Inside Asia's Golden Triangle Today
Opium gave way to coffee, casinos, scam centers and meth
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At the old camp of opium warlord Khun Sa in northern Thailand, you can sit with a life-size model of the kingpin and see the hole where he threw insubordinates, for crimes including smoking opium. Over the border in Myanmar, guerilla armies that got rich from heroin bank billions churning out methamphetamine. Across another border into Laos, a Chinese businessman sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury for drug trafficking has built a towering casino city. Away from the glittering lights lies a frightening enclave of people held hostage to make scam calls.
The mountainous hinterlands of the so-called Golden Triangle, where Myanmar (formerly Burma) connects with Laos and Thailand, became infamous in the 1970s for endless fields of opium poppies, the raw ingredient for heroin. Today it has transformed into a patchwork of coffee farms, tourist towns, synthetic drug labs, endangered animal markets, casinos and scam centers.
I traveled through the Thai and Lao sides with historian David Lawitts who has been working in the area for two decades and developed incredible sources and language skills. It’s a beautiful and surreal land where the Ruak and Mekong rivers converge and flow by ancient rice fields. Yet while some parts are now fun and secure others are still dangerous and intimidating.
The Thai area is the safest with one of the world's most successful crop substitution programs. Hills that used to be bathed in white and pink poppies are now flowering with tea and coffee leaves, making for a delicious hot beverage from a Chinese porcelain cup. A Hall of Opium chronicles the history of the heroin trade, including a “Gallery of Excuses” about drug use; the top photo is from a corridor depicting victims of narcotics.
But over into Laos, the casino city called the Golden Triangle Special Economic Zone shows that crime is not confined to the region’s history. Entering from Laos, we went through a check point run by men from Myanmar, who appeared to be ethnic Wa. The zone is alleged to have links to the United Wa State Army, which runs its own narco state amid the bloodbath of the Myanmar Civil War.
Inside the zone, we talked to three people, Brazilian, Pakistani and Burmese men, who said they had been tricked into coming there, had their passports held, and were forced to work in scam centers to pay off debts that keeps changing.
The Brazilian said he was recruited on Facebook and offered a trip with all expenses but then realized he was the victim of a con, which he describes as “human trafficking.” He makes calls to people in various countries, especially in the United States, to fool them into depositing money under false pretenses. As most people refuse, it’s useful for the gangsters to have coerced labor to shower out the calls in volume.
When we asked the Brazilian if he had told his family or Brazilian authorities about being held, he replied:
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