Asia's Golden Triangle Of Crime

Laos, Myanmar, and Thailand have a problem.

Five months ago I wrote Myanmar’s Cyberslaves. The problem is so much broader and deeper than I knew, this report on the Golden Triangle Special Economic Zone lays it all out. A Chinese fellow named Zhao Wei received a 39 square mile concession from the government of Laos to create the GTSEZ, which appears to be the Southeast Asian equivalent of South America’s Tres Fronteras.

A record 169 tons of methamphetamine was seized in Southeast Asia in 2023, 82% of this in the three countries bordering the GTSEZ.

The numbers I can find are all over the board, but a ton of crystal meth would cost around $5 million in the San Diego area where it enters California. That one drug alone is a billion dollar industry for the region. This was surprising, I expected opium and heroin to dominate, but in retrospect fentanyl must have swamped that market.

This is the GTSEZ location in the first map and the second shows junta vs. resistance control in Myanmar. The government is slowly collapsing and GTSEZ has a weapons trafficking aspect. Landlocked Laos is a communist country with strong ties to China.

What happens to an already terrible region in a client state when the parent state collapses? China’s housing market is in much worse shape than the U.S. was in 2008 and China Update has been reporting daily on the creaking and popping coming from their financial sector. I’m not sure what it means, but looks like we’re going to find out sooner rather than later.