Deep in the jungle where Myanmar, Laos and Thailand's borders meet lies the Golden Triangle, a trafficking heartland where drug runners and police play a dangerous — and sometimes deadly — game of cat and mouse.
At four o'clock in the morning in a quiet, pitch-black jungle, a patrol of young Thai soldiers looked through night vision goggles and heat detection cameras for any sign of movement.
"The total drugs we seized were 1.8 million pills," Captain Kittidech Gunkloy said as he showed the ABC the backpacks at a Thai defence base later that day. The cooks and crooks are rarely caught, but smugglers from poor backgrounds enter a daily game of cat and mouse with Thai border guards.Around 1,500 officers from Thai Taskforce Pha Muang are responsible for keeping watch over 342 kilometres of porous land borders alongside Myanmar to the west and Laos to the east.
The ABC joined Thai soldiers for a daytime patrol through a mountainous section of the Thailand-Myanmar border. From the water, officers watch out for smugglers using the long winding rivers to move their product out of the Golden Triangle.While the global pandemic disrupted industries far and wide, the drug trade out of the Golden Triangle has not just survived, but thrived.
The thick jungle along the Thailand-Myanmar border has become an attractive route for drug smugglers.
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