On the border with China, the Wa people have created a narco-state that generates billions from drug trafficking.

Of the more than 135 ethnic groups that populate Myanmar, only the Wa have managed to create their own autonomous region: effectively a state within a state, with its own laws, schools, roads and a permanent army, known by the acronym UWSA, United Wa State Army.
But the Wa is also a narco-state “at the centre of a drug trafficking ring in Southeast Asia that generates sixty billion dollars a year from methamphetamine alone”, a figure that exceeds the GDP of many internationally recognized countries.
Yet the Wa were originally a tribe of peasant warriors who resided in the mountains bordering the Chinese province of Yunnan and were best known for the brutal practice of collecting the heads of their enemies.

This particular evolution of the Wa – from a head-cutting tribe to an international drug cartel – is well documented in the book “Narcotopia”, by the American journalist Patrick Winn, based in Bangkok, Thailand.
A transformation that took place between the 1960s and 1970s thanks to the support of the CIA, which wanted to counter the expansion of Chinese communism. In exchange for the collaboration of drug lords who cultivated opium, the US intelligence agency turned a blind eye to the export of narcotics to Thailand and from there to the rest of the world. Then, in the 1990s, when the CIA decided that the Wa were becoming a threat to national interests, it began to target the same drug lords it had previously protected. “When a superpower attempts to destroy an entire civilization and brand its people as untouchable on the international stage, it is essential to tell the other side of the story,” Winn writes in the first pages of the book.

Soldiers on patrol. In the civil war that began after the military coup in 2021, the Wa were not officially involved. Shutterstock/Skynavin

The author’s intent was achieved through direct interviews conducted in Myanmar and intelligence documents that confirm the Wa leaders’ versions of events. Even today, the Wa, thanks to a militia of about 25-30,000 members, are considered the most powerful ethnic group in all of former Burma.
Yet they have not officially taken part in the civil conflict that began after the military coup in 2021, probably under pressure from China, with which the Wa maintain close ties today. With the advance of resistance forces towards their territories, the Wa have tried to act as mediators, again in an attempt to protect Beijing’s commercial interests in the region. An epilogue that the CIA probably had not imagined.

Patrick Winn, Narcotopia, Icon Book Ltd, London 2024.  (Open Photo: Purple opium poppy field (Papaver somniferum) in Myanmar. Shutterstock/Delpixel)

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