Villagers in Thailand, including former KMT refugees, are exploiting family connections to send illicit drugs abroad to Thai laborers overseas, mainly in Taiwan, Thai narcotics officials said yesterday.
Several groups, including the Chinese Haws, in Thailand's northern border regions, are operating clandestine smuggling operations that see drugs such as methamphetamines and heroin transported to Thais in Taiwan and Singapore.
"Methamphetamines are sent to trade to Thai laborers in Taiwan by sellers who are not only Chinese Haws, but also from others groups," a source in the Office of Narcotics Control Board (ONCB) told the media.
"But Chinese Haws may have greater opportunities because they know people there and they send their children to study there," said the source, who spoke on condition of anonymity.
Northern Thailand is home to thousands of former KMT soldiers who fled China's Yunnan Province following the 1949 victory of Mao Zedong (
Most other KMT fighters fled to Taiwan half a century ago, but connections between the two communities remain, and many KMT descendants in Thailand head to Taiwan for study and work.
Thailand's north is notoriously prone to drug trafficking, particularly for heroin and stimulant pills like methamphetamines smuggled across the border from Myanmar.
The source would not specify the amount of drugs being trafficked into Taiwan from northern Thailand.
Most of the drugs were being brought into Taiwan by relatives making visits to family members or laborers there, according to a Bangkok Post report which also cited ONCB sources.
It said the ONCB arrested Chinese Haws a few years ago as they boarded a flight to Taipei with several kilograms of heroin in their possession.
The narcotics office had been asked by Taiwan for details on trafficking networks following an influx of pills there, the English-language daily added.
Up to 4,000 Thais leave for Taiwan each month to take up work, mostly at construction sites or factories, the paper said.
There are more than 130,000 Thai laborers in Taiwan.
Singapore is also a key destination for the drugs, and deals to Europe and the Americas were being closely monitored as well, the ONCB source said.
Some 70 percent of all methamphetamines trafficked through Thailand and bound for Europe were sent through the Thai and Laotian communities there, he said.
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