And you spent seven years doing this research?

Going back and forth, I was in Pakal-Ná (Mexico) and then I was in Honduras. …

I started meeting all these different folks who were connected in different ways, and the project just kind of kept going and going.

In some ways Covid was good for me, because it gave me kind of a hard stop on some of the field work, and then I had to be much more strategic after that to keep doing it. I spent the first part of lockdown replaying hundreds of hours of audio…started to write, and then, as soon as we could travel again, I went back, and I could see how Covid was impacting these things, how much the migrant trail changes in a matter of months.

Now I think we’re about to see major changes, similar to when I was there in Mexico during the beginnings of Trump, and things were really changing pretty quickly.

Thinking back on that moment, what are the kinds of changes you expect to see?

Smugglers love Trump, because it’s a lot of bluster, and migrants don’t know that, so they can jack up their prices quickly. I would say Trump is good for the economy of undocumented migration. Smugglers are going, “OK, if you want to come now, the price has doubled, because it’s so much more dangerous now,” even though it’s probably not. I remember having lots of conversations with smugglers, who would say, “I love Trump. He makes our job easier and makes it easier for us to justify higher rates.”

I’m sure the rates are going through the roof right now. I think we’re going to continue to see that. Then (the question is) whether or not deportations will start in any meaningful way, that’s more unknown right now. I do think we’re going to see this uptick in migration rates, and probably in costs, until January, and then I don’t know.

What about the impact of building the wall, and added enforcement at the border?

It puts people more in harm’s way. At this point, we’ve had 30 years of “prevention through deterrence.” Thirty years of these policies have just shown that people are more than willing to risk their lives. Migrant death is about as high as it’s ever been. I think people are going to continue to die at the rate that they have, and probably more, as they become more and more desperate.

I’ve heard politicians who normally have different viewpoints agree that human smuggling is bad. It’s something they’ll say, almost in passing, as a starting point before they debate what should be done. What do you think people are missing when they don’t dig more deeply into who these smugglers are, and what’s motivating them, and the human side of all of this? Why is that so important?

One of the goals for me with the book was to clarify that smuggling and human trafficking are radically different things. They overlap sometimes, but most of the time they are two separate kind of entities. When we hear people talk about smuggling, they’re conflating it with trafficking. And a lot of times, when you hear politicians on the left or the right talk about the evils of smuggling, it’s because people have been trafficked, or because someone has died, and obviously both of those things are terrible things.

I think that’s the dominant narrative that we hear. And if smugglers only abandoned people in the desert or only trafficked people, this industry would not be so self-sustaining. At the end of the day, those things that are really hyper-visible are a very small proportion of what actually happens.

I really want people to think about smuggling as a service economy for migrants. Every American is implicated in this industry, because we benefit from the labor of smugglers who bring the people to this country, who do all the work that many Americans don’t want to do. The employers benefit from smugglers. The consumer benefits from smugglers. I want people to think about it in those terms.

And then you can start to ask yourself, okay, well, who else benefits from this? And who’s driving these things? That’s an important way to then start having these broader discussions about the complexities. Any way that we can add nuance or detail to the discussions around migration for me is a good thing.

In recent years, when I’ve spoken to migrants who’ve made the journey up, the mood in the conversation often really shifts when they start talking about Mexico. Many have told me it was the worst part of their journey. Does that resonate with what you saw?

It’s definitely getting a lot worse. Mexico has just gotten so dangerous. Journeys are becoming longer. It’s becoming more expensive. The abuses are just ramping up. I think for me a signal that Mexico is becoming more and more dangerous for these folks is the fact that I’m running out of places where I feel safe doing field work. And that kills me. That really makes me incredibly sad. I love Mexico so much.

In the last 10 years, I’ve watched all these places where I had spent so much time just becoming impossible to be. And I’m a passport-carrying citizen who can navigate these things relatively well, and even I’m like, what’s going on, I can’t be here anymore. And so I can’t imagine if you’re someone coming from Venezuela or Haiti and you’re trying to get through this gauntlet.

It used to be before that Veracruz (a state in eastern Mexico) and the North, that’s where bad things happen. And now it’s like, any one of these places, something catastrophic can happen if you’re a migrant.

What’s changed?

As migration has ramped up, you’ve got more people coming who now have to cross the length of Mexico. You’ve got Mexican immigration (officials) with the help of the United States trying to crack down on this — trying to slow people down, deporting people en masse. There’s way more border infrastructure, or immigration infrastructure, there now that’s dedicated towards stopping people, which then, of course, just leads to increased corruption.

And so now migrants are dealing with corrupt immigration agents, and then, of course, the cartels and these transnational gangs, they look at this stuff and they go, oh, this is super easy money. This is actually much easier to make money off of than it is moving drugs. And this is a steady supply of people to tax.

It used to be you could get across Mexico in under a month — hop on a train, ride some buses. It wasn’t super controlled. And now just getting out of Chiapas (state in southern Mexico) can take weeks. And as all these new cartels are popping up, they’re recognizing that there’s a lot more money to be made. People are looking at all of these migrants as easy money, and with that easy money just comes increased violence and increased dangers that people have to navigate.

Your book is the first I’ve ever read with a soundtrack at the end detailing music for different chapters, which I thought was so cool. Thinking about your field work along the border, and on the tracks in Mexico, and where we are as a society today, is there a song you would pick for this moment right now? Why?

I think “Clandestino” by Manu Chao is timeless. Every election cycle, every time there’s some catastrophe where people have to flee, this song comes up. When I was first introduced to it in the early 2000s, it was coming out of every radio in Mexico, and I think it’s one that you still hear pretty consistently. It still resonates with folks. Manu Chao did a video a few years ago with him playing it acoustic in front of a detention center in Phoenix.

I like thinking about it in terms of this sort of universal need to migrate, and the seemingly universal need for folks to be under the radar, because of the way border policies work, and because of all of the structures in place that really keep people sort of hidden.

It’s a good reminder that whatever we’re seeing now, we’ve seen in the past, we’re going to continue to see in the future. And you know, as an anthropologist, it’s really just reminding people that humans have always moved, and borders are a relatively new invention, and the only way that our species is going to survive is through movement.

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