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- Herausgeber: Icon Books
- Kategorie: Lebensstil
- Sprache: Englisch
'Reads like a thriller you can't put down' - Megha Rajagopalan, China Bureau Chief, Buzzfeed News 'ensures you'll never think about Southeast Asia in the same way ever again.' - Geographical Magazine Essential to understanding Southeast Asia in the 21st century, Hello, Shadowlands reveals a booming underworld of organised crime across a region in flux— a $100 billion trade that deals in narcotics, animals and people —and the staggering human toll that is being steadily ignored by the West. From Myanmar's anarchic hills to the swamplands of Vietnam, jihadis are being pitted against brothel workers, pet thieves against vigilantes and meth barons against Christian vice squads. Hello, Shadowlands takes a deep plunge into crime rings both large and small. It also examines how China's rise and America's decline is creating new opportunities for transnational syndicates to thrive. Focusing on human stories on both sides of this crime wave, the acclaimed Bangkok-based broadcaster and journalist Patrick Winn intimately profiles the men and women of the region who are forced to make agonizing choices in the absence of law.
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Through gripping narrative … vivid character portraits and deft anecdotes, Winn offers the reader an intimate, indelible portrait of a major world region in the throes of serious social change.
— Alfred W. McCoy, author of The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade
Drawing on a decade of on-the-ground reporting in Southeast Asia … Hello, Shadowlands is a sweeping work of investigative journalism that reads like a thriller you can’t put down. Winn demonstrates how the breakneck economic growth that has lifted so many fortunes in Southeast Asia has also set the stage for a new golden age of drug trafficking – aided by corruption, despotism and the absence of law … a quintessential read for anyone who wants to understand the dark side of Southeast Asia’s economic gains.
— Megha Rajagopalan, China bureau chief, Buzzfeed News
Brilliantly crafted and thrilling to read … a page-turner with soul.
— Tom Vitale, director of Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown
Patrick Winn writes in a vibrant, readable style, uses years of hardcore field reporting and adds thought-provoking analysis to expose a side of global crime that we all need to better understand. His vivid descriptions take you deep into surreal and at times heartbreaking worlds but he also steps away to give wider meaning to these tales and their place in the economic and political systems. Anyone who wants to make sense [of] modern global capitalism needs to read it.
— Ioan Grillo, author of El Narco and Gangster Warlords
Not inappropriately billed as Fear and Loathing meets McMafia, this is a compelling expose of Southeast Asia’s criminal underworld, and the dark underbelly of some popular holiday destinations by an award-winning US journalist resident in Thailand … the chapters on Myanmar [are] particularly illuminating.
— The Bookseller
HELLO, SHADOWLANDS
INSIDE THE METH FIEFDOMS, REBEL HIDEOUTS AND BOMB-SCARRED PARTY TOWNS OF SOUTHEAST ASIA
PATRICK WINN
Dedicated to Pailin
Contents
Prologue
In 2008, I moved to Bangkok with my girlfriend, now wife, who is also a journalist. Both of us were refugees from a collapsing newspaper industry. We sought to escape American newsrooms that were being gutted by layoffs and permeated by gloom – a dreary landscape against which to spend the final years of our twenties.
So we embarked on new lives as freelance correspondents based in Thailand’s capital. We began in a leaky shophouse, our meager earnings sustaining a glitchy internet connection and a diet of cheap noodles.
I was drawn towards the intensity of 21st-century Southeast Asia, a region seemingly destined to grow more prosperous despite its war-wracked history. My wife Pailin Wedel – a photojournalist originally from Bangkok – was keen to properly document a region that is so often depicted through crude stereotypes.
For her, this was a homecoming. But for me, it was an odyssey into a world utterly unlike my own. I loved it instantly and threw myself into learning the Thai language. My first years were spent badgering street vendors with tortured grammar, practicing my lilting tones in the shower and watching karaoke DVDs of Thai country singers to absorb bits of rural dialect.
Ten years on, what was unfamiliar has become mundane. Eating a grilled catfish with my bare hands used to be thrilling. Now that’s my go-to breakfast. But I’ve yet to grow bored. That hunger to better understand my adopted home still gnaws at me.
Southeast Asia is heaven for the compulsively curious. This is a world in vibrant flux. Old codes are clashing with modern appetites. The laboring classes are scrambling for cash and status like never before. Meanwhile, the ruling elites grow steadily more cozy in their authoritarianism – and less in thrall to old allies (and former colonial tormenters) in the Western hemisphere.
There is endless drama to document and, for every scintilla of effort I’ve put into understanding the region, I’ve been repaid twice over with astonishing stories. I continue to meet people – farmers and aristocrats alike – whose lives demand a thorough telling.
My job, as I see it, is tracking down compelling characters and trying to crystallize their experiences into words. The goal is to capture a twinkle of their humanity – or even just a small episode in their life’s journey – and make it available to the world at large. A bit melodramatic, I know. But on my less cynical days, I like to think this work allows readers to take in the splendor and struggles of people they’d never know otherwise.
Over the last decade I’ve covered coups, street cuisine, ethnic cleansing, pop culture fads and more protests than I can recall. But I’ve always gravitated back to one subject: organized crime.
This is not a fixation on deranged personalities. Nor is it a true crime-style attraction to the gritty details of shocking murders. Quite the opposite, actually. I’m interested in well-meaning, logic-driven people who choose to live outside the law.
I want to understand all of the forces that pushed them towards those often wrenching decisions to go underground – those little moments that progressively turned them into heroin dealers or rebels or bomb-makers. I’m fixated on the economic, cultural and historical currents that have washed trouble into their lives.
I’ve found that lawlessness itself is often what pushes people over the edge. How do you react when your village or hometown is repeatedly besieged by criminal syndicates – and the police ignore your pleas for help?
Worse yet: what if your government, the appointed arbiter of justice, is actually in collusion with your tormentors?
Do you flee?
Plot vigilante resistance?
Join an armed rebellion?
Or do you seek your own foothold within the underworld so that you might become predator instead of prey?
In the absence of law, people can be driven to make radical decisions. But once closely examined, the choices of those enmeshed in Southeast Asia’s underworld – meth barons, dodgy cops, the traffickers and the trafficked – start to make perfect sense.
This pursuit has drawn me into all sorts of jungle hamlets, urban pockets and remote border towns. These are Southeast Asia’s shadowlands: zones where the authorities allow organized crime to thrive. They are seldom illuminated to the outside world and the lives of their inhabitants are chronically ignored.
This book doesn’t attempt to catalogue every single crime ring in Southeast Asia. Nor have I prioritized only the largest and most fearsome groups. I’ve instead opted to profile a number of syndicates – in Myanmar, Thailand, Malaysia, Vietnam and the Philippines – that, upon examination, tell us something indispensable about their surroundings.
Many of these syndicates actually operate with the unofficial blessing of the authoritarian states in which they are found. They flourish in spots where officials choose not to enforce order – or at least not as they should. Instead, local police will often function as a protection racket for select criminal operations. In the most forsaken quarters – Myanmar’s northern hills, for example – the state actually allows drug barons to rule over its citizens like feudal lords.
Documenting these shadowlands isn’t as grim an exercise as it might seem. I’ve found that humor flourishes in troubled places. So does heroism. I hope to convey the warmth I’ve felt among guerrillas, brothel workers and vigilantes. Some are among the most impressive people I’ve ever known. They are men and women who’ve learned to evade danger with brilliant ingenuity.
Through their stories, I’ve attempted to sketch a broader portrait of Southeast Asia in the 21st century – a vision filtered through the lens of crime and state power.
Let’s back up. What exactly is Southeast Asia anyways?
The short answer: every nation from Myanmar’s frigid peaks running eastward to the balmy Philippine islands. Politically speaking, it’s the bloc of ten countries within the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, or ASEAN.
At a glance, this region appears to be defined by proximity and not much else. On the mainland, militaristic Buddhist kingdoms abut a pseudo-communist regime that is, in fact, ravenously capitalistic. All this is half-encircled by a largely Islamic archipelago – one that terminates in islands that are beholden to the Vatican.
This corner of the earth is home to 650 million people, more than in North America or South America or the European Union. But they are not – as in the Middle East – bound by an overarching faith. Nor by a common currency as in Europe. Nor by a common tongue as in Latin America. They are riven by mountains and seas, as well as by language and culture.
Yet in the 21st century, these scattered peoples are increasingly held in common by another force: capitalism – an ideology that America and its allies attempted to pound into this region with millions of bombs.
Those Cold War battles ended in American retreat. But capitalism won out in the end. Markets are roaring in Southeast Asia. Among the world’s major economies, only China and India are growing faster than ASEAN.1
This economic boom is widely regarded as a success story. But it has also cast the region into an era of social upheaval.
For millennia, families grew what they ate and seldom left their little patch of land. Today, in practically every Southeast Asian nation, traditionally agrarian peoples have abandoned the fields in droves. Millions keep hurling themselves into a cash economy – a fast and plasticky world where basic nourishment comes not from the soil but from 7-Eleven.
Those raised in comfort are often tempted to lament the withering away of idyllic villages. But I’ve found that anyone who grows up yanking rice stalks from the mud seldom turns down a chance to do something else. A farmer’s life is afflicted by nature’s cruel whims: drought one year, pestilence the next.
In recent decades, people from Southeast Asia’s farming hinterlands have deluged the cities. In these boom towns – Manila, Ho Chi Minh City, Bangkok – the shopping malls are often lavish and the streets are set to a soundtrack of bleeping smartphones.
But when newcomers arrive from the paddies, they’re usually swept into an underclass of taxi drivers or sex workers, builders of condos or stitchers of Nikes. They endure this toil in pursuit of the Southeast Asian dream.
What is that dream, exactly? It’s a modest set of hopes compared to its fading American counterpart.
It typically includes a new Honda motorbike parked by the front steps. Kids in fresh uniforms, headed to school instead of work. Hopes that those children will someday find jobs in air-conditioned offices and send money home. It’s one weekly day of leisure, often spent at the mall, slurping mango ice cream and dithering on Chinese-made mobile phones.
There are daunting barriers in the way of the Southeast Asian dream. They include merciless labor laws, broken education systems, post-colonial class discrimination, loan sharks and police shakedowns.
Still, people persist by the millions. This mass scramble for cash is more than a trend. It is the story of almost every Southeast Asian nation today.
This meta-narrative is also the backdrop to many smaller phenomena in the region – including the expansion of Southeast Asia’s criminal underground.
A voracious breed of capitalism is binding together once-fractured Southeast Asian nations like never before. Previously torn apart by land wars, they are now united in trade, digital communication and a mass narrative of upward mobility.
But as the region’s overall economy soars, its black markets keep swelling too.
In fact, they’ve never been bigger.
This is largely down to the fact that there are more cashed-up consumers out there for every good or service you can think of: toothpaste, prostitution, airline tickets, crystal meth and so on.
The more-illicit wares are traded in a subterranean realm – one inhabited by syndicates large and small. It’s home to scrappy players such as part-time gun-runners or pet-thief gangs. But it also encompasses the planet’s largest methamphetamine empire – a billion-dollar complex churning out more speed pills each year than McDonald’s serves Big Macs worldwide.
The United Nations values Southeast Asian organized crime at $100 billion and growing. That’s equal to the entire economy of Washington DC. Or every single transaction made in Las Vegas for an entire year – and this is cited as a lowball estimate.2
To be clear: this book is a narrative plunge into the Southeast Asian criminal underworld. It’s not an academic treatise. But in my years of reporting, I’ve developed a hypothesis of sorts: Southeast Asia is veering into a golden age of organized crime.
Before diving into these shadowlands, I’d like to briefly sketch out a few trends that support this conclusion. Some explain why transnational criminal operations are in a position to flourish. Others indicate that, if nothing else, the near future is unlikely to bring any major threats to Southeast Asia’s melange of smugglers, pushers and traffickers.
Authoritarianism is here to stay
The West once had great political hopes for Southeast Asia. America in particular has long envisioned a string of just and orderly pro-US democracies triumphantly prospering in China’s backyard.
Today, that vision looks more like a hallucination. Southeast Asia has become the domain of unelected authoritarians – or worse yet, elected leaders who behave like despots.
Let’s briefly scan the region. Vietnam and Laos are run by entrenched, Chinese-style communist parties. Cambodia has been controlled for three decades by Hun Sen, Asia’s longest-running strongman. Thailand is ruled by a prickly military junta. Myanmar, now superficially democratic, is actually in the grip of its ruthless army.
Turning southward, both Malaysia and Singapore are effectively one-party states. The West may claim Indonesia as a bright spot – the world’s third-largest democracy! – yet its scattered islands and institutional rot make it difficult to govern. Moving eastward, the Philippines is run by an elected leader with the bloodlust and dangerous unpredictability of a dictator.
This is the present and future of Southeast Asia: hypercapitalistic but deeply illiberal. This autocratic sweep doesn’t just benefit the entrenched political dynasties that run these nations.
It’s also a blessing for organized crime.
Southeast Asia doesn’t breed the sort of authoritarianism that offers squeaky-clean streets and criminals cowering in fear. (Tiny Singapore, with less than 1 per cent of ASEAN’s population, is an exception.) To varying degrees, police throughout the region instill just enough order to keep the economy humming along.
Their prime duties include squashing dissidents while protecting the upper classes and their property. The cops are far less keen on breaking up crime rings – particularly the ones that pay on time.
Despite incessant claims to the contrary, most politicians in Southeast Asia fully expect their police forces to indulge in corruption. I don’t mean a little dabbling here and there. From Mandalay to Manila, bribery is an essential source of funding for law enforcement.
Without this flow of illicit cash, many police departments would risk collapse. They simply wouldn’t be able to pay officers enough to come to work. On paper, the region’s cops are offered miserable wages: roughly $100 to $700 per month*, depending on the country.
But these official salaries are comparable to the $3-per-hour wages paid to American waiting staff. The real money comes from tips.
Cops generate off-the-books money through a dazzling variety of methods. They can shore up petty cash by shaking down motorists or small-time vendors. But the much bigger payments come from brothels, underground gambling halls or smugglers of people, wildlife and drugs.
For a monthly fee, these illegal operations will pay for a tantalizing benefit: immunity from prosecution or, at the very least, a warning if crackdowns are imminent.
As Southeast Asian governments grow increasingly authoritarian and opaque, their security forces grow more untouchable. This allows police and military officers to run their departments like entrepreneurial businesses. Give them a big umbrella of impunity and they will permit criminals – for the right price – to take shelter underneath.
There is a financial logic to this model. Governments willing to overlook police bribery can pay their security forces dismal salaries and then foist these labor costs onto the black market.
I’m painting in broad strokes here. Police corruption in Southeast Asia is an incredibly complex ecosystem – a theme that will become clear over the course of this book.
In each country of the region, you can find workaday cops who may feel genuinely fed up with vice in their ranks. They may be heartened by sporadic anti-corruption drives, orchestrated by politicians, that take down a handful of low- and mid-tier officers. Or they may place faith in some phony drug war that never actually imprisons any of the top kingpins.
These campaigns are designed not to upturn the status quo but to deflate public anger or to shore up some leader’s tough-on-crime bona fides. Often the state is selective in its targets. They may order police units to go hard on sellers of endangered wildlife, perhaps, while tolerating collusion with speed traffickers.
But no matter what, the overall model remains intact. This is a system that perversely incentivizes cops to focus on the wellbeing of criminal figures – their paying customers – above the civilians they’ve sworn to defend.
New arteries for the criminal underground
You may regard infrastructure as boring. Smugglers tend to disagree.
In the 21st century, Southeast Asia is increasingly interlinked by roads, bridges, docks, runways and railway lines. This has proven utterly transformative – and the boom has just begun.
Over the next two decades, large parts of Asia will be interlaced by new infrastructure worth trillions of dollars. Much of this will be underwritten by Beijing, which is now building its Silk Road redux – a matrix of highways and ports that link the Chinese motherland to its backyard and beyond.3
Southeast Asia’s punishing landscape of tall mountains and deep inlets is finally being tamed by concrete and steel. These new land and sea lanes aren’t being created for malevolent purposes. They’re simply meant to increase the flow of stuff and people: oil barrels and motherboards, traders and tour groups.
But they are also a boon to crime syndicates, which need to move forbidden goods and substances (as well as undocumented migrants) from points A to B.
Gone are the days of rebels in Myanmar strapping heroin to mules that clomp through malarial jungles. Old paths that were once used to trade opium and tiger bones across the Golden Triangle are being paved over and rebranded as ‘economic corridors’. Drug runners can now truck their wares along these new highways, hiding their illicit bundles under sacks of grain or pallets of toys.
Police don’t stand a chance of keeping up. They are so overwhelmed by the new rush of transnational trade that, according to UN experts, they catch only about 5 to 10 per cent of the narcotics flowing across Southeast Asia’s mainland borders.4
Now factor in new powers of communication that would have astounded the poppy kingpins of the 1960s. Mobile phone towers are sprouting up everywhere – even in remote valleys that still lack regular electricity.
This is a blessing for long-isolated peoples, many of them mesmerized by the glowing screens of their $100 Huawei smartphones. But this mobile phone revolution is even more wondrous for criminals seeking to expand their cross-border trade.
Smugglers benefit from constant communication. They need tipoffs from police to steer clear of surprise checkpoints. They require a clean flow of information across a long chain of suppliers, truckers and armed guards. With the proliferation of cell towers, there’s never been a better time to move speed, people, wildlife and weapons around Southeast Asia.
The moralizing Western order is wilting
Western diplomacy towards Southeast Asian nations has often assumed the tone of a disappointed dad. America is particularly fond of reacting to any serious abuse of power – from coups to protest crackdowns – with ‘deep concern’.
To leaders around the region, the US can come off like a nag, forever harping on about ‘human rights’ and ‘the rule of law’. These are more than just ideals. They are measuring sticks, used to size up Southeast Asian nations and gauge their virtue.
Aspire to be more like us, America tells both its allies and foes. Promise to do better by signing memoranda and conventions on slavery, narcotics, land mines and human trafficking. Go after your corrupt police and officialdom at the highest levels and make a big show of locking them up.
When Southeast Asian nations fail to live up to these expectations – as they frequently do – the US Foreign Service will attempt to prod and shame their governments into better behavior.
But it’s always been a bit bizarre to watch America hover over Southeast Asia as a self-appointed guiding moral light. After all, no other foreign power has brought so much mechanized death to this region.
During the US–Vietnam War, American planes disgorged more bombs over Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos than were dropped from all Allied planes during the Second World War.5 In the late 1960s, the White House was, by its own admission, overseeing the killing or maiming of ‘more than 1,000 non-combatants a week’ in the war against communism.6 Even today, children are still getting killed by US explosives that remain buried in the mud.
Of course, none of the officials who masterminded these crimes are in prison. Henry Kissinger is not only free but fêted in Washington DC. It is difficult to understate the extent to which war planners of his ilk have shaped modern Southeast Asia through violence: annihilating entire cities, altering maps and propping up powerful cliques at the expense of others.
This hypocrisy is not lost on Southeast Asian leaders. But the flipside to American aggression has been bountiful aid: a torrent of cash that many nations – such as Thailand, Cambodia and the Philippines – have relied upon.
This has given America and its allies enough clout to browbeat leaders into launching occasional police campaigns (some superficial, some legit) against certain breeds of criminality such as sex trafficking, child soldiering or people smuggling. The US Foreign Service’s stated rationale is that human rights will not just ‘combat crime’ but ‘strengthen democracies’ – a notion harkening back to the Cold War.
Governments that refuse to cooperate with these demands risk losing aid or, worse yet, incurring economy-shattering sanctions. But some good does occasionally comes from this pressure exerted from afar.
One of the better modern-day examples is an offensive against seafaring slave traders operating from Thailand to Indonesia. In the past decade, these traders have duped thousands of poor villagers, mostly from Myanmar, onto deep-sea trawlers. The men are then forced to fish without pay.
This trade was going strongest around 2012, right about the time that then-President Barack Obama promised to champion ‘one of the great human rights causes of our time’ – a global fight against the ‘injustice, the outrage, of human trafficking, which must be called by its true name: modern slavery.’7 It is a scourge, he said, that ‘fuels violence and organized crime’.
My own encounters with slave-driving boatmen bear this out. In Samut Sakhon, a port city in Thailand, I once met a deputy boat captain named Jord. His face was dominated by a scar running in a pink groove from his scalp to his nose bridge.
He and his crew mates shared tales that recalled the horrors of the Middle Passage: Burmese men purchased for $600 a head, their bodies brutally exploited out on the anarchy of the sea.8 They spoke of slaves traded from boat to boat, never coming ashore for five years or more. The maimed or diseased, they said, are often bludgeoned and dumped overboard.
A few years later, when it grew painfully obvious that slave-caught fish were being sold in Western supermarkets, the US, EU and UK pushed Thailand to kick off a region-wide crackdown. Raids against boat captains and people smugglers followed and Thai officials began surveilling boat crews more closely. The region’s fishing industry remains murky but the worst abuses – such as murdering migrant workers at sea – were diminished.
This was presented as a victory for the American-led global order of rules and rights, which is always in need of a public relations win. Obama’s soaring rhetoric was a thin veneer over US misadventures in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya – not to mention its long history of supporting dictatorships from Southeast Asia to Latin America.
But pushing back against Southeast Asian slavery may have been one of this system’s last hurrahs. Just a few years on, the idea of a US-led international order looks more wobbly and morally confused than before – so much so that it’s hard to imagine another campaign on this scale.
Under the presidency of Donald Trump, the White House doesn’t even pretend that it cares more about individual suffering than about corporate interests. This is an administration that believes fretting over ‘human dignity’ is an ‘obstacle’ to advancing America’s business interests.9
Wondering aloud about abuses in Asia, Trump’s national security adviser asks: ‘How much does it help to yell about these problems?’10 The US is turning inward: gutting its diplomatic corps and eviscerating foreign aid. American evangelizing about the ‘rule of law’ was dubious before. Now it looks absurd.
In 2016, the volatile and self-avowedly murderous president of the Philippines, Rodrigo Duterte, rolled out a crowd-pleasing ‘war on drugs’ to purge his nation of ‘junkies’. This crusade is mostly wiping out poor meth smokers, not well-connected traffickers. The upshot is that meth sales continue while Philippine cops, more than ever, have been gifted an unrestricted license to kill.
So far, this massacre has ended the lives of more than 10,000 people.11 That’s a death toll which exceeds that of the Srebrenica massacre, the worst mass killing in Europe since the Second World War. And it’s actually receiving kudos from the White House.
Trump never expresses (as his predecessors surely would have) ‘deep concern’ about this killing spree. Instead, he’s called the Philippine president to ‘congratulate you because I am hearing of the unbelievable job on the drug problem’. As a US senator later lamented: ‘We are watching in real time as the American human rights bully pulpit disintegrates into ash.’12
Oh, well. The era of pious American patronage is probably doomed no matter who leads the US. The future of Asia belongs to China, soon to become the world’s dominant economy.
China is Southeast Asia’s top trading partner. Many nations here have already adopted its philosophy of government: authoritarian capitalism. As American largesse becomes more fickle and weak, these nations increasingly turn to Beijing for aid, weapons, rail lines and counsel.
That China offers its backing without resorting to belittling harangues is quite refreshing to leaders in Southeast Asia. These are men (and a few powerful women) who crave respect as much as fortune and power.
China’s political dream is to dominate Asia and share global power with the US as an equal. This world is taking shape faster than many predicted.
Even after Trump is gone, America will find itself jockeying for influence in Southeast Asia from a weakened position – one too weak, perhaps, to sporadically cajole governments into the embarrassing work of uprooting traffickers and dodgy police.
In finishing, I’d like to ask for a favor.
This is a book filled with tales of predation and survival. But it mustn’t be read as a portrait of a region succumbing to wholesale disorder or haphazard violence. That simply isn’t accurate. In fact, many of the places profiled here are statistically less dangerous than parts of the US.
On the whole, Southeast Asia is not a dreary place. In surveys taken in almost every country in the region, people report feeling quite optimistic about their future. This can’t be said about Americans or Western Europeans, whose feelings tend to portend decline.13
Nothing I describe here should convince you to cancel your holiday to Southeast Asia. You won’t encounter jihadis or stick-wielding vigilantes on your street food crawl in Bangkok or your Bagan temple tour. The mainstream tourist trail is quite safe.
Much of the criminality described in this book is quarantined to specific areas where travelers seldom venture. Moreover, organized crime need not correlate with an increase in pickpockets, muggers or other predators who target strangers at random. I’ve actually encountered very little petty crime in Southeast Asia – even in places that are largely abandoned by police.
I’ve written this book in part to exorcise frustrations over the way parts of Southeast Asia are portrayed by Western media. The denizens of these places are too often depicted as unicellular organisms, easily victimized or casually roused to violence.
Seldom do we hear about rational, complex actors in brothels or drug dens or rebel battlefields. If you spend enough time with people in these environments – as I’ve been fortunate enough to do – you’ll find a multiplicity of motives, some nakedly selfish and others quite noble.
I am deeply grateful to the lawbreakers who’ve expanded my understanding of the human condition. I’ve met very few genuine sadists out there. I’ve more often found people who demonstrate a deep capacity for sacrifice – especially when their family members are under threat.
I hope this book will help you think about the agonizing decisions any of us might make if our police and courts left us to fend for ourselves. Those who would prefer a tabloid-style account of black-hearted villains will find this book exasperating – and perhaps guilty of moral relativism.
So be it.
Notes
1. ‘Investing in ASEAN’, report issued by ASEAN, 2017.
2. ‘Protecting peace and prosperity in Southeast Asia: synchronizing economic and security agendas’, report issued by UNODC, 25 February 2017.
3. ‘Asia Infrastructure Needs Exceed $1.7 Trillion Per Year’, report issued by Asian Development Bank, 28 February 2017.
4. Author interviews with UNODC and US DEA personnel in 2015 and 2017.
5. ‘Bombs Over Cambodia’, report by Yale University’s The Walrus, 2006.
6. Secret memo written by then-Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, 19 May 1967. Revealed via ‘The Pentagon Papers’, a cache of Defense Department documents leaked to The New York Times and other outlets in 1971 by former US military contractor Daniel Ellsberg.
7. ‘Remarks by the President to the Clinton Global Initiative’, The White House, Office of the Press Secretary, 25 September 2012.
8. ‘Desperate Life at Sea’, Public Radio International, 21 May 2012.
9. ‘Remarks to US Department of State Employees’, US Department of State, Rex Tillerson speech in Washington DC, 3 May 2017.
10. ‘Press briefing by Press Secretary Sarah Sanders and National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster’, The White House, Office of the Press Secretary, 2 November 2017.
11. Late 2017 estimates calculated by Human Rights Watch and the Philippines Alliance of Human Rights Advocates.
12. ‘Trump Called Rodrigo Duterte To Congratulate Him On His Murderous Drug War: “You Are Doing An Amazing Job”’, The Intercept, 24 May 2017.
13. ‘Emerging and Developing Economies Much More Optimistic than Rich Countries about the Future’, Pew Research Center, 9 October 2014.
* These police wages would be paid in local currency – Thai baht, Philippine pesos, Vietnamese dong, etc. – but figures throughout the book are generally presented in US dollars.
Author’s Note
Journalism is a tribe with a deeply held set of convictions and mores. My membership in this tribe is central to my identity. So I want to be totally transparent about the ways in which I plan to deviate from its norms.
My biggest transgression concerns chronology. Every event in this book happened. Most happened in the order in which they’re presented. But in select cases, I’ve opted to depict events out of sequence. For example, if I’ve interviewed an individual two or three times, I’ll condense those talks into a single conversation.
Also, I’ve occasionally stumbled into a revelatory experience or piece of intel very early into an investigation – and the significance can’t be appreciated without a proper lead up. For clarity’s sake, I’ve shifted some of these occurrences forward in time. These alterations, applied very judiciously, have allowed for a narrative that remains honest if not chronologically pure.
Investigative journalism doesn’t unfold like a Scooby Doo episode with cascading clues building to a neat conclusion. Some of the narratives in this book were compiled over multiple years. Long lapses were taken when time or expenses ran short. Were this book written exactly as events occurred, it would be twice as long and thrice as confusing.
This is a book about the underworld so, naturally, I’ve changed quite a few names. Anyone whose appearance here might lead to legal harassment or, worse yet, getting dragged from their home at 1am – either by police or outlaws – has been given a pseudonym. In very isolated cases, I’ve slightly altered the description of a source’s appearance to protect their identity.
Note that this anonymity has not been extended to high-ranking officials, warlords or insurgent chieftains who enjoy positions of great power. For the record: none of them asked.
Some conversations in this book were reconstructed from my handwritten notes. This is an imperfect process, subject to my fallible memory, but I’ve made every effort to preserve accuracy.
Also, in select cases, I’ve had to excise field producers from the storyline. Among reporters, these people are called ‘fixers’. But that term doesn’t adequately value their work and, frankly, implies a value beneath the lofty title of ‘foreign correspondent’.
Nothing could be further from the truth. A good field producer can arrange tricky interviews, negotiate access to hidden places and distract authorities who intend to sabotage your reporting. I’d be useless without them.
On top of that, these field producers have to translate. I only speak English and Thai. So any conversation in this book held in Vietnamese, Tagalog, Burmese, Kachin (a language spoken in northern Myanmar) or Korean was filtered through an interpreter.
You’ll meet many of these field producers in this book. Those who may face repercussions, however, have been removed from the story. This is terribly unfair – and it reflects my privileged status as an American, often immune to the worst penalties doled out by authoritarian states.
Police are reluctant to risk the diplomatic grief that comes with locking up journalists with US passports. They reserve the cruelest treatment for their own citizens. But without the wit and persistence of my field-producer colleagues, this book would not exist.
CHAPTER I
Hot Pink Speed
Location: Myitkyina, Myanmar
Where drug barons churn out candy-colored meth
The town of Myitkyina is the last outpost before Myanmar disintegrates into its chaotic frontier. When the British Empire laid railroad tracks throughout this territory – which was then called Burma – its sinews of steel reached these foothills but went no further.
This town now functions as the government’s northernmost terminal station. Beyond it lie hilltops ruled by guerrillas and armed clans.
Just a few miles from the town’s decrepit railway station, inside the attic of a wooden home, a ritual is set to commence. The windows have been shuttered, nosy kids ordered to scram. Sunday morning sunshine seeps through cracks in the blinds, casting blades of warm light on the floor planks. The room is otherwise dim.
Leading this ritual is Zau Ring, sitting in the lotus position. He is 40 or so, a tad gaunt, clad in a beige sarong and an unbuttoned plaid shirt. I’m crouching nearby, watching him work.
Zau Ring slides a hand into his sarong and fishes a foreign object out of his underwear. It looks like a lumpy wad of electrical tape, roughly the size of his palm. But when Zau Ring peels away the layers of tape, he reveals a ziplock baggie concealed within.
He squeezes open the baggie’s plastic mouth. Out pour two dozen methamphetamine tablets, which rattle across the floorboards. Each pill is as pink as Barbie’s Corvette.
All hard drugs evoke a certain counterculture. Opium conjures old-world mystique. Cocaine screams fast-money excess. Meth, in the West at least, is seen as a gutter drug – a tooth-rotting, low-life disgrace. But what I am about to witness will play out more like a sacrament than some dirty fix.
Zau Ring has an array of paraphernalia at his feet: strips of aluminum foil, colorful bendy straws, one roll of electrical tape, a half-empty bottle of water. From these household items, he begins to assemble a funny-looking hookah.
With a lit cigarette, he burns a circular hole into the side of the water bottle. Into this orifice he inserts a foot-long length of piping. It’s made from interlocked plastic drinking straws. This is the hookah’s hose. He applies some tape to seal up leaks, gives it a test suck and the contraption bubbles into life.
Strangely, a strong aroma permeates the room before the hookah has been lit. This is the signature scent of Myanmar speed tablets – a chemical sweetness that smells exactly like vanilla cake frosting. The pills reek even before they are put to flame.
The smell is derived from some mysterious additive favored by meth chemists – the legions of drug lab mixologists, operating in those lawless hills beyond the tracks.
Perhaps this is a fluke of their recipe. Maybe it’s a marketing strategy to render meth pills more candy-like. Regardless, it’s so aromatic that addicts such as Zau Ring won’t carry meth pills in public without triple-wrapping their baggies in tape. That scent is a dead giveaway. You can smell this stuff across a large room – especially an airless attic.
Outside the attic’s entrance, Zau Ring and I hear loud creaking – the sound of a wooden staircase bending under the weight of grown men. Our heads jerk towards the doorway as three figures approach.
But it’s just Gideon, the home’s owner, followed by two anemic-looking younger guys.
‘You startled me, Gideon,’ I say. ‘I keep worrying your wife and kids will barge in.’
‘Relax,’ he says. ‘They’re at church already. Can’t you hear?’
Indeed, for the past ten minutes, Zau Ring’s prep work has been set to a soothing soundtrack: harmonious choir singing. The attic overlooks the courtyard of a Baptist church next door. The voices, high-pitched and adolescent, carry easily through the attic’s thin walls.
These are Myitkyina’s churchgoing hours – an ideal time to sneak away and sin in peace.
I’m relieved that Gideon has returned to the room. He’s like a brotherly confidant, the only friend I’ve got in this town. Zau Ring and these other men? To me, they’re total strangers.
Gideon is in his late thirties with raven-black hair styled into an Elvis swoosh. Like most guys around here, he almost exclusively wears flip-flops and sarongs. Up top, however, he favors Magnum PI-style flamboyant shirts: lots of button-ups with floral patterns and fleurs-de-lis. They’re always partially undone to reveal his hairless chest, which is smooth as a mango.
I prefer to keep Gideon close. Here, in Myanmar’s far north, survival hinges on knowing the dos and don’ts. Whom to flatter. What laws you can safely ignore. Which officials to bribe. When to shut up. Where to smoke meth without getting caught.
Gideon, a Myitkyina native, is my guide to this world. He’s helping me navigate this thicket of unwritten codes. It’s a vital skill. Doubly vital considering our plans for the next few weeks. It will involve consorting with quite a few lawbreakers – starting with the men in this attic.
Gideon corralled them here at my request. Actually, I just requested one guy – any user willing to show off his stash and chat about the local drug scene. Gideon, with his heavy appetite for mischief, was more than happy to oblige. He even offered up his own attic, assuring me that the cops would never think of raiding his home.
Only Zau Ring was invited this morning. But soon after he arrived, Gideon’s phone started chirping. A few of Zau Ring’s pals had caught word of our little drug scrum and they were already loitering outside, desperate to join. Gideon obliged, ducking out of the room so he could unlock his front gate and discreetly guide them up to this hideaway.
Now he’s back and we’re all here. Both of the newcomers are far more conspicuous than Zau Ring. One is shirtless, his back and arms inked up with crudely-drawn tattoos. The other is wraith-like, tall and painfully slender, a lichen-esque goatee clinging to his chin.
As soon as they mount the stairs, the two newcomers spot the pink meth. Like ants to sugar, they scuttle over and kneel by Zau Ring’s feet, inspecting and sniffing at the pills arrayed on the floor. Zau Ring swats them away.
They back off and assume sitting positions on the floor, encircling the meth hookah like it’s some sort of altar.
‘So,’ I ask, ‘how do you guys know each other?’
Long pause.
‘We’re all mechanics,’ says the tatted-up guy. Head downcast, he fidgets with his toes. ‘I do air-conditioners.’
‘I work on generators,’ murmurs the goateed man, the youngest of the three.
‘Generators?’ I say. ‘Well, you must get a lot of work.’ Myanmar’s state-run electrical grid is so glitchy that shops and homes require diesel generators to power through daily blackouts. They’re noisy machines, big as refrigerators, and they’re always breaking down.
‘Yeah, sure,’ he says in a pained murmur. ‘Very busy.’
This is like chatting up guys in a long bathroom line. Their minds are consumed by the looming promise of physical relief. No one here seems keen on small talk with a foreigner – some weirdo who apparently traveled to the far edge of Myanmar to watch strangers get high.
‘Almost done here,’ Zau Ring says, tinkering with his hookah, giving it one final quality inspection. ‘Let’s not waste any more time.’
At last, the ritual begins. Zau Ring picks up a long strip of foil and pinches it into a silvery canoe. He takes one of the pills – about the size of a baby aspirin – and drops it into the foil. Then he lovingly treats the underside of the strip with candle flame.
Heat makes the little pill dance. It shimmies on the bed of aluminum, charring at the edges, liquefying and quickly losing its shape. All the while, white vapor rises from the foil.
Zau Ring holds the foil beneath an air valve carved into the water-bottle hookah. When he sucks on the hookah’s hose, the meth smoke is hoovered into the apparatus, where it mixes with burbling water. This softens the acrid notes that would otherwise sting the throat.
Zau Ring holds the smoke inside his lungs for a beat. Then he releases twin torrents from his nostrils. So this thing actually works. A few more rounds and the pill is a blackened squirt on the foil.
One pill leads to another. And another. The other men have their turn. Gideon is standing in the corner, grinning, meth clouds swirling at his legs. I’m stationed closer to the hookah, entranced by the rite, trying to catch whiffs. You’d think these pills would smell like burnt Oreos when cooked. But the smoke is nearly scentless.
The smokers’ malaise has lifted. They sit with upright spines. I attempt another question. At the first syllable, their heads swivel towards me in unison like startled owls.
‘So tell me,’ I say. ‘What’s so great about meth?’
The answers come quick and loud. They speak all at once, six eyes laser-locked on mine. Gideon gestures for them to keep their voices down but it’s no use. I can hardly keep track of who’s saying what.
‘This stuff gives you incredible alertness. You become so focused you forget to eat and …’
‘… yeah, it’s like you can achieve anything. You’re not sleepy nor drunk nor hungry nor fatigued and you just go and go and go …’
‘… so it’s like our medicine, right? As we say, use a bit and it’s medicine, use a lot and it’s poison. But it’s really hard to moderate …’
‘… true, like, once I scored ten pills and said, “I’ll just use one per day for ten days” but then I smoked all ten pills in one morning …’
‘… which is how you ruin your body. Smoke too much and you’ll stay awake for three days, dim-witted and paranoid, flying into a rage at some small remark …’
‘… and that’s the real problem with ya ma. You always think one more pill will bring perfect bliss. But it never comes. It’s always one more pill away …’
‘… but it’s worth it, just to feel that power. Like no one can stand in your way. Like no one can take you down.’
Ya ma. That’s what they call these pills in Myanmar. Translation: horse pills. If swallowed or smoked, the pills bring stallionesque intensity to any task: sex, plowing rice fields, partying, assembling sneakers in a factory, shooting the shit in some dusty attic.
This drug scene is steeped in slang. In neighboring Thailand, a prime consumer of Myanmar’s meth, these tablets are known by a more sinister name: ya ba – madness pills. That’s the term preferred by police across Southeast Asia.
But Zau Ring and his crew are not tilting towards face-chewing insanity – the sort of crazed behavior caricatured in anti-drug propaganda. They seem no more psychotic than a few grad students snorting powder-blue rails of Adderall off a physics textbook.1 (Still, if Adderall is Bombay Sapphire, this is bathtub gin: noxious, strong stuff riddled with adulterants.)
As the men tell it, meth positively dazzles. Euphoria? That doesn’t quite capture it. It’s more like sublime confidence. Your ego is electrified. Your enemies seem small. Your day crackles with brilliant potential.
On meth, you are essential. You matter. You are in control.
What better drug to transfix the inhabitants of Myanmar’s borderlands? They are remote hill dwellers – neglected by the government, bullied by warlords, forgotten by the world.
Zau Ring grows fidgety and, soon enough, another pill drops onto the foil. Now he’s on his knees, crouching over the hookah, sucking so hard that the jade amulet around his neck sways like a pendulum. He has stripped to the waist.
The pill sizzles. Sweat streaks his back, drippy rivulets soaking into the sarong pulled snug around his hips.
While Zau Ring smokes, I find myself tracing a finger along the wooden floor planks. Each swipe sends little plumes of dust spiraling upwards and, when they drift towards sunbeams, their sooty particles twinkle magnificently in the light. How intensely mesmerizing. I notice my other hand tapping out a manic drumroll on the floor.
‘Gideon, I have a question,’ I say. ‘Can I get a contact high just by sitting here?’
‘Maybe,’ he says from the far corner of the room. ‘These pills are 88s. Extra strong. Take a look.’
I lean over to scrutinize the remaining pills – only half remain – and see that each pill is imprinted with the number 88.2 It’s a brand. Like BAYER etched into aspirin.
‘You know, 1988?’ Gideon says. ‘The big democracy protest year.’
Everyone in Myanmar knows the significance of 1988. The digits are burned into the nation’s psyche. That was the year roaring masses poured into the streets of every major city (Myitkyina included) to demand that the military junta loosen its kleptocratic death grip on the country.
The uprising failed. Thousands were slaughtered.3 Yet this flash of defiance is still acid-etched into the souls of millions – just as the Boston Tea Party or the 1963 March on Washington is held sacred by Americans.
These days, it seems the uprising’s appeal is also being exploited to brand meth. ‘How odd,’ I say. ‘I would never associate drugs with that protest.’
‘Yeah, well, the number just means democracy. So it’s cool,’ Zau Ring says. ‘Eighty-eights are the finest pills on the market.’
We are interrupted by another round of hymns resounding from the church outside. This time the singers are backed by an organ, blaring chords through a cheap amplifier. Its sound waves cause the attic’s windowpanes to buzz.
This song’s melody is startlingly familiar, stirring my own memories from 1988: the back row of a Baptist church, small-town North Carolina, my mother imploring me to stop sulking and sing along.
There’s a reason the hymn outside sounds so recognizable to my American ears. This patch of Myanmar was Christianized more than a century ago by Baptists from the US – and those proselytizers left behind their hymnals.
To this day, come Sunday mornings, Baptists around here belt out the same old-time gospel songs as their American counterparts. The lyrics, however, are translated into the local tongue: Kachin.
We are, after all, in Myanmar’s Kachin State. It’s a region about the size of Portugal and is inhabited by its namesake: the Kachin people. Their language is spoken by roughly a million people, including the four Kachin men in this attic. But their speech is unintelligible to the Burmese, who make up the dominant ethnicity in Myanmar.
‘Hear that?’ Gideon says. ‘That’s the last round of singing. Time to finish up. The service will end soon.’ After that, he says, the streets will fill with church folk. Best for the meth smokers to clear out and head home.
Last call for horse pills.
‘Now that you’re high,’ I say, ‘will you guys feel a bit anxious walking the streets?’
They nod affirmatively. ‘These days, you’ve got to watch your back,’ he says. ‘Pat Jasan is everywhere.’
Ah, Pat Jasan. The word on everyone’s lips in Kachin State.
Pat Jasan, I’m told, is a newly formed group of Christian anti-drug vigilantes. Their name is a compound word, mashing together the Kachin-language verbs ‘block’ (Pat) and ‘cleanse’ (Jasan). They are hunters of addicts, stalkers of dealers, raiders of drug dens. Though they seemingly coalesced out of nowhere, these grass-roots hardliners are metastasizing with great speed. Their goal is to purify Kachin society of narcotics, one addict at a time.
People say Pat Jasan will charge into your bedroom, kick over your bong and drag you screaming into the road. They’ll abduct you, stuff you into a cage, make you beg for God’s clemency. Run afoul of Pat Jasan and you will vanish for days, sometimes months, resurfacing with bloody welts, vowing never to touch meth again.
‘Pat Jasan is changing everything,’ Zau Ring says. ‘They have spies on every street. Hell, half of that church over there is probably cooperating with Pat Jasan.’
‘Wow,’ I say, ‘so you guys are really that scared of church folk? What about police?’
The baffled smirks curling across their lips indicate that I’ve asked a stupid question. Around here, everyone knows that copping speed is as easy as buying eggs. Kachin State cops are notoriously lenient on drugs.
There’s another reason these guys aren’t too worried about cops at the moment. Gideon – the very man who organized this gathering – is himself a low-level police operative. Is this foreigner really that clueless? Has Gideon never told him? Ever the rascal, Gideon lets them wonder, savoring the awkward silence.
Yes, I’m well aware that Gideon works with the police. I’ve known that ever since we were connected through a network of Kachin friends.
My contacts had suggested that, in Gideon, I might enlist an interlocutor with a deep knowledge of the local black market. Once we met here in Myitkyina, Gideon and I got along easily, building trust over many mugs of beer and cups of milk tea.
Honestly, I couldn’t have found a more perfect conspirator than a plainclothes police agent. Gideon operates in the murky space where the state and the underworld overlap. And I’ve come here to figure out how Myanmar gave rise to the biggest meth trade on the planet – all with suspiciously little government pushback.
Here’s what I know so far.
Myanmar’s billion-dollar meth syndicates now collectively rake in more profit than many Fortune 500 companies.4 This cabal of drug barons currently commands the weaponry and political clout of a small nation. Their power and cash is largely owed to their top-selling product: those little pink pills.
Hanging with meth smokers in a musty attic? This is a decent start. But my ultimate goal is to push beyond the customers and uncover the supply chain. To reveal this drug trade’s inner workings, I’ll need to penetrate that murky purgatory where officialdom seethes with criminality. This is a realm that Gideon knows well.
You probably think of Myanmar as a single, unified country. It sure looks like one on the map – a misshapen diamond with a spit of land jutting south like a kite’s tail.
These are Myanmar’s official borders, drawn by (who else?) the British. For millennia, this area was an amalgam of small kingdoms and loosely-run territories inhabited by a dizzying variety of ethnic groups. In the 19th century, however, the British Empire glued them into one big blob and called it Burma.
Never mind that many of these groups had been clashing for centuries. Under British rule, they now belonged to one common territory. But when the Empire ended its more than 120-year occupation of Myanmar after the Second World War, the country was left with a puzzle.
How to preserve this weak fiction of nationhood?
Enter a brilliant Burmese rebel named Aung San, beloved for orchestrating the British Empire’s ouster. In the waning day of British Burma, Aung San emerged as the leading voice for a population eager to construct its own state. Aung San vouched for a plan that would prevent minority groups from breaking away. Why not let the so-called ‘hill peoples’ run their own semi-autonomous states in the frontier?5
They could swear allegiance to a national union, which would look after defense and foreign affairs. Day to day, however, the minorities would manage their own turf – just as they’d done for ages. This recalled the United States’ post-colonial era, when George Washington tried to cobble together a nation out of many squabbling states.
This plan, however, was annulled with bloodshed. A Burmese clique in collusion with British officers mowed Aung San and his crew down with Tommy guns, inside a government building. The exact motives behind this assassination remain murky. But the reigning theory is that they feared Aung San would veer Burma towards communism.6 Regardless, the upshot of his murder would be prolonged national disunity.
The following decade was marked by uprisings and political chaos. Then, in 1962, Myanmar’s army seized absolute control. They proposed a darker solution to the country’s externally-imposed diversity puzzle. Deploy brute power. Force the minorities to their knees. Propagate a myth of racial supremacy.
(In a jab to the British, they later gave the nation a postcolonial title: Myanmar. The meaning is virtually identical. Myanmar is just a slightly more poetic word for the Burmese race.)
The nation of Myanmar remains a melange of 100-plus ethnicities. But there are seven major minority groups: Shan, Karen, Chin, Rakhine, Mon, Kachin and Karenni. If you grow up in Myanmar, you learn these racial categories at around the same time you learn to count.
Lording it over all minorities, however, are the Burmese. They are the heirs to a grand civilization spanning two millennia. They are the builders of glimmering temples, the pious disciples of Buddha, the conquerors of savages. Without Burmese might, the borderland barbarians would run amok and Myanmar would come unglued.
So goes the narrative proffered by the Burmese army propagandists.
Those at the nation’s fringe have a different view. In their eyes, the Burmese-dominated army – which effectively embodies the state – is not some valiant protector of nationhood. It’s more like a voracious squid-beast, tentacles flared in all directions.
The beast’s head rests in the central plains. This is Myanmar’s low country, a fat ribbon of fertile land. It begins in a sun-baked plateau, runs southward into soggy river delta and finally melts into the Bay of Bengal. This land is the nation’s soft and populous center, lush with rice fields, scattered with the ruins of ancient kingdoms. This is native soil for the nation’s ethnic-religious majority: Burmese Buddhists.
Perhaps your aunt, college roommate or neighbor went on holiday in Myanmar and came back gushing about golden spires and barefoot monks? This is where they went. It’s the Myanmar of coffee table books and travel sites that tout the world’s top ten hottest new destinations.
This is also the army’s home turf – and it is indeed safe for tourists. But the central region is not without problems. The first among them is punishing poverty.
Belonging to the top ethnicity does not confer prosperity to the Burmese. The military beast hoards the national wealth all for itself, enriching a coterie of generals and cronies. The masses – of whatever ethnicity – are left to feed off the few crumbs that dribble from its jaws.
The army devours much of the national budget, leaving between 1 and 3 per cent of GDP for health care and education.7 Such stinginess makes the governments of Liberia or Sudan look charitable.
As a result, many of Myanmar’s hospitals are eaten by black mold. So are the schools, where teachers are sometimes paid so poorly that the students sustain them with donated sacks of rice.
Many kids never make it to class at all. Instead, they report each morning to the dockyards or the quarry. According to the United Nations, one in five of Myanmar’s kids (aged ten to seventeen) holds down a job.8 They are often pulled out of school by sick parents who’ve been made invalid by treatable illnesses, casualties of the broken health care system.
In Yangon, Myanmar’s principal city, state neglect is actually a tourist attraction. Foreign visitors are inevitably charmed by the city’s grandiose Victorian-era British architecture. But they are often surprised to learn that bureaucrats still have to work inside some of these crumbling structures. The buildings – spectacular in their decay – have become exotic backdrops for selfie-snapping tourists.
This is the bleak status quo in Myanmar’s center. And yet, compared to those in the hills, the people who live in this low country are comparatively fortunate.
Follow the beast’s tentacles out of native Burmese terrain in any northerly direction. You will begin winding uphill into the mountains that encircle the plains. Keep going and you will reach the ‘black zones’ – army parlance for the jungles that are teeming with ‘terrorist’ minorities. Here, in lieu of clinics or classrooms, the army has invested in death. Its troops have sown some of the densest mine fields in Asia.
These black zones – large swaths of Karen, Kachin, Shan and other states – officially belong to Myanmar. In reality, they are disputed battlefields, chewed by the beast but not quite swallowed up.
For the minorities who live here, life is a struggle to keep those tentacles from wrapping around their throats. As with mountain cultures the world over, from the Ozarks to Tibet, the high altitude seems to breed rebellion. These hills are filled with men and women whose distrust of low-land authoritarians is felt down in their marrow.
Much of Myanmar – nearly half, by some estimates – is contested by various armed groups.9 But they are not galvanized behind a single resistance force. Instead there is a messy jumble of territories, divided up by language and clan. In more extreme terrain, each new valley seems to contain a different ethnicity with its own dialect and band of fighters. There are now so many guerrilla factions in Myanmar – many dozens of them, large and small – that even experts struggle to recall all of them from memory.
Though united in suspicion of the beast, these armed groups are driven by diverse motives. Within a 50-mile radius, you may find Jesus-loving freedom fighters, ex-communists and river pirates. Some groups control proto-states, defended by anti-aircraft cannons and thousands of uniformed grunts. Other factions amount to just a few guys in flip-flops with mud-splattered carbines.
