Word: opiumeators
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...stake: the Golden Triangle's $800 million opium trade...
...Southeast Asia's Golden Triangle, January is harvest time. It is also a time when members of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration check the skies for signs of bad weather, hoping that nature will spoil the lucrative crop of opium poppies that are the economic mainstay of the mountainous region where the borders of Burma, Thailand and Laos converge. This year the climate has been kind to the poppy growers and bad for the DEA: a bumper crop of 700 tons is expected, 100 tons more than last year. But the U.S. narcs are not very worried. The reason...
Anarchy may be too mild a term for the situation in the 75-sq.-mi. triangle, where bandits, remnants of China's pre-1949 Nationalist army, and more than half a dozen "liberation armies" scramble for their share of the $800 million annual opium haul. Last February Thai armed forces ousted the region's biggest opium smuggler, Khun Sa, and his 3,000-member Shan United Army from their luxurious mountain aerie in the border town of Ban Hin Taek. Khun Sa fled back to Burma, and his departure created a power vacuum that lesser warlords...
...troops from both countries, which are straining diplomatic relations. Last month the warlords began hitting back, machine-gunning and looting a tourist boat in Thailand's northern Chiangrai province. Says a U.S. diplomat in Bangkok: "Our mission in [neighboring] Chiangmai [province] is almost literally under the gun. The opium warlords have so many contacts in Chiangmai that anything is possible...
...family made a 70-day trek through snowcapped mountains and malarial forests into Burma. The Morses eventually returned to work again in Yunnan, a remote region of China where cannibals roamed, Tibetan bandits burned villages, and the chief trade with the outside world was carried on by opium dealers. The nearest hospital was four weeks away by foot...