Asia’s infamous Golden Triangle and the soldiers tracking down the drug smugglers who rule its narcotics trade – ABC News

Atfour o'clock in the morning in a quiet, pitch-black jungle, a patrol of young Thai soldiers looked through night vision goggles and heat detection cameras for any sign of movement.

Their beat:a mountainous section of the Thailand-Myanmar border in Asia's notorious drug trafficking heartland, the Golden Triangle.

Their targets: armed smugglers hiking from Myanmar.

Soon, the soldiers spotted a group of people with large backpacks hiding in the dense scrub.

"The patrol ordered them to stop to check, but the group opened fire at the officers," Royal Thai Army Colonel Sudkhet Srinilthin told the ABC.

"The soldiers fired back and there was a firefight for around 30 minutes."

Once the sun came up, the soldiers found six bodies alongside nine large, straw backpacks full of methamphetamine pills.

It was a tragic result for the smugglers, but the patrol's biggest drug bust for the year.

"The total drugs we seized were 1.8 million pills," Captain Kittidech Gunkloy said as he showed the ABC the backpacksat a Thai defence base later that day.

"If all this could get inside Thailand it would [be valued] about 100 baht ($4) a pill, so in total around 180 million baht ($7.5 million) and then who knows how much, double or triple, if it could reach a third country."

The Golden Triangle is the region where the borders of Thailand, Myanmar and Laos meet at the junction of the Mekong and Ruak Rivers, includingthe surrounding mountains in all three countries.

It is a stunning part of South-East Asia, but its beauty belies a dark underbelly.

Traditionally well-known for its opium and heroin trade, the Golden Triangle still produces large amounts of opiates, but it is now one of the biggest synthetic drug production and distribution points in the world.

The drugs are primarily made in the hills of Shan state in northern Myanmar, where clandestine laboratories are pumping out crystal and tablet methamphetamines by the tonne for militia groups and organised crime syndicates.

The cooks and crooks are rarely caught, but smugglers from poor backgrounds enter a daily game of cat and mouse with Thai border guards.

It is always dangerous, and sometimes deadly.

Around 1,500 officers from Thai Taskforce Pha Muang are responsible for keeping watch over 342 kilometres of porous land borders alongside Myanmar to the west and Laos to the east.

"We need to patrol 24 hours, day and night, and when we can't cover that [in person] we use special tools to help, like CCTV or motion sensors to check along the border," Colonel Sudkhet said.

On a daytime border walk the ABC was invited to join with another patrol, it was clear to see why the jungle has become an attractive route for drug smugglers.

The bush is thick, the terrain is rugged, there are plenty of places to hide, and some of the barbed-wire border fences are flimsy or cut away.

Smugglers also take their chances across the long, winding rivers separating the countries, which are patrolled by heavily armed Thai navy officers out on the water.

Captain Jirat Pookthong from the Mekong Riverine Unit sees his team's role as policing Thailand's front door while soldiers in the jungle guard the back door.

"We devote our strength and our heart to stop the drugs the best we can," he told the ABC.

"Definitely, if there was no riverine unit to keep watch, the illegal operations around the Golden Triangle especially drugs would be able to get inside Thailand.

While the global pandemic disrupted industries far and wide, the drug trade out of the Golden Triangle has not just survived, but thrived.

Jeremy Douglas from the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) has spent more than a decade in the region.

He told the ABC that despite the large drug busts, supply has barely been dented.

"COVID never slowed the drug business down, it's really, really resilient," Mr Douglas said.

"Frankly, the guys that are in this business, the big organised crime figures and their militia partners in Myanmar, don't play by the rules we do, so while borders closed to us they were freely crossing them."

After being manufactured in Myanmar, the drugs are trafficked through Laos and Thailand, then sent by sea cargo, air cargo, and, increasingly during COVID, by parcel post to other countries, including Australia.

Mr Douglas said drug busts in Laos were up 600 per cent for the year, including "by far the largest seizure in the history of East and South-East Asia" 55 million methamphetamine tablets and 1.5 tonnes of crystal meth.

A Thai-led operation involving the Mekong countries and southern China smashed records in 2021, too.

They confiscated more thanhalf a billion methamphetamine pills, 30 tonnes of ice, six tonnes of heroin, three tonnes of ketamine, and 257 tonnes of chemicals used to make illegal drugs.

"We saw an increase in drugs being seized which to us indicates an increase in production, and at the same time prices on the street were down, so supply was very, very high," Mr Douglas said.

He added that the turmoil in Myanmar following February's military coup had fuelled the rise in synthetic drug production.

"Clearly people are using the post-coup chaos and environment as an opportunity and traffickers, of course, need those kind of conditions," he said.

"They don't want the Myanmar police to be working against them.

"Right now, the police are fighting an insurgency or dealing with ethnic armed unrest, so they have other issues on their mind, and that is a free space for others [drug smugglers] to do their business."

As the drug trade traverses the mountains and rivers of the Golden Triangle, some of the communities in the region are desperate for their "beautiful part of the world" to earn a new reputationas a tourist destination.

Phakakan Rungpracharat, 42, grew up in the northern Thai village of Ban Pa Mee, just a few kilometres from the Myanmar border.

She set up a mountainside cafe five years ago, and since then other locals have opened guest houses, restaurants, and stalls selling handicrafts from the local Akha hill tribe.

"Nowadays, we have proved that our community has so many great things, and we are more than what the world has thought of us before," Ms Phakakan told the ABC.

"We have become a tourism village, we have created work for the youth and our community, we have a lot of young people who left or lived abroad and have come back to develop their village."

Thailand reopened to fully vaccinated international visitors last month and some have started to trickle up to the villages, temples, and lookouts in the Golden Triangle.

Ms Phakakan said the recent news of the six drug smugglers' deaths was upsetting, but she also felt comforted that soldiers were patrolling the border to keep local villages safe.

"I want to tell people around the world to please come and visit us, please don't worry about the drugs, we can guarantee your safety," she said.

"We have such beautiful scenery, a good way of life, nice weather, it's peaceful, and we have great food and coffee this is who we are."

The Golden Triangle's drug trade is established and lucrative, despite the authorities' attempts to stop the flow and some locals' desire to reinvent the region.

For every group of drug smugglers caught, many are successfully running the gauntlet and making it from Myanmar into Thailand and Laos every day.

Beyond this part of South-East Asia, the organised crime syndicates these smugglers work for have tentacles that stretch all over the world.

The steep rise of the Golden Triangle's drug supply is a big concern for the Australian Federal Police (AFP) in particular.

Simon Lalic, the AFP's senior officer in Thailand, said Australia was a key target market for Golden Triangle drugs.

"Our statistics suggest that anywhere between 60 to 80 per cent of the methamphetamine that is consumed in Australia comes from this very region," Mr Lalic told the ABC at a checkpoint on the Thailand-Myanmar border.

The AFP's Thailand officers work closely with local authorities in a dedicated team called Taskforce Storm, to share intelligence, information and forensic technology.

During the pandemic, the task force's biggest Australia-bound hauls have been found in sea cargo, including methamphetamines concealed in motorbike parts, coconut milk cansand barbecue grills, and heroin hidden in tins of acrylic paint.

Last month AFP officers made a breakthrough, with the arrest of one of the kingpins behind the heroin-in-paint shipmentin Sydney.

Two men, including a38-year-old considered to be one of Australia's most significant organised crime threats, were charged with allegedly conspiring to import the drugs an offence with a maximum penalty of life imprisonment.

"We see our work as really important here in Thailand, because every kilogram that we seize and every dollar that we confiscate has an effect on the criminal entities that are working in this," Mr Lalic said.

"It's a difficult fight because the numbers are big and the statistics show that this issue is getting bigger and bigger, but we can't stop the fight."

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Asia's infamous Golden Triangle and the soldiers tracking down the drug smugglers who rule its narcotics trade - ABC News