The Lao People’s Army patrol boat was custom-made in China with night-vision capability and two of the most powerful engines on this remote stretch of the Mekong River.
Today, like most days, it sits idle for lack of gasoline, guarded by a single Laotian soldier in flip-flops.
Even occasional patrols by boats like these, supplied by China to the Laotian Army and Myanmar police, have successfully subdued the pirates who once robbed the Mekong’s cargo ships with impunity since Chinese-led joint patrols began in 2011.
However, there has been little progress on another objective — stemming the flood of illicit drugs — exposing the limits of China’s hard power in mainland Southeast Asia even as Beijing accelerates its militarization of disputed islands in the South China Sea.
While attacks on Mekong shipping have tailed off, drug production and trafficking in the untamed region, known as the Golden Triangle, is booming — despite the presence of Chinese gunboats and units of Chinese armed police along the Mekong.
The UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) estimates that Southeast Asia’s trade in heroin and methamphetamine was worth US$31 billion in 2013.
“That’s bigger than the economies of some Southeast Asian countries,” UNODC Asia-Pacific chief Jeremy Douglas said. “It’s like having an undeclared sovereign state in your midst with no borders and lots of money.”
Enter another Mekong boat, looking at first glance like a pleasure cruiser filled with middle-aged tourists. In fact, they are senior police and drugs experts from four countries, among them one of China’s top anti-narcotics officials, Wei Xiaojun (魏小軍).
Arranged by the UNODC and lent further clout by Wei’s involvement, their recent voyage down the Mekong was aimed at mustering the regional collaboration needed to tame the Golden Triangle.
Reuters was invited to join the four-day trip from the Chinese port of Jinghong through the heart of the Golden Triangle.
Wei, who is deputy secretary general of China’s National Narcotics Control Commission, called drugs the “main threat” along the Mekong.
“All other types of organized crime are rooted in the drug business, like human trafficking, money laundering and the illegal wildlife trade,” he said.
CRAZY MEDICINE
China is a favorite destination for Myanmar’s drugs, which are flowing through Asia in unprecedented quantities.
More than 250 million methamphetamine pills, better known by their Thai name ya ba, or “crazy medicine,” were seized in East and Southeast Asia in 2013, an eight-fold increase from 2008.
Seizures of “crystal meth” or “ice” — a potent, crystalline form of methamphetamine dubbed “the poor man’s cocaine” — doubled during the same period.
Last year China seized a record 36.5 tonnes of methamphetamine, the UNODC said, with most of the drug in pill form coming from Myanmar.
Myanmar is the world’s second-largest producer of opium, the bulk of which ends up in China as heroin.
A recent report from the commission raised concerns about the involvement of some Chinese military personnel in drug trafficking and said the number of registered drug users in China rose to more than 2.3 million last year.
Increasingly Myanmar too has a drug problem, with police last year making record-breaking busts of both ya ba and ice.
This could severely test the new government of Burmese leader Aung San Suu Kyi, whose National League for Democracy party has yet to formulate drug policies, experts said.
UNDERFUNDED
Many factors combine to help the Golden Triangle’s drug industry prosper.
The Myanmar-Laos border, which the Mekong delineates, is mostly unguarded. The terrain is rugged and hostile, with rebel armies holding sway in some areas and drugs and money-laundering flourishing in lawless enclaves on both sides of the river.
Regional law enforcement agencies are often underfunded and ill-trained and the intelligence they gather is not effectively shared with neighboring countries.
In October 2011, a gang led by a Mekong pirate called Naw Kham murdered 13 Chinese sailors. He was hunted down in Laos, then taken back to China to be tried and executed.
Afterwards, Chinese gunboats began patrolling further downriver, extending China’s reach far beyond its borders.
This includes a riverside facility in Muang Mom, Laos, run and guarded by a 25-strong unit of Chinese People’s Armed Police.
China conducts monthly joint patrols with its Laotian and Myanmar counterparts, who — gasoline permitting — do additional patrols by themselves.
There have been successes. In 2013, a Chinese-Laotian patrol found 580kg of ya ba, worth more than 100 million yuan (US$15 million at current rates), hidden in a cargo ship.
However, more patrols were needed and Mekong countries also needed to coordinate and share intelligence to interdict more drugs, Douglas said.
NTELLIGENCE BLACK HOLES
Some areas remain intelligence black holes. Hsop Lwe, for example, is Myanmar’s busiest port on the Mekong, but its government has no control over it.
The port belongs to Special Region 4, a semi-autonomous enclave famous for gambling, prostitution and narcotics. To the north is Special Region 2, also controlled by heavily armed rebels.
The special regions were “off the political grid,” Douglas said, although he hoped Suu Kyi’s new government would engage with and secure better access to them.
The UNODC boat could not get permission to stop at Hsop Lwe, where a Chinese cargo ship was unloading SUVs as it passed.
Reuters reporters also spotted unofficial Mekong ports in Laos, which this year chairs the ASEAN.
Landlocked and impoverished, Laos shares a border with all the Mekong countries, which also include Vietnam and Thailand, making it an important smuggling hub for both narcotics and the chemicals that make them.
From Vietnam, for example, comes tonnes of caffeine, used in methamphetamine production and spirited through Laos and across the Mekong in rice bags.
Other lawless areas were being created by the Mekong itself.
The ever-shifting river created islands where drug shipments were hidden, Royal Thai Army Colonel Patpong Ngasantheir said, but according to a treaty negotiated while Laos was still a French colony, these islands were deemed neutral.
“We’re not allowed to search them,” he said.
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