Drugs, scams and sin: Myanmar’s war has made it the global crime capital
SHAN STATE, Myanmar — 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.
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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. 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.
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 worldwide.
“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.”
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.
