The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia

South Vietnam: Heroin Achieves Full Market Potential

The quantum leap in the size and profitability of South Vietnam's narcotics trade, due both to the new and burgeoning GI market as well as the increased demand on the part of the international narcotics syndicates, resulted in a number of new mini-cliques coming into the traffic. (108)

But by 1970 the traffic appeared to be divided among three major factions: (1) elements in the South Vietnamese air force, particularly the air transport wing; (2) the civil bureaucracy (i.e. police, customs and port authority), increasingly under the control of Prime Minister Khiem's family; and (3) the army, navy and National Assembly's lower house, who answer to President Thieu. In spite, or perhaps because, of the enormous amounts of money involved, there was considerable animosity among these three major factions.

"Involvement" in the nation's narcotics traffic took a number of different forms. Usually it meant that influential Vietnamese political and military leaders worked as consultants and protectors for chiu chau Chinese syndicates, which actually managed wholesale distribution, packaging, refining, and some of the smuggling. (Chiu chau are Chinese from the Swatow region of southern China, and chiu chau syndicates have controlled much of Asia's illicit drug traffic since the mid 1800s and have played a role in China's organized crime rather similar to the Sicilian Mafia in Italy and the Corsican syndicates in France. See Chapter 6 for more details.) The importance of this protection, however, should not be underestimated, for without it the heroin traffic could not continue. Also, powerful Vietnamese military and civil officials are directly involved in much of the actual smuggling of narcotics into South Vietnam. The Vietnamese military has access to aircraft, trucks, and ships that the Chinese do not, and most of the Vietnamese elite have a much easier time bringing narcotics through customs and border checkpoints than their Chinese clients.