Patrick Winn spent years pursuing Asia’s most notorious narcotics syndicate. This excerpt from his new book, Narcotopia, explains how it grew so powerful.
Members of UWSA empties a packet of 'WY' also know as Ya Ba drug before they are set on fire during a drug burning ceremony to mark the UN's world anti-drugs day in Poung Par Khem, near the Thai and Myanmar border on June 26, 2017.cartel do good? It’s an especially subversive question in North America, where the word “cartel” evokes boundless cruelty. But the Americas hold no monopoly on narco-trafficking supergroups.
Few cultures are so strongly linked to a commodity. The Amish build furniture. The Swiss make watches. The Wa cook meth — and before meth was in vogue, the Wa churned out heroin. Their soil is cold and bitter, terrible for vegetables but ideal for heroin’s raw ingredient:Like mountain peoples from Chechnya to the Ozarks, the Wa like to do things their own way.
The Wa stockpile guns for a reason. America isn’t the only country they’ve had to worry about. Wa people are indigenous to China’s frontier, just like Tibetans and Uyghurs, minorities who’ve suffered deeply under a Chinese government that micromanages their every move. The Wa have faced the same threat.
I’m an American journalist who has lived and worked in Bangkok for more than 15 years. In my day job with, a foreign affairs show airing on National Public Radio stations, I might cover anything from pop groups to riots. But I’m also a part-time) is that lawbreakers tend to be rational actors, not just black-hearted ghouls. It’s a collection of real-life stories about smugglers and rebels in Southeast Asia.
During the grunge-era nineties, when the Wa were synthesizing tons of pristine heroin for export to America, this source was a high-level UWSA commander. As I explain in the short chapterHis former DEA handlers still speak of him with reverence, which is unusual, because confidential informants are seldom praised by anyone. CIs rat out fellow criminals to spare themselves from prison. Some CIs snitch for envelopes of cash, others to help police arrest their underworld rivals.
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