patrickwinn

To your question about safety: I would rather walk around the most neglected neighborhood in Bangkok at 3 a.m. than do the same in most major American cities. On the tourist trail, there is not an overwhelming risk of random violent crime. Even in Cambodia. (The best way to get yourself killed in Southeast Asia is to rent a motorbike.)

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As for the islands, well, there is a Chinese expression that goes something like "the mountains are high and the emperor is far away." Start heading away from the center of power in Bangkok and up in to the hills and you'll enter a world where provincial political figures can get away with operating their turf as they please and breaking rules. Not to say there isn't plenty of corruption in Bangkok — because, oh, there is — but that far-flung provinces can often run things as they please.

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So you can imagine how this effect is magnified on an actual f-ing island. The authorities there start to feel untouchable. It's far easier to pull off cover ups and to botch investigations on an island. That said, if I had a friend who was prepared to go on holiday on any of those islands you mentioned, I wouldn't necessarily discourage them. These violent incidents are horribly tragic yet still rare.

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Much of my work focuses on documenting the region's meth trade, which is astoundingly huge. Drug lords in this region are whipping up more pink meth pills each year than Starbucks sells cups of coffee worldwide. And yet this trade, for all its volume and complexity, does not seem to whip up the degree of shocking violence that you would see on the U.S.-Mexico border. I'm not saying it's not violent or the cause of great misery. But there just isn't the same level of bloody jostling for turf. I'm not entirely sure why.

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I'd also add that it's tragically undercovered by the Western media. Americans know about Italian mafia or Latin cartels or Russian gangsters — and yet Southeast Asian syndicates are largely ignored by the U.S. media.

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I'll be totally honest. Because Singapore amounts to less than 1 percent of Southeast Asia's population, I don't devote much of my energy chasing stories there. As someone interested in street-level organized crime, it's just not a target-rich environment. If anything, we're talking crimes such as money laundering, which isn't my specialty.

A few similarities that come to mind.

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If you want to operate a successful drug lab, you need territory that is mostly immune to drug raids. You will prefer to set up shop in A) an impermeable mountainous area where B) you will be left alone thanks to an alliance with the state. In Myanmar, as in Mexico, the drug lords pay off state security forces to be left alone — and, in Myanmar at least, sometimes become units attached to the army itself.

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But if you're thinking like a drug lord, you also want C) proximity to loads of people who can afford your drugs. Mexico is adjacent to the world's largest economy — and loads of Americans who want to buy coke and heroin. Myanmar is adjacent to what will soon be the world's largest economy: China. As well as countries such as Thailand, which has seen its economy boom in recent decades.

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This is a vast simplification. But any consortium of drug producers with A, B and C stands a chance of raking in as much income as some Fortune 500 companies.

A few disturbing nights come to mind.

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— Witnessing a kidnapping, to which I alluded in the intro. I had embedded with a Baptist vigilante vice squad, which had decided to fight the meth trade by doing home invasions against anyone they suspected of using meth of heroin. (This crew was based in northern Myanmar in town called Myitkyina.) Basically, they stormed this guy's farmhouse, dragged him out and then interrogated him in this bamboo detention center. They flogged the guy over and over — forcing him to repent for using meth — and then forced his feet into these medieval-looking wooden stocks. Strangely, the vigilantes did all this inside a church's auxiliary building, which doubled as a storage shed — and there was a giant Santa Claus mannequin propped up in the corner the whole time.

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— I touched on this briefly in another comment but there was the night I witnessed a jihadi bombing in Thailand's deep south — an attack that was meant to strike the nearby red-light district. I was down there on a reporting trip and so, when I heard the bomb erupt a few blocks away, I felt compelled to run towards the flames. By the time I arrived, there were quite a few cops and soldiers trying to set up a perimeter. A woman was struck by shrapnel — and I remember seeing detectives cover her body with a sheet and twist gold rings off her fingers. I was incredibly nervous because the militants will often set up secondary bombs to wipe out first responders. The sheer senselessness of this attack — which struck some woman on a motorbike, not even directly targeting security forces — really gnawed at me. It led me to eventually track down a former leader of an insurgent coalition to better understand the jihadis' justification for targeting random women.

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But these are extreme circumstances. They don't reflect the typical encounter with someone tangled up in organized crime. Usually, it's just an extended interview over cups of tea.

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Also, compared to many journalists who were born in the countries I cover — such as Myanmar and the Philippines — I am a total lightweight. For example: there are two young journalists from Myanmar named Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo who uncovered an army massacre for Reuters. They're in prison right now and may be there for years to come. These are the sort of guys I really look up to.

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