Drugs from Burma brought into Thailand

[CrazyExpat]

I have actually traveled into Burma and enjoyed the people and have great hopes that one day the country will be safe for more travel and free from the government that has suppressed the people.

From the New York Times:

FANG, Thailand — The heroin and methamphetamine traffickers carry assault weapons and walk briskly through the night, crossing the border in small groups and traveling down a spider’s web of footpaths and dirt roads.

So says Ja Saw, a wiry man in his 20s who should know: Two years ago, he was one of them.

Mr. Ja Saw spent a year in a Thai prison for trafficking. Now he works as an undercover agent for the Thai military. In his native Myanmar, where he travels periodically to glean intelligence, he is known by another name.

“They would kill me immediately if they knew I was a spy,” Mr. Ja Saw, who is from the Wa ethnic group, said in an interview at a remote location several kilometers from the Myanmar border.

Thailand’s northern borderland region is ground zero in the country’s efforts to interdict the tons of illicit drugs manufactured in the freewheeling northern reaches of Myanmar. Thailand is also the main international gateway for heroin bound for the streets of Tokyo, Hong Kong, Sydney and other major cities in the region, counternarcotics officials said.

Sending the drugs through China would be the most geographically direct route to Hong Kong, Tokyo and other points north. But the Thai and United States counternarcotics authorities said they believed that most of the drugs move south through Thailand.

“It’s more convenient,” said a senior Thai police official, who estimated that around 90 percent of illicit drugs produced in northern Myanmar come through Thailand, sometimes via Laos or down the Mekong River. He did not want to be quoted by name because of the sensitivity of the topic.

Economic development in Thailand has facilitated trafficking, officials said, because evading the police is easier through the growing network of roads leading to Bangkok and places farther south, including Malaysia.

The armed ethnic groups in northern Myanmar such as the Wa and Kachin are wary of antagonizing China because of their reliance on the Chinese for cross-border business and, in years past, weapons.

“Since the early 1990s, the Chinese have delivered very stern warnings: Send your powder anywhere else but here,” said Michael Black, an expert on the Wa and a security writer for Jane’s Intelligence Review. The ethnic groups, he said, “can’t afford to anger the Chinese.”

China stepped up pressure on the Wa to shut down trafficking routes across the mainland in the late 1990s when H.I.V. was identified as a growing problem spread in large part by intravenous heroin users.

The illicit drugs produced near the Chinese border take a circuitous route, often shipped down to the southern stronghold of the United Wa State Army, a group that the Thai and American governments say is responsible for the lion’s share of the drug trade in Myanmar. Wa Army camps, perched on hilltops like fortresses from another era, are visible from the Thai side of the border.

The drug trade has helped turn the poorly delineated border between Myanmar and Thailand into a treacherous killing zone.

An increase in trafficking this year, related to tensions between the Myanmar military and the Wa, has left 15 suspected traffickers dead in the Fang area alone, said Master Sgt. Somsak Taengorn, a member of a plainclothes counternarcotics unit. Some of those killed were wearing Wa Army uniforms, he said.

The drugs are often stored near the border and divided into parcels. But traffickers are so worried that the drugs will be pilfered by their competitors that they put them in unusual storage facilities. “Sometimes they dig a hole and bury it,” Sergeant Somsak said.

The drug trade here is lucrative, and Sergeant Somsak said many families in otherwise impoverished areas have brand-new pickup trucks and nicely furnished houses made of sturdy materials.

Two years ago, Mr. Ja Saw was paid 10,000 baht, about $300, to carry 20,000 methamphetamine tablets, known in Thailand as ya ba, or “crazy drugs.” He dropped off the drugs at a Thai village and was paid on arrival. On his third trafficking run, he was ambushed by the Thai military and arrested.

Once delivered to the Thai side, the drugs are sent to Bangkok, to the resort island of Phuket (where yachts are sometimes used to smuggle the drugs to other countries) and to the provinces bordering Malaysia, depending on the final destination.

The drugs are shipped using a variety of ruses, some of them creative, some more pedestrian. Often they are packed inside shipments of corn, lettuce or other agricultural goods, Sergeant Somsak and other officials said. In May 2008, Sergeant Somsak helped seize thousands of methamphetamine pills packaged in condoms and hidden in the vaginas of eight hill-tribe women who tried to board a plane for Bangkok before they were arrested.

In September, a Taiwanese trafficker was arrested in Thailand with boxes of bicycle pedals stuffed with heroin.

The strangest smuggling scheme? Manachai Pongsanae, commander of a checkpoint on a major road in northern Thailand, remembers stopping a woman in her 50s with methamphetamine tablets wrapped in plastic and secreted inside a packet of fermented fish paste.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/07/world/asia/07thai.html?_r=1