Asia’s infamous Golden Triangle and the drug dealers who ruled its narcotics trade laid bare in HBO’s Traffickers

“The Mekong massacre,” says journalist Jeff Howe, “was one of the largest killings of Chinese nationals outside China since World War II.”

And it was this slaying of 13 sailors aboard two cargo vessels on the morning of October 5, 2011, that reawakened the world to a notoriously criminal region, the Golden Triangle, and brought into public view Myanmar’s elusive freshwater pirate, Naw Kham.

Referred to as “a narco-state”, the area covers roughly 950,000 sq km (370,000 square miles) that incorporates the confluence of the Mekong and Ruak rivers and extends into Thailand, Myanmar and Laos. The territory remains the ultimate “traffickers’ paradise”. It has always been a hot spot for drug smuggling, and Howe is a key contributor to HBO Asia’s latest true-crime documentary series, Traffickers: Inside the Golden Triangle. His insights are aired along with those of former special agents, police commanders, aides to drug barons, fellow reporters and unlikely defenders of some savage public enemies since apprehended.

Today, the “deadly tentacles”, as the series puts it, reach further than ever, assuring the Golden Triangle remains “unquestionably the epicentre of illicit drug production”, enjoying additional benefits from a com­bination of pandemic and politics. Whatever hazy images its name might still evoke, this is no hippy dreamland as it was mythologised in the 1960s, but, according to Howe, “the craziest, most lawless, most scary-ass place you could ever travel to”.

Yet travel to it director Steve Chao and executive producer Dean Johnson did, at various times, with their crew, to tell the stories of three of the most heinous traffickers the region has known. Chao, also an investigative journalist, who has worked in assorted conflict zones, is only half-joking when he says, during a video call from the Malaysian capital Kuala Lumpur, “It’s comforting to know that your [executive producer] has a commando background and if you get into trouble he’ll be parachuting in to take down everybody and rescue you. It gives us confidence to know we can get in and out of places because of the training that Johno has.”

Although the expertise Johnson gained as a British Royal Marine was not called upon this time, he reveals that the team had “pretty good risk-security assessment and did operate in a militaristic kind of way when needed”.