2024-09-20 08:07:00
Drugs and a population of ex-cutters: here is «Narcotopia», the reportage by investigative journalist Patrick Winn coming out for Adelphi. With an essay by Roberto Saviano
In the Burmese city of Lashio, lashed by energetic subtropical monsoons and also by a regime whose exploits are well known in the news, there is a small Christian church erected on top of a hill. At its entrance, hanging from two wooden beams, a singular clapper dangles: it is a grenade. Corroded by time, rusty, but still perfectly recognisable, since the foundation of this house of God in 1971, it has performed the function of church bell, bell for visitors, and drum for the village that rose around it.
What image is it, that of a church that has an old grenade as a clapper? It is an image of faith, certainly. Of a faith that is only partly religious, as we will discover. Faith in the rebirth of a people, in their salvation, in their destiny. It is an image of violence, above all doubt. A violence to which the inhabitants of those portions of the globe that straddle China, Burma and Thailand are very accustomed and of which they were often protagonists in the distant (but not too distant) past. It is the image of an exemption from the canon, from the rules to which places of worship are subject. You can bet that any priest would object if one of his faithful proposed using a war relic as a bell. But the man who built that church is not just any priest. He’s not even a priest, if you look closely. And the people he built it for, of the Wa ethnic group like him, also overturned rules and laws like dominoes. Forced by history, sometimes. Hungry for power and money, other times. For local news, especially those Made in the USAthe Wa State – located in two non-contiguous areas, a geopolitical compromise born from uninterrupted turmoil, migration and war – is nothing more than a drug trafficking cartel. Ruthless head cutters. Corrupt hierarchs. Dirty money launderers. Unparalleled wholesalers of opium and heroin, first, and then of methamphetamine. Poisoners of the world. Scoundrels. Scum. But the story is much more complex. The story is Always more complex.
The reasons why the Wa have become in the past decades, and for a long time, the largest exporters of heroin in the world are many. But if the question were answered: thanks to the United States and the CIAhe wouldn’t be wrong. Of course, only part of the truth would be grasped, an element of the painting would be preferred rather than its varied entirety. But it would be a very large element. Since the Cold War, Americans have been going around arming people, proxy soldiers who, according to the intentions of the wealthy client, should kick the communist enemybut in reality they do whatever the hell they want. They escape supposed control. They embrace causes they deem more worthy. They rebel against an agency that regularly – with a frightening regularity, almost as if it never learned from its mistakes – treats them like high mountain idiots, brawling simpletons, illiterate fools. Well, ethics aside, the problem is that with the same frightening regularity, the agency gets the sack. The fool turns out to be much less of a fool than the person who wanted to control him.
This is precisely what happened to the Wa, the Shan, the Exiles, to those who from one day to the next saw automatic rifles raining from the sky, literally: entire boxes dangling in the clouds, tied to American parachutes, and landing in villages and makeshift camps or in a dense forest, on an impervious hill, in the middle of a valley. Hunted, many of them, by Maoist China, refractory to any hypothesis of religious worship, persecuted, chased up to the top of the mountains, inside the thickest jungle, these men and these women, these barefoot and emaciated children, witnessed a rain of rifles. Planes crossed the skies giving them weapons and ammunition. Take and use them all. They are enough for you to send the communists home, with the blessing of our American friend. And precisely with the blessing of the CIA, many of these unfortunates, kicked like deflated balloons from one corner of Burma to another, actually took up those rifles. They have become warlords. Armed traffickers of that opium which, by centuries-old tradition, is the natural product of their mountainous, cold and alkaline lands, lands which, moreover, offer nothing else on which one can make a living. From poppy farmers to vicious heroin cartels in the blink of an eye. It’s the dream that shatters, or rather: it’s a double dreamto be understood not in the Schnitzlerian sense, but precisely as a double dreamlike excursion of two countries asleep on the pillow of utopia. China and the United States awaken together, at the same moment, like two twins so different but so much the same. Having slipped away from his eyes – but only for a moment – the veil of Maya, the Maoist dragon finds himself clumsy and awkward, as well as cruel: how could he have thought of a transfer of faithful from the Church of Our Lord to that of four times as large? On the other side of the world: how could the Americans think that throwing a load of rifles, some medicine, a handful of money at some group of discontented people was enough to retain them for life? Who guaranteed Western strategists that these people, once they took up the weapon, would not turn it against their crude, imprecise and pandering benefactor? Well, if an image can be useful to us to summarize the central theme of this volume, then it will be that of a bomb with the construction signs and the logo of a China sclerotized by communism. But a bomb must be activated to explode. And what is the hand that triggers the device? What passport does the bomber have? The same as those who armed the Taliban and mujahideen in Afghanistan against Russia; the same as those who poured weapons and money into a series of Latin countries, without worrying too much about whether they were government forces, rebels, fascists, drug traffickers or whatever. The script is now a canon; it only changes, from time to time, who stacks the explosive, but the imprint on the primer is invariably the same. As in this story, which however offers a new chromatic range, unprecedented shades, sensational mixtures that in our home, on our armchair, in our streets, project on us reverberations that are anything but faded, however distant the source may appear.
Its focal point is in Banna, on the Chinese side of the border with Burma, in a Christian mission led by the pastor William Marcus Young, nicknamed the “Man-God” by the Wa and Lahu and responsible, in addition to their religious conversion, of the creation of their own alphabet, as the natives do not possess a written language. Jeremiah, Moses, Peter: these are the names of the new born within the mission, to be traced back, according to the pastor, to an ethical life far from alcohol, opium, and the beheadings to which some groups on the highest peaks are subjected adusi. Among the new born, in the year 1944, there is also Saul – named after the first king of Israel, the one who unifies the dispersed tribes – who will later become Saw Lu, a fervent Christian, builder of a church which can be accessed by knocking with a grenade. The events of this book, impressive in content and ambition, unfold through humid and treacherous forests and are populated by characters whose names, on certain occasions, leap up to the local news and still sometimes support the reports of the Goddess, the Drug Enforcement Administration American: Wei Xuegang and Bao Youxiang, politicians, drug traffickers, or both? Khun Sa, general Lee Wen-huan, Zhao Nyi Lai, but also tribal leaders such as the Master of Creation – who according to the militiamen possesses the gift of levitation -, Prince Mahasang, together with his American counterpart – the agents of the Goddess and those of the CIA, the presidents, the diplomatic officials – friend, enemy, conspirator, supporter, traitor, as the case may be, and capable of switching from one role to another with a snap of the fingers. They are forests that do not fail to surprise, because they often transform dwarfs into giants, tribes into armies, unfortunates into misfortunes.
It is a very dangerous forest, the one you will read about, populated by snakes and ferocious beasts, guarded by militias and armed smugglers, dotted with huts in which opium is transformed into heroin, laboratories in which the methamphetamines and where ancient, surviving poppy plantations still stand the test of time and the US War on Drugs. And it makes us smile how the author uses the term “tribe” to describe not the groups that lived within it and which today, in many cases, reside in the cities all around, but rather the agencies of Atlantic origin, whose internal feuds have caused enormous upheavals, considerable embarrassment and, unquestionably, the highest number of victims in that geographical area called the Golden Triangle which, however, often struggles to even obtain electricity.
September 20, 2024 (changed September 20, 2024 | 10:07)
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#story #CIA #Chinese #opium #Corriere.it
Gression of American interests that led to the arming and empowerment of these groups. The duality of their existence, as both victims and perpetrators, encapsulates the complex interplay of power, faith, and survival in a region marred by conflicts and drug trade.
Through this lens, the Wa people’s struggle is laid bare—not merely as a narrative of violence and betrayal but also one of resilience and reinvention. The church served not just as a place of worship but as a symbol of a unique and often contradictory identity rooted in both faith and the harsh realities of existence amidst drugs and war. The story reflects broader geopolitical themes, shining a light on the consequences of foreign intervention and the chaotic aftermath that follows.
In a world dominated by narratives of good versus evil, the tale of the Wa challenges such binaries, urging a closer examination of the socio-political fabric that connects distant lands through shared histories of conflict, survival, and transformation. As we explore the lives of those enmeshed in the drug trade and the broader implications of American foreign policy, we are prompted to reconsider our understanding of morality and agency in these complex landscapes.
Ultimately, “Narcotopia” presents an invitation to delve deeper into the lives shaped by these forces, to recognize the human element that exists within the larger narratives of geopolitics and to remember that beneath the surface of every story lies intricate threads of connection, often woven through pain, hope, and the enduring quest for belonging.