The flower fields stretch out from the mountain village along most every road — fluttering patchworks of white and pink and purple.
The beauty in this corner of Shan state, in northeastern Myanmar, might seem a respite from the country’s brutal civil war. Instead the blooms are a symptom: It is all opium poppy in these fields, and Myanmar again ranks as the world’s biggest exporter of the raw material to make heroin and other opiates. And that’s just the beginning.
Since descending into a full-blown civil conflict nearly four years ago, after the military overthrew the elected government, Myanmar has cemented its status as a hotbed of transnational crime. It is a playground for warlords, arms dealers, human traffickers, poachers, drug syndicates and generals wanted by international courts.
Myanmar is now the biggest nexus of organized crime on the planet, according to the Global Organized Crime Index.
The criminality flourishing in Myanmar’s fertile soil carries disastrous consequences for its 55 million people. It is also spreading the fruits of transgression across the globe. With more than half of the country battle-struck after the military coup in February 2021 that unseated the civilian authority of Aung San Suu Kyi, Myanmar is racking up dubious superlatives.
It is now the world’s largest producer of opium and one of the world’s largest manufacturers of synthetic drugs, including methamphetamine, ketamine and fentanyl. Concocted with precursor chemicals from neighboring China and India, tablets made in Myanmar feed habits as far away as Australia. With factories in overdrive and international law enforcement overwhelmed, street prices of these drugs are alarmingly cheap.
Myanmar is not just a narco-state. It is also thought to be the world’s largest exporter of certain heavy rare earth elements that power clean energy worldwide. In battlefields turned toxic wastelands, workers dig in illegal mines, then dispatch the rare earths to China along old smuggling routes. The Southeast Asian nation is also home to the best jade and ruby on the planet, much of it extracted by young men addicted to the same drugs that are flooding the global market. Poachers scour Myanmar’s forests for endangered wildlife and timber, too, often bound for China.
The war in Myanmar is expanding the reach of Chinese criminal syndicates, which are operating with impunity and monopolistic ambition in the region, despite occasional crackdowns by China. Chinese weapons flow both to the ruling junta and to the resistance forces that are fighting it.
In Myanmar’s borderlands, criminal networks that unite Chinese kingpins with ethnic warlords are kidnapping people from all over the globe to toil in factories that scam people online. International police organizations say this online fraud has bilked billions of dollars from retirees and lonely hearts in the United States, China, Europe and beyond.
“Organized crime has a vested interest in conflict continuing because it thrives in that environment,” said Masood Karimipour, the regional representative for Southeast Asia and the Pacific for the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, or UNODC. “And the longer the conflict goes on, the more territory falls under the control or influence of parties who stand to profit.”
“The profits,” he added, “are from truly horrifying things that are destroying lives in Myanmar and in many other countries.”
The Myanmar military and the ethnic militias that have aligned with it are by far the biggest drivers of the illicit economy. Since the coup, international sanctions imposed because of the army’s terrible human rights record have cut into the junta’s profits. But those fighting on the side of democracy and regional autonomy also know that illegal proceeds are the easiest way to fuel their war machine.
New York Times reporting within Myanmar over the past few years of intensifying war has laid bare how the country’s descent into failed statehood is stoking conflict at home and exporting misery, dependency and corruption across continents.
These are the biggest cogs in Myanmar’s military-industrial crime complex:
Opium in the Open
In the Shan Hills of Myanmar, the opium poppy is called “the peace flower.”
The name is an irony: There has not been true peace in Shan state for decades. Over the years, more than a dozen ethnic guerrilla groups have fought the Myanmar military — and one another — for dominance, not only of the territory but of the drug trade, too.
This planting season, opium farming in Pekon Township in Shan state reached a troubling milestone. For years, farmers grew their poppies in mountains and valleys, away from the authorities that would, sometimes at gunpoint, impose taxes, demand a cut of the crop or even destroy their fields.
Today, these growers cultivate opium flowers openly in their villages. Nourished by complex irrigation systems, fields of poppies sway beside churches, temples, police stations and town halls. Farmers harvest the oozing opium resin without fear of getting caught.
“Now there is no government, no military, so we don’t have to hide,” said Hla Win, as she returned from tending her poppies in a field across the street from her house. “It’s the best time ever for opium.”
Before the coup, elected officials and foreign bureaucrats tried to convince Shan opium farmers to abandon their traditional ways and grow substitutes, such as avocados, coffee and corn. But impoverished farmers in these isolated hills say there was little market for such crops.
Besides, opium, which has been used sparingly as medicine for generations here, is more lucrative. This flowering season, which runs from November to February, prices for opium resin are already reaching $430 per pound, three times what they were a few years ago.
“Life is unpredictable,” said Ko Htein Lin, who has given over his farmland for opium poppies. “We need to make money when we can.”
The UNODC estimates that up to $1.26 billion in heroin, mostly derived from Shan opium, was exported from Myanmar this year. Many of the opium farmers in Pekon are sharecroppers who were displaced by the fighting and earn as little as $2 a day.
“I have to survive,” said Pa Lae, who with his family fled junta airstrikes on their hometown.
A year ago, a resistance offensive pushed the military out of dozens of towns, bringing these opium fields under the mandate of an ethnic armed group that is part of the anti-government resistance force. At the same time, the Myanmar military — which terrorizes the civilian population with airstrikes and drone attacks — and its associated militias are buying most of the opium grown here, locals say. Some rebels fighting the military are also complicit in the trade, although other armed groups have eschewed drug trafficking completely.
“We sell to anyone who has money to pay us,” said Myo Lay, an opium farmer in Pekon. “I don’t ask who they are.”
Jungle Drug Labs
A bottle of beer in Myanmar costs about $1. A little pink pill, a potent combination of methamphetamine and caffeine known as yaba, goes for less than 25 cents.
Last year, governments in East and Southeast Asia seized a record 190 tons of methamphetamine, the UNODC said, but its street price dropped as jungle labs in Shan state went into overdrive.
The making of synthetic drugs in Myanmar predates the coup and ensuing civil war. Warlords in certain self-administered regions of Shan state have long overseen drug economies, with the military and its proxies taking a cut of the profits. Air force helicopters would fly packets of pills and chunks of crystal methamphetamine to cities and ports for distribution overseas, former pilots said.
Production in Myanmar intensified after a crackdown on the assembly of drugs in China. The chemical precursors instead found their way to Myanmar, and Chinese lab technicians taught locals how to craft crystal methamphetamine, also known as ice, in jungle redoubts. Chinese kingpins brought in pill presses to make yaba.
In 2019, in the northern Shan state village of Konemon under the control of an ethnic armed group, a visit by the Times showed the extent to which methamphetamine production dominated the local economy. All but three homes, locals said, were involved in making yaba. At night, the thrum of generators broke the quiet of the Shan Hills. A sour smell pervaded from the acid used in drugmaking.
The intensity of workshops churning out synthetic drugs has reached a new high since the army takeover in Myanmar, drug trade monitors and law enforcers say. Ethnic armed groups in Shan state have begun producing new club drugs, such as “happy water” and lollipops made with a cocktail that includes ketamine, MDMA and methamphetamine.
Synthetic drugs are pouring out of Shan state to Laos and Thailand, reconstituting the infamous Golden Triangle. They are smuggled to Bangladesh and India by ethnic rebels who are both fighting the junta and in business with it.
In Mandalay, the second-largest city in Myanmar, about 40 extravagantly tattooed soldiers with rifles spend their days hewing to the junta’s command as part of a so-called people’s militia. Sometimes they break up pro-democracy dissent or threaten entrepreneurs thought to support the resistance movement. Mostly, though, they organize the movement of synthetic drugs from rebel-held areas to junta-controlled territory before it heads abroad by sea and land.
“We are called a people’s militia, but we rarely engage in fighting,” said Ye, one of its members. “We engage in the drug trade.”
Scam Mills With Global Reach
On Myanmar’s border with Thailand, in what was once dense jungle, Kyaw Htay worked on the third floor of a windowless boiler room, huddled over his phone, he recalled. In 12-hour shifts, he and about 40 others sat at plastic tables, all absorbed in online conversations, he said, with people across the world: China, Mexico, Japan, Italy, India and the United States.
Kyaw Htay’s marks were in France, and he used Google Translate to build relationships. “You’re so beautiful,” he wrote to widows, liberally adding heart emoji. Or he made his profile photo that of a long-haired Asian woman and, in deliberately broken French, wooed older men eager for love.
The online romances soon gave way to talk of investments. In one case this year, Kyaw Htay said he told a widow from southern France that they should, as a couple, invest in a cryptocurrency-backed housing development. She said “yes.”
In a good month, Kyaw Htay said, he scammed as much as 80,000 euros ($83,000) out of victims. He was paid about $445 a month for his work, he said, a good salary in postcoup Myanmar. Unlike the foreigners in the room with him — four Africans, seven Indians and five Chinese — he had come willingly to this border enclave run by a Chinese crime syndicate.
The United Nations estimated last year that at least 120,000 foreigners were being forced into the cybercrime and online gambling industries in Myanmar. Many had been duped by ads promising clerical, technical or customer service jobs in Southeast Asia. An Interpol operation last year found people from 22 countries who had been compelled to work in cybercrime hubs in Myanmar. Others were kidnapped off the streets in China and taken by gunpoint to enclaves run by ethnic warlords and Chinese crime gangs, survivors said.
While ethnic militia commanders aligned with the military have long operated with impunity in certain fiefs in Shan state and Karen state, in the east, new high-rise buildings and scam warehouses have sprouted since the coup. The language of such commerce, more than a dozen people who have worked in these cybercrime and casino enclaves say, is mostly Mandarin.
Last year, more than 40,000 Chinese people were detained in Myanmar over scams and deported to China. A few Chinese kingpins have been apprehended. Chinese nationals were killed in a shootout at one compound used by scammers on the border with Myanmar, Chinese and Myanmar state media reported.
Myanmar citizens who worked in the scam centers say that because of a Chinese government crackdown, the business model is shifting away from targeting Chinese victims to those in America and Europe. The bosses of scam rings are also increasingly using deepfake images and ransomware to extort money out of victims, workers said.
“These scam centers are horror shows on a massive scale,” said Karimipour of the UNODC.
The Thai government has cut off electricity and the internet to scam factories and online gambling dens across the river border. But even if a sin city is targeted, another will soon take its place.
After eight months, Kyaw Htay said he was no longer comfortable defrauding French retirees. The old woman to whom he had sold the idea of crypto-backed real estate wrote of her grief over her husband’s death. Shyly, she professed her love for the stranger who had first contacted her by WhatsApp. She had handed over her savings for the scheme, around 15,000 euros. She lost it all.
“Her trust in me and her optimism still haunt me,” said Kyaw Htay, who spoke with the Times this past fall after he fled the scam warehouse. “I deeply regret what I did.”
An All-Out Mining Rush
Three months before the military coup, the pine forests around Pangwa in Kachin state, in Myanmar’s north, had 15 rare earth mines. Three months after the putsch, there were five times as many, residents said.
Last year, Myanmar was believed to be the world’s largest exporter of certain heavy rare earths, including dysprosium and terbium, which are used in items such as electric vehicles and wind turbines. (Although there are no reliable official figures for Myanmar’s mining output, the environmental watchdog Global Witness found 2023 Chinese customs data indicating that imports from Myanmar were larger than China’s own domestic mining quota.)
China has monopolized the industry for processing rare earths. Before the coup, Myanmar’s elected government tried to control or ban their export because of concerns over the environmental damage from mining. But after Western governments imposed sanctions on Myanmar’s military, the generals, who have been backed by China, needed a new money source.
The heart of Myanmar’s rare earths mining operations was in the hands of an ethnic Kachin militia tied to the junta. With no environmental or labor safeguards in place, Pangwa, on the border with China, became gripped by high-intensity mining, locals said.
Hundreds of Chinese mine bosses descended, as did Chinese technicians adept at isolating the rare earths from the soil. Residents noted that within a few months, nearly all of Pangwa’s pine forests were uprooted, except for a clump of trees in a cemetery where the local militia boss’s grandparents were buried.
Pangwa, like two other mining towns, has been destroyed, residents said. San Hlaing worked the mines, his bare hands blistered and burned from the corrosive acid used in the extraction process. The air was full of dust, and he developed a constant hacking cough. To make it through the long days spent digging pits and lugging chemicals, San Hlaing resorted to yaba, as did most miners.
“It’s a bad cycle because most of the money we earn goes to buying more drugs,” he said. “Work destroys our health, and drugs destroy our lives.”
Toxic chemicals have infiltrated the soil, environmentalists said. Locals are scared to drink the water. Landslides are another constant threat in both these and other types of mines in Kachin state, where the illegal excavation of jade kills scores of wildcat miners a year.
In October, the Kachin Independence Army, a member of the rebel alliance aiming to oust the military, captured Pangwa. Anti-junta forces now control the entire China-Kachin boundary, through which rare earths, timber, jade and other treasures are smuggled.
For a few weeks after the rebels’ victory, Pangwa residents said, rare earth mining ceased. Chinese workers returned home. But other areas that had been under the control of the Kachin resistance were also churned up for rare earth mining, residents say. Satellite imagery shows the scarring of this land.
“We are just experimenting,” said Col. Naw Bu, a Kachin Independence Organization spokesperson. “If we decide to pursue this for business purposes, we will ensure that public health is not affected.”
Naw Bu said that negotiations with Chinese businessmen on regulated rare earth mining was underway but that no official permission had been granted. This month, a Kachin delegation went to China for talks.
By the end of November, Pangwa residents said, some mining had already resumed. Myanmar rare earths, extracted at great human cost, are again entering the global supply chain to drive the green revolution.
The New York Times News Service
