Drugs, scams and sin: Myanmar’s war has made it the global crime capital

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.

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 organised 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 organisations say this online fraud has bilked billions of dollars from retirees and lonely hearts worldwide.

“Organised 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.

These are the biggest cogs in Myanmar’s military-industrial crime complex:

Opium in the Open

In the Shan Hills of Myanmar, the opium poppy is called “the peace flower.”

The name is an irony: There has not been true peace in Shan state for decades. Over the years, more than a dozen ethnic guerrilla groups have fought the Myanmar military — and one another — for dominance.

This planting season, opium farming in Pekon Township in Shan state reached a troubling milestone. For years, farmers grew their poppies in mountains and valleys, away from the authorities that would, sometimes at gunpoint, impose taxes, demand a cut of the crop or even destroy their fields.

Today, these growers cultivate opium flowers openly in their villages. Nourished by complex irrigation systems, fields of poppies sway beside churches, temples, police stations and town halls. Farmers harvest the oozing opium resin without fear of getting caught.

Jungle Drug Labs

A bottle of beer in Myanmar costs about $1. A little pink pill, a potent combination of methamphetamine and caffeine known as yaba, goes for less than 25 cents.

Last year, governments in East and Southeast Asia seized a record 190 tons of methamphetamine, the UNODC said, but its street price dropped as jungle labs in Shan state went into overdrive.

The making of synthetic drugs in Myanmar predates the coup and ensuing civil war. Warlords in certain self-administered regions of Shan state have long overseen drug economies, with the military and its proxies taking a cut of the profits.

The intensity of workshops churning out synthetic drugs has reached a new high since the army takeover in Myanmar, drug trade monitors and law enforcers say. Ethnic armed groups in Shan state have begun producing new club drugs, such as “happy water” and lollipops made with a cocktail that includes ketamine, MDMA and methamphetamine.

Scam Mills With Global Reach

On Myanmar’s border with Thailand, in what was once dense jungle, Kyaw Htay worked on the third floor of a windowless boiler room, huddled over his phone, he recalled. In 12-hour shifts, he and about 40 others sat at plastic tables, all absorbed in online conversations, he said, with people across the world.

Kyaw Htay’s marks were in France, and he used Google Translate to build relationships. “You’re so beautiful,” he wrote to widows, liberally adding heart emoji.

The online romances soon gave way to talk of investments. In one case this year, Kyaw Htay said he told a widow from southern France that they should, as a couple, invest in a cryptocurrency-backed housing development. She said “yes.”

In a good month, Kyaw Htay said, he scammed as much as 80,000 euros ($83,000) out of victims.

After eight months, Kyaw Htay said he was no longer comfortable defrauding French retirees. The old woman to whom he had sold the idea of crypto-backed real estate wrote of her grief over her husband’s death. Shyly, she professed her love for the stranger. She had handed over her savings for the scheme, around 15,000 euros. She lost it all.

“Her trust in me and her optimism still haunt me,” said Kyaw Htay, who spoke with the Times this past fall after he fled the scam warehouse. “I deeply regret what I did.”

An All-Out Mining Rush

Three months before the military coup, the pine forests around Pangwa in Kachin state, in Myanmar’s north, had 15 rare earth mines. Three months after the putsch, there were five times as many, residents said.

Last year, Myanmar was believed to be the world’s largest exporter of certain heavy rare earths, including dysprosium and terbium, which are used in items such as electric vehicles and wind turbines.

China has monopolised the industry for processing rare earths. Before the coup, Myanmar’s elected government tried to control or ban their export because of concerns over the environmental damage from mining. But after Western governments imposed sanctions on Myanmar’s military, the generals, who have been backed by China, needed a new money source.

The heart of Myanmar’s rare earths mining operations was in the hands of an ethnic Kachin militia tied to the junta. With no environmental or labor safeguards in place, Pangwa, on the border with China, became gripped by high-intensity mining, locals said.

Hundreds of Chinese mine bosses descended, as did Chinese technicians adept at isolating the rare earths from the soil. Residents noted that within a few months, nearly all of Pangwa’s pine forests were uprooted.

In October, the Kachin Independence Army, a member of the rebel alliance aiming to oust the military, captured Pangwa. Anti-junta forces now control the entire China-Kachin boundary, through which rare earths, timber, jade and other treasures are smuggled.

By the end of November, Pangwa residents said, some mining had already resumed. Myanmar rare earths, extracted at great human cost, are again entering the global supply chain to drive the green revolution.