Word: burma
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...officials convinced the Carter Administration that such preemptive buying would be futile, since Khun Sa could still flood the market with opium. Officials now estimate that about 600 tons of opium is harvested each year in the area, most of it in the vast poppy fields of northern Burma. Of this, at least 125 tons is lashed to mountain ponies and carried to the Thai-Burmese border, where it is refined into 90% pure heroin. The 12% tons of heroin thus produced provides about twice the world's demand...
...grenades, recoilless rifles and rocket launchers, the men clambered aboard trucks and rode all night through the newly harvested rice fields of central Thailand. Finally the trucks began to growl up the narrow roads that climb to the Golden Triangle, the opium-rich territory where the borders of Thailand, Burma and Laos converge...
...house-to-house battle for the town late last month lasted three days. Only with the support of OV-10C aircraft, which strafed the dense surrounding jungle, were the government forces able to defeat the opium mercenaries, who fled across the border into Burma. At least 51 mercenaries and 16 Thais were killed in the fighting. When the Thai soldiers picked their way through the rubble afterward, they were amazed to find that Ban Hin Taek in no way resembled a jungle village. It was a modern town with tennis courts, a soccer field and shops stocked with electric guitars...
Khun Sa, who at 50 is regarded as the undisputed "king of the Golden Triangle," proved as elusive as ever. Born in Burma to Chinese parents, he turned to soldiering at an early age and adroitly manipulated a princely marriage for his mother and connections with the Burmese government to set himself up in the drug trade. Since 1964, he has successfully challenged the opium operations of several now aging Nationalist Chinese generals, who with their armies sought sanctuary in the triangle in 1950 and developed the lucrative drug trade...
...long as Khun Sa did not threaten Thailand's national security, Bangkok refrained from direct attacks on him. But last year he made a deal with Burma's Communist Party to provide its cadres with rice in return for opium. The Communists soon became a major supplier. Khun Sa's army in turn acted as a conduit that enabled Communists to establish a toehold near the Thai border...