Thai Border on Guard for Drugs From Myanmar

So says Ja Saw, a wiry man in his 20s who should know: Two years ago, he was one of them.

Mr. Ja Saw spent a year in a Thai prison for trafficking. Now he works as an undercover agent for the Thai military. In his native Myanmar, where he travels periodically to glean intelligence, he is known by another name.

“They would kill me immediately if they knew I was a spy,” Mr. Ja Saw, who is from the Wa ethnic group, said in an interview at a remote location several kilometers from the Myanmar border.

Thailand’s northern borderland region is ground zero in the country’s efforts to interdict the tons of illicit drugs manufactured in the freewheeling northern reaches of Myanmar. Thailand is also the main international gateway for heroin bound for the streets of Tokyo, Hong Kong, Sydney and other major cities in the region, counternarcotics officials said.

Sending the drugs through China would be the most geographically direct route to Hong Kong, Tokyo and other points north. But the Thai and United States counternarcotics authorities said they believed that most of the drugs move south through Thailand.

Read more...