Chinese actor Wang Xing was deceived by a fake casting director to travel to Thailand under the pretext of auditioning for a movie. As soon as he set foot on Thai soil, Wang was kidnapped. His captors took him to Myawaddy, in neighboring Burma, a border town that has become the epicenter of regional cybercrime, run by Chinese mafias.
After three days, Wang, whose head had been shaved, was rescued in an operation organized by the Thai police. Following the news that broke in January, the families of 174 Chinese citizens believed to have also been kidnapped by the same networks operating in Myawaddy organized a campaign urging the Chinese government to bring their relatives back home.
Chinese criminal gangs, taking advantage of the chaos in Burma, a country stunned by a bloody civil war, seized control of Myawaddy by reaching an agreement with ethnic armed groups and local warlords fighting against the military that staged a coup exactly four years ago: weapons and ammunition in exchange for facilitating their entry and infrastructure to set up call centers from where they carry out online frauds in multiple languages targeting retirees and lonely individuals worldwide. Although most victims are Chinese living in China, the United States, and Europe.
These mafias also deceive thousands of victims each year to cross into Burma or Thailand with false promises of work, as was the case with actor Wang, and then they kidnap and force them to work making calls from scam centers. Since Beijing began pressuring the Burmese coup government to crack down on these Chinese gangs in earnest last September, over 30,000 criminals have been arrested and extradited to China for trial.
These networks engaging in internet scams or through calls are just one of the many facets of the transnational crime hub that Burma has become since the military ousted the elected government. The Southeast Asian country is currently a safe haven for arms traffickers and human traffickers. It is a fertile ground for synthetic drugs. It also dominates the circuit of species trafficking and the highly demanded rare minerals.
"Burma is currently the largest hub of organized crime on the planet," stated the latest report, regarding 2024, published annually by the Global Organized Crime Index. This report particularly highlights that this country is now the world's largest opium producer and one of the largest manufacturers of synthetic drugs, such as methamphetamine and ketamine, which end up being sold in far-flung places like Australia or Canada.
"The amount of opium produced in Burma is very close to the highest levels we have seen since we first measured it over 20 years ago," explains Masood Karimipour, regional representative of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), an organization that, in 2023, stated that, for the first time, Burma had surpassed Afghanistan as the world's primary source of opium and heroin.
"As the conflict dynamics in the country remain very intense and global supply chains adapt to the ban imposed by the Taliban in Afghanistan, we see a significant risk of further opium expansion in Burma in the coming years," Karimipour continues.
Crisis of enormous proportions
After the 2021 coup, Burma was plunged into a humanitarian crisis that escalated as the civil war between the army and rebels progressed. The economy collapsed, and many families turned to farming poppy (or opium poppy), from which opium is extracted, as the only way they found to make ends meet. This coincided with the Taliban's crusade in Afghanistan against these crops, almost halting abruptly the production of what had been the world's largest supplier (over 80%) of opium for many decades. Burma, with its clandestine labs in war zones transforming opium into heroin, then began to meet global demand.
The heroin trafficking route shifted, taking as its starting point the already established drug supplier of Southeast Asia, the Golden Triangle, a term coined years ago by the United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to refer to the border area where Thailand, Laos, and Burma meet. In the depths of its jungles, local militias fighting against the military and financing themselves mainly through methamphetamine production also began to dominate the heroin market.
In Burma, the main opium cultivation area is in the northern Shan region, one of the epicenters of the current clashes between the army and the alliance formed by armed groups. "The heroin prices, which have dropped by 8%, have likely been a decisive factor for the production increase," says Karimipour. Experts claim that criminals, with their labs scattered throughout Shan, have also lowered prices for methamphetamine, ecstasy, ketamine, and yaba - a mix of methamphetamine and caffeine - to move larger quantities of these substances across the region.
The drug trafficking business in Burma has thrived alongside the illegal exploitation of jade and ruby mines. Both murky worlds have one thing in common: drug lords addict many young Burmese who end up working in the mines, under deplorable conditions, to afford their doses.
All of this is happening in a country on the brink of a major famine, while the blood of war continues to flow everywhere. A few days ago, the ruling junta extended the state of emergency that was set to expire at midnight on Friday, January 31, for another six months, once again postponing the holding of free general elections. That was the promise of the generals behind the February 1, 2021 coup, which forcibly removed the popular Aung San Suu Kyi's government from power, who is serving a 27-year prison sentence.
Last November, the International Criminal Court prosecutor requested an arrest warrant against junta leader Min Aung Hlaing for alleged crimes against the Rohingya minority in 2016 and 2017. A UN report released a few days ago denounced that the war has displaced over 3.5 million people and that Burmese prisons hold thousands of opposition members enduring torture.
"The military has massacred thousands of civilians, bombed and burned villages, and displaced millions of people," says former US congressman Tom Andrews, who currently serves as the UN Special Rapporteur on human rights in Burma. "Over 20,000 political prisoners remain behind bars, the economy and public services are collapsing. And famine looms over much of the population." This is the broad picture of present-day Burma four years after the military coup.