Trolls under the bridge

There are many things to like about Soldiers and Kings, our book of the month for September. First, there’s the sheer verve it takes to go and report from the field about the clandestine people smuggling operations criss-crossing central and north America. This is an area dominated by rhetoric from people who haven’t seen it up close, where experience from real life counts for a huge amount, and De León delivers a riveting, personal viewpoint on what’s happening.

Second, there’s the way that he gets us really invested in the people in the story. It’s a cliche to suggest that any fiercely propelling work of non-fiction “reads like a novel,” but in Soldiers and Kings there were times where I was desperate to know what happened. Would this person make the border crossing? Would they survive the journey? When they disappeared, where did they go to? And would Jason be exposed or caught up deeper in this terrible web?

Third, though—and the area I want to focus on a little today—is how comfortable this book is with ambiguity. 

Sometimes there are books you read where the gray areas are simply a function of the author lacking certain kinds of information: the story that doesn’t have an end and so takes a “I guess we’ll never know” or “only time will tell” approach. This gets harder to digest when the rest of the story is full of answers or forensic-level insights but ends in a slightly inconclusive way (it’s one of the issues I had with Patrick Radden Keefe’s London Falling, for example.)

On the other hand, a lot of non-fiction really struggles with ambiguous characters, because of what I think of as the “hero-villain” issue—stories need an arc, but authors worry that drawing a problematic character with sympathy will make them compelling in such a way that it undermines their flaws. In fiction, the switch between hero and villain is common, with your origin story often . But the anti-hero is rarer in non-fiction, I think, because they end up being far more crudely drawn because we are less comfortable with real people who are both bad and likeable. There are shades of this around Elizabeth Holmes in John Carreyrou’s seminal Bad Blood, which is a truly fantastic read but never quite got me to understand what people found so magnetic about the former Theranos CEO. I hope that Nathan Fielder’s upcoming and trippy-looking documentary promises to break this barrier down. 

(A plug for one of our own here, too: I thought David Baron’s The Martians (CUR020, December 2025) avoided this problem despite focusing on Percival Lowell, a man who was somewhat admirable, but got so many things wrong and yet was still able to carry the whole book.)

Ambiguity, though, is threaded through almost every aspect of Soldiers and Kings, from the first page onwards. It lays out gray areas at every turn, placing inside a maze where nothing has a clear and uncomplicated answer. Simple questions like “is this system good or bad?” have answers that recognize ambiguity—yes, people smuggling is bad, but most people are trying to escape genuinely terrible situations. Are the characters we meet good or bad? Sometimes they’re both. They’re human. Even questions like “is Jason a reliable narrator?” are breadcrumbed for us. De León has to wear several masks, sometimes he makes good decisions, sometimes he makes bad ones. He gets very close to some people, maybe too close, but he gets to go home at the end of it all, which means he can never be all the way in. All of it sets us up as readers to live in a place that’s kind of in-between, liminal, neither right or wrong. It’s very powerful.

⌘ 

I just wanted to point out two places that stuck out to me in this journey. The first is that, in this world of fog, the occasional piece of non-ambiguous information becomes incredibly vivid. We have met gangsters, chancers, scammers, desperate people who are also humorous, conflicted, wildly alive. Enter Payaso, an MS-13 enforcer who appears disproportionately cold and unflinching even to this violent, chaotic world.

We know where Payaso stands, and as the book progresses we find out more to confirm our initial instincts.

Last, just a couple of pages later, there is a paragraph that I think puts De León’s story into perspective—all that complexity and ambiguity summed up in one. He’s telling us why he has spent so much time with this group of smugglers and migrants, why he thinks it will show something deeper. And in doing so he describes them all as several things at once; here and not here, friends and enemies, together and alone. Those dualities underscore that there is no single true answer in any of this.

Onwards.

Bobbie