John Vaillant’s ‘The Jaguar’s Children’ gives voice to human trafficking victims

TORONTO – Human trafficking is the focus of acclaimed non-fiction writer John Vaillant’s debut novel, “The Jaguar’s Children,” about a Mexican man trapped in a broken down truck that’s being used to smuggle a group into the U.S.

It’s an issue the Vancouver-based scribe delved into while living in the protagonist’s hometown of Oaxaca, Mexico, in 2009.

By Vaillant’s estimates, about 500 people die each year in human trafficking attempts into the U.S., most of them on the American side.

And a lot of them are never identified.

“They’re buried as Jane Doe or John Doe, and that’s who I really wanted to give voice to as I got deeper into the project,” Vaillant said in an interview.

“There are all these people who’ve been on these incredible journeys and didn’t quite make it, and what would they say?

“What would you say if you had three hours or three days left? What would you want the world to know about who you were and where you came from?”

In “The Jaguar’s Children” (Knopf Canada), Hector Gonzalez tells his story through text messages and voice notes from the cellphone of Cesar Santiago, his old schoolmate who is injured and unconscious inside the truck with him.

Over many agonizing hours, Hector tries to contact someone identified as AnniMac on Cesar’s phone, describing how they came to be in the vehicle with 13 others.

As conditions deteriorate inside the truck — with extreme temperature fluctuations, dampness, no light or way out — we learn that Hector and Cesar paid to be smuggled into the U.S. in the truck.

Hector wanted to get a better job in the U.S., while Cesar’s urge to flee was more urgent: he’s a scientist at odds with a major corporation behind a brand of genetically modified corn.

Vaillant said the story, which also delves into Mexican culture and how NAFTA agreements affect the region, came to him in the form of a voice.

“A voice that I was not thinking about or requesting said the first line of the book, which is, ‘I’m sorry to bother you, I need some assistance,’ and it came through in my mind as a text message,” he said.

That was while Vaillant was living in Oaxaca with his wife and their two young children.

His wife — a potter, anthropologist and writer — wanted to move there for stimulation and he used the time there to write 2010’s “The Tiger,” which won the B.C. National Award for Canadian Non-Fiction. Brad Pitt now has the big-screen rights and Vaillant said Darren Aronofsky is considering directing.

While there, Vaillant was struck by the region’s contrasts: The traditional, indigenous life of the older generation versus the tech-obsessed youth, who want cars and such but can’t buy them because “the price of corn is so depressed.”

Mexicans used to go to the U.S. for a few months at a time to work and make money, but “now with the fence and the drug cartels running the smuggling operations and the hostility to immigrants, it’s much harder to get in,” he said.

“And if you get in you might not come back because you don’t want to risk coming back and not being able to get back again, so people just stay up there. So you have these gutted communities. It’s like everybody died except for the kids and the grandparents.

“I’ve been in these villages and there’s something weird going on. You see these concrete houses all in various stages of construction and those are people sending money back to build these houses nobody lives in. It’s creepy.”

Another problem, said Vaillant, is that the communities there are run on a volunteer basis by residents who rotate through necessary jobs such as fixing roads and acting as the water manager.

“If all those guys have gone — and they’re not just gone for three months, they’re gone for six months or six years — who is going to do that?”

Yet Vaillant didn’t witness residents “racing to get over the border” and away from the problems.

“There was a big flood, in the ’80s and ’90s it was much more common, but it’s really slowed down now,” he said.

“It’s at an all-time low right now, historic low, because the economy is relatively depressed. The San Joaquin Valley is dried up, and partly because the drug cartels are now so dominant in human trafficking it’s very dangerous to do it.

“The mortality rate on the border is now going up even though the number of people crossing is going down. Who is now still trying to get across are people from Central America, so Guatemala and Honduras.”

He added: “Mexico may be bad but Guatemala is untenable. It’s absolutely hideous what is happening there and so these are people who are absolutely desperate. They’re more like refugees.”