Soldiers and Kings

Jason De León turns his attention to the world of human smuggling in Latin America, following the people who move migrants through danger, desperation, and shifting power. The result is narrative nonfiction with close human detail, shaped by anthropology but carried by lived risk, moral compromise, and the search for survival.

It is an unsentimental book, but not a distant one. What stays with the reader is how carefully it holds both structure and personhood in the same frame.