Laos

CAPE TOWN, South Africa — Five men deported by the United States to Eswatini in July have been held in a maximum-security prison in the African nation for seven weeks without charge or explanation and with no access to legal counsel, their lawyers said Tuesday.

They accused the Trump administration’s third-country deportation program of denying their clients due process.

The New York-based Legal Aid Society said that it was representing one of the men, Jamaican national Orville Etoria, and that he had been “inexplicably and illegally” sent to Eswatini when his home country was willing to accept him back.

That contradicted the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, which said when it deported the five men with criminal records that they were being sent to Eswatini because their home countries refused to take them. Jamaica’s foreign minister has also said that the Caribbean country didn’t refuse to take back deportees.

Etoria was the first of at least 20 deportees sent by the U.S. to various African nations in the last two months to be identified publicly.

Expanding deportation program

The deportations are part of the Trump administration’s expanding third-country program to send migrants to countries in Africa that they have no ties with to get them off U.S. soil.

Since July, the U.S. has deported migrants to South Sudan, Eswatini and Rwanda, while a fourth African nation, Uganda, says it has agreed to a deal in principle with the U.S. to accept deportees.

Washington has said it wants to deport Kilmar Abrego Garcia, whose case has been a flashpoint over President Trump’s hard-line immigration policies, to Uganda after he was wrongly deported to his native El Salvador in March.

Etoria served a 25-year prison sentence and was granted parole in 2021, the Legal Aid Society said, but was now being held in Eswatini’s main maximum-security prison for an undetermined period of time despite completing that sentence.

The U.S. Homeland Security Department said that he was convicted of murder. The agency posted on X in reference to a New York Times report on Etoria, saying that it “will continue enforcing the law at full speed — without apology.”

It didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment from the Associated Press.

The Legal Aid Society said that an Eswatini lawyer acting on behalf of all five men being held in prison there has been repeatedly denied access to them by prison officials since they arrived in the tiny southern African nation bordering South Africa in mid-July.

The other four men are citizens of Cuba, Laos, Vietnam and Yemen.

‘Indefinite detention’

A separate lawyer representing the two men from Laos and Vietnam said that his clients also served their criminal sentences in the U.S. and had “been released into the community.”

“Then, without warning and explanation from either the U.S. or Eswatini governments, they were arbitrarily arrested and sent to a country to which they have never ever been,” the lawyer, Tin Thanh Nguyen, said in a statement. “They are now being punished indefinitely for a sentence they already served.”

He said that the U.S. government was “orchestrating secretive third-country transfers with no meaningful legal process, resulting in indefinite detention.”

U.S. Homeland Security said those two men had been convicted of charges including child rape and second-degree murder.

A third lawyer, Alma David, said that she represented the two men from Yemen and Cuba who are also being held in the same prison and denied access to lawyers. She said she had been told by the head of the Eswatini prison that only the U.S. Embassy could grant access to the men.

“Since when does the U.S. Embassy have jurisdiction over Eswatini’s national prisons?” she said in a statement, adding the men weren’t told a reason for their detention, and “no lawyer has been permitted to visit them.” David said all five were being held at U.S. taxpayers’ expense.

Secretive deals

The deportation deals the U.S. has struck in Africa have been secretive, and with countries with questionable rights records.

Authorities in South Sudan have given little information on where eight men sent there in early July are being held or what their fate might be. They were also described by U.S. authorities as dangerous criminals from South Sudan, Cuba, Laos, Mexico, Myanmar and Vietnam.

The five men in Eswatini are being held at the Matsapha Correctional Complex. It’s the same prison where Eswatini, which is ruled by a king as Africa’s last absolute monarchy, has imprisoned pro-democracy campaigners amid reports of abuse that includes beatings and the denial of food to inmates.

Eswatini authorities said when the five men arrived that they were being held in solitary confinement.

Another seven migrants were deported by the U.S. to Rwanda in mid-August, Rwandan authorities said. They didn’t say where they are being held or give any information on their identities.

The deportations to Rwanda were kept secret at the time and only announced last week.

Imray writes for the Associated Press.

Bangkok, Thailand – A surge in rare earth mining in rebel-held pockets of Myanmar supplying Chinese processing plants is being blamed for toxic levels of heavy metals in Thai waterways, including the Mekong River.

China dominates the global refining of rare earth metals – key inputs in everything from wind turbines to advanced missile systems – but imports much of its raw material from neighbouring Myanmar, where the mines have been blamed for poisoning local communities.

Recent satellite images and water sample testing suggest the mines are spreading, along with the environmental damage they cause.

“Since the mining operation started, there is no protection for the local people,” Sai Hor Hseng, a spokesman at the Shan Human Rights Foundation, a local advocacy group based in eastern Myanmar’s Shan state, told Al Jazeera.

“They don’t care what happens to the environment,” he said, or those living downstream of the mines in Thailand.

An estimated 1,500 people rallied in northern Thailand’s Chiang Rai province in June, urging the Thai government and China to pressure the mining operators in Myanmar to stop polluting their rivers.

Villagers in Chiang Rai first noticed an odd orange-yellow tint to the Kok River – a tributary of the Mekong that enters Thailand from Myanmar – before the start of this year’s rainy season in May.

Repeated rounds of testing by Thai authorities since then have found levels of arsenic and lead in the river several times higher than what the World Health Organization (WHO) deems safe.

Thai authorities advised locals living along the Kok to not even touch the water, while tests have also found excess arsenic levels in the Sai River, another tributary of the Mekong that flows from Myanmar into Thailand, as well as in the Mekong’s mainstream.

Locals are now worried about the harm that contaminated water could do to their crops, their livestock and themselves.

Arsenic is infamously toxic.

Medical studies have linked long-term human exposure to high levels of the chemical to neurological disorders, organ failure and cancer.

“This needs to be solved right now; it cannot wait until the next generation, for the babies to be deformed or whatever,” Pianporn Deetes, Southeast Asia campaign director at the advocacy group International Rivers, told Al Jazeera.

“People are concerned also about the irrigation, because … [they are] now using the rivers – the water from the Kok River and the Sai River – for their rice paddies, and it’s an important crop for the population here,” Pianporn said.

“We learned from other areas already … that this kind of activity should not happen in the upstream of the water source of a million people,” she said.

‘A very good correlation’

Thai authorities blame upstream mining in Myanmar for the toxic rivers, but they have been vague about the exact source or sources.

Rights groups and environmental activists say the mine sites are nestled in pockets of Shan state under the control of the United Wa State Army (UWSA), a well-armed, secretive rebel group that runs two semi-autonomous enclaves in the area, one bordering China and the other Thailand.

That makes the sites hard to access. Not even Myanmar’s military regime dares to send troops into UWSA-held territory.

While some have blamed the recent river pollution on the UWSA’s gold mines, the latest tests in Thailand lay most of the fault on the mining of rare earth minerals.

In a study commissioned by the Thai government, Tanapon Phenrat, an associate professor of civil engineering at Naresuan University, took seven water samples from the Kok and surrounding rivers in early June.

Tanapon told Al Jazeera that the samples collected closest to the border with Myanmar showed the highest levels of heavy metals and confirmed that the source of the contamination lay upstream of Thailand in Shan state.

Significantly, Tanapon said, the water samples contained the same “fingerprint” of heavy metals, and in roughly the same concentrations, as had earlier water samples from Myanmar’s Kachin State, north of Shan, where rare earth mining has been thriving for the past decade.

“We compared that with the concentrations we found in the Kok River, and we found that it has a very good correlation,” Tanapon said.

“Concentrations in the Kok River can be attributed about 60 to 70 percent … [to] rare earth mining,” he added.

The presence of rare earth mines along the Kok River in Myanmar was first exposed by the Shan Human Rights Foundation in May.

Satellite images available on Google Earth showed two new mine sites inside the UWSA’s enclave on the Thai border developed over the past one to two years – one on the western slope of the river, another on the east.

The foundation also used satellite images to identify what it said are another 26 rare earth mines inside the UWSA’s enclave next to China.

All but three of those mines were built over the past few years, and many are located at the headwaters of the Loei River, yet another tributary of the Mekong.

Researchers who have studied Myanmar’s rare earth mining industry say the large, round mineral collection pools visible in the satellite images give the sites away as rare earth mines.

The Shan Human Rights Foundation says villagers living near the new mines in Shan state have also told how workers there are scooping up a pasty white powder from the collection pools, just as they have seen in online videos of the rare earth mines further north in Kachin.

‘Zero environmental monitoring’

Patrick Meehan, a lecturer at the University of Manchester in the UK who has studied Myanmar’s rare earth mines, said reports emerging from Shan state fit with what he knows of similar operations in Kachin.

“The way companies tend to operate in Myanmar is that there is zero pre-mining environmental assessment, zero environmental monitoring, and there are none of those sorts of regulations or protections in place,” Meehan said.

The leaching process being used involves pumping chemicals into the hillsides to draw the rare earth metals out of the rock. That watery mixture of chemicals and minerals is then pumped out of the ground and into the collection pools, where the rare earths are then separated and gathered up.

Without careful attention to keeping everything contained at a mine, said Meehan, the risks of contaminating local rivers and groundwater could be high.

Rare earth mines are situated close to rivers because of the large volumes of water needed for pumping the extractive chemicals into the hills, he said.

The contaminated water is then often pumped back into the river, he added, while the groundwater polluted by the leaching can end up in the river as well.

“There is definitely scope for that,” said Meehan.

He and others have tracked the effect such mines have already had in Kachin – where hundreds of mining sites now dot the state’s border with China – from once-teeming streams now barren of fish to rice stalks yielding fewer grains and livestock falling ill and dying after drinking from local creeks.

In a 2024 report, the environmental group Global Witness called the fallout from Kachin’s mining boom “devastating”.

Ben Hardman, Mekong legal director for the US advocacy group EarthRights International, said locals in Kachin have also told his team about mineworkers dying in unusually high numbers.

The worry now, he adds, is that Shan state and the neighbouring countries into which Myanmar’s rivers flow will suffer the same fate as has Kachin, especially if the mine sites continue to multiply as global demand for rare earth minerals grows.

“There’s a long history of rare earth mining causing serious environmental harms that are very long-term, and with pretty egregious health implications for communities,” Hardman said.

“That was the case in China in the 2010s, and is the case in Kachin now. And it’s the same situation now evolving in Shan state, and so we can expect to see the same harms,” he added.

‘You need to stop it at the source’

Most, if not all, of the rare earths mined in Myanmar are sent to China to be refined, processed, and either exported or put to use in a range of green-energy and, increasingly, military hardware.

But, unlike China, neither Myanmar, Laos nor Thailand have the sophisticated processing plants that can transform raw ore into valuable material, according to SFA (Oxford), a critical minerals and metals consulting firm.

The Institute for Strategy and Policy-Myanmar, a local think tank, says Chinese customs data also show that Myanmar has been China’s main source of rare earths from abroad since at least 2017, including a record $1.4bn-worth in 2023.

Myanmar’s exports of rare earth minerals were growing at the same time as China was placing tough new curbs on mining them at home, after witnessing the environmental damage it was doing to its own communities. Buying the minerals from Myanmar has allowed China to outsource much of the problem.

That is why many are blaming not only the mine operators and the UWSA for the environmental fallout from Myanmar’s mines, but China.

The UWSA could not be reached for comment, and neither China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs nor its embassy in Myanmar replied to Al Jazeera’s emails seeking a response.

In a June 8 Facebook post, reacting to reports of Chinese-run mines in Myanmar allegedly polluting Thai rivers, the Chinese embassy in Thailand said all Chinese companies operating abroad had to follow local laws and regulations.

The embassy also said China was open to cooperating with Mekong River countries to protect the local environment, but gave no details on what that might entail.

Thailand has said it is working with both China and Myanmar to solve the problem.

In a bid to tackle the problem, though, the Thai government has proposed building dams along the affected rivers in Chiang Rai province to filter their waters for pollutants.

Local politicians and environmentalists question whether such dams would work.

International Rivers’ Pianporn Deetes said there was no known precedent of dams working in such a manner in rivers on the scale of the Mekong and its tributaries.

“If it’s [a] limited area, a small creek or in a faraway standalone mining area, it could work. It’s not going to work with this international river,” she said.

Naresuan University’s Tanapon said he was building computer models to study whether a series of cascading weirs – small, dam-like barriers that are built across a river to control water flow – could help.

But he, too, said such efforts would only mitigate the problem at best.

Dams and weirs, Tanapon said, “can just slow down or reduce the impact”.

“You need to stop it at the source,” he added.

WASHINGTON — President Trump’s tariff onslaught this week left a lot of losers — from small, poor countries such as Laos and Algeria to wealthy U.S. trading partners such as Canada and Switzerland. They’re now facing especially hefty export taxes — tariffs — on the products they export to the U.S. starting Thursday.

The closest thing to winners may be the countries that succumbed to Trump’s demands — and avoided even more pain. But it’s unclear whether anyone will be able to claim victory in the long run — even the United States, the intended beneficiary of Trump’s protectionist policies.

“In many respects, everybody’s a loser here,’’ said Barry Appleton, co-director of the Center for International Law at the New York Law School.

Barely six months after he returned to the White House, Trump has demolished the old global economic order. Gone is one built on agreed-upon rules. In its place is a system in which Trump himself sets the rules, using America’s enormous economic power to punish countries that won’t agree to one-sided trade deals and extracting huge concessions from the ones that do.

“The biggest winner is Trump,” said Alan Wolff, a former U.S. trade official and deputy director-general at the World Trade Organization. “He bet that he could get other countries to the table on the basis of threats, and he succeeded — dramatically.’’

Everything goes back to what Trump calls “Liberation Day’’ — April 2 — when the president announced “reciprocal’’ taxes of up to 50% on imports from countries with which the United States ran trade deficits and 10% “baseline’’ taxes on almost everyone else.

He invoked a 1977 law to declare the trade deficit a national emergency that justified his sweeping import taxes. That allowed him to bypass Congress, which traditionally has had authority over taxes, including tariffs — all of which is now being challenged in court.

‘Winners’ still paying higher tariffs

Trump retreated temporarily after April announcement triggered a rout in financial markets and suspended the reciprocal tariffs for 90 days to give countries a chance to negotiate.

Eventually some of them did, acceding to Trump’s demands to pay what four months ago would have seemed unthinkably high tariffs to maintain their ability to sell to the vast American market.

The United Kingdom agreed to 10% tariffs on its exports to the United States — up from 1.3% before Trump amped up his trade war with the world. The U.S. demanded concessions even though it had run a trade surplus, not a deficit, with the U.K. for 19 straight years.

The European Union and Japan accepted U.S. tariffs of 15%. Those are much higher than the low-single-digit rates they paid last year, but lower than the tariffs he was threatening — 30% on the EU and 25% on Japan.

Also cutting deals with Trump and agreeing to hefty tariffs were Pakistan, South Korea, Vietnam, Indonesia and the Philippines.

Even countries that saw their tariffs lowered from April without reaching a deal are still paying much higher tariffs than before Trump took office. Angola’s tariff, for instance, dropped to 15% from 32% in April, but in 2022 it was less than 1.5%.

And while the Trump administration cut Taiwan’s tariff to 20% from 32% in April, the pain will still be felt by a U.S. ally that China claims as its territory.

“Twenty percent from the beginning has not been our goal. We hope that in further negotiations we will get a more beneficial and more reasonable tax rate,” Taiwan’s President Lai Ching-te told reporters in Taipei on Friday.

Trump also agreed to reduce the tariff on the tiny southern African kingdom of Lesotho to 15% from the 50% he’d announced in April, but the damage may already have been done there.

Brazil, Canada, Switzerland

Countries that didn’t knuckle under — and those that found other ways to incur Trump’s wrath — got hit harder.

Even some of the poor were not spared. Laos’ annual economic output comes to $2,100 per person and Algeria’s $5,600 — versus America’s $75,000. Nonetheless, Laos got rocked with a 40% tariff and Algeria with a 30% levy.

Trump slammed Brazil with a 50% import tax largely because he didn’t like the way it was treating former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, a close Trump ally who is facing trial for trying to overturn his electoral loss and inspiring a riot in the capital in 2023 — recalling Trump’s role in the Jan. 6. insurrection two years earlier at the U.S. Capitol.

Never mind that the U.S. has exported more to Brazil than it’s imported every year since 2007.

Trump’s decision to plaster a 35% tariff on long-standing U.S. ally Canada was partly designed to threaten Ottawa for saying it would recognize a Palestinian state in light of the humanitarian crisis in the Gaza Strip. Trump is a staunch supporter of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Switzerland was clobbered with a 39% import tax — even higher than the 31% Trump announced on April 2.

“The Swiss probably wish that they had camped in Washington’’ to make a deal, said Wolff, now a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics. “They’re clearly not at all happy.’’

Fortunes may change if Trump’s tariffs are upended in court. Five American businesses and 12 states are suing the president, arguing that his April 2 tariffs exceeded his authority under the 1977 law.

In May, the U.S. Court of International Trade, a specialized court in New York, agreed and blocked the tariffs, although the government was allowed to continue collecting them while its appeal wends its way through the legal system, and may end up at the Supreme Court. In a hearing Thursday, the judges on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit sounded skeptical about Trump’s justifications for the tariffs.

“If [the tariffs] get struck down, then maybe Brazil’s a winner and not a loser,’’ Appleton said.

$2,400 bill for U.S. households

Trump portrays his tariffs as a tax on foreign countries. But they are actually paid by import companies in the U.S. who typically pass along the cost to their customers via higher prices. True, tariffs can hurt other countries by forcing their exporters to cut prices and sacrifice profits — or risk losing market share in the United States.

But economists at Goldman Sachs estimate that overseas exporters have absorbed just one-fifth of the rising costs from tariffs, while Americans and U.S. businesses have picked up the most of the tab.

Walmart, Procter & Gamble, Ford, Best Buy, Adidas, Nike, Mattel and Stanley Black & Decker have all raised prices due to U.S. tariffs.

“This is a consumption tax, so it disproportionately affects those who have lower incomes,” Appleton said. “Sneakers, knapsacks … your appliances are going to go up. Your TV and electronics are going to go up. Your video game devices, consoles are going to up because none of those are made in America.’’

Trump’s trade war has pushed the average U.S. tariff from 2.5% at the start of 2025 to 18.3% now, the highest since 1934, according to the Budget Lab at Yale University. And that will impose a $2,400 cost on the average household, the lab estimates.

“The U.S. consumer’s a big loser,″ Wolff said.

Wiseman writes for the Associated Press. AP writer Christopher Rugaber contributed to this report.

Houayxay, Laos – Fishing went well today for Khon, a Laotian fisherman, who lives in a floating house built from plastic drums, scrap metal and wood on the Mekong River.

“I caught two catfish,” the 52-year-old tells Al Jazeera proudly, lifting his catch for inspection.

Khon’s simple houseboat contains all he needs to live on this mighty river: A few metal pots, a fire to cook food on and to keep warm by at night, as well as some nets and a few clothes.

What Khon does not always have is fish.

“There are days when I catch nothing. It’s frustrating,” he said.

“The water levels change all the time because of the dams. And now they say the river is polluted, too. Up there in Myanmar, they dig in the mountains. Mines, or something like that. And all that toxic stuff ends up here,” he adds.

Khon lives in Laos’s northwestern Bokeo province on one of the most scenic stretches of the Mekong River as it meanders through the heart of the Golden Triangle – the borderland shared by Laos, Thailand and Myanmar.

This remote region has long been infamous for drug production and trafficking.

Now it is caught up in the global scramble for gold and rare earth minerals, crucial for the production of new technologies and used in everything from smartphones to electric cars.

Over the past year, rivers in this region, such as the Ruak, Sai and Kok – all tributaries of the Mekong – have shown abnormal levels of arsenic, lead, nickel and manganese, according to Thailand’s Pollution Control Department.

Arsenic, in particular, has exceeded World Health Organization safety limits, prompting health warnings for riverside communities.

These tributaries feed directly into the Mekong and contamination has spread to parts of the river’s mainstream. The effects have been observed in Laos, prompting the Mekong River Commission to declare the situation “moderately serious”.

“Recent official water quality testing clearly indicates that the Mekong River on the Thai-Lao border is contaminated with arsenic,” Pianporn Deetes, Southeast Asia campaigns director for the advocacy group International Rivers, told Al Jazeera.

“This is alarming and just the first chapter of the crisis, if the mining continues,” Pianporn said.

“Fishermen have recently caught diseased, young catfish. This is a matter of regional public health, and it needs urgent action from governments,” she added.

The source of the heavy metals contamination is believed to be upriver in Myanmar’s Shan State, where dozens of unregulated mines have sprung up as the search for rare earth minerals intensifies globally.

Zachary Abuza, a professor at the National War College in Washington and an expert on Southeast Asia, said at least a dozen, and possibly as many as 20, mines focused on gold and rare earth extraction have been established in southern Shan State over the past year alone.

Myanmar is now four years into a civil war and lawlessness reigns in the border area, which is held by two powerful ethnic armed groups: the Restoration Council of Shan State (RCSS) and the United Wa State Army (UWSA).

Myanmar’s military government has “no real control”, Abuza said, apart from holding Tachileik town, the region’s main border crossing between Thailand and Myanmar.

Neither the RCSS nor the UWSA are “fighting the junta”, he said, explaining how both are busy enriching themselves from the chaos in the region and the rush to open mines.

“In this vacuum, mining has exploded – likely with Chinese traders involved. The military in Naypyidaw can’t issue permits or enforce environmental rules, but they still take their share of the profits,” Abuza said.

‘Alarming decline’

Pollution from mining is not the Mekong River’s only ailment.

For years, the health of the river has been degraded by a growing chain of hydropower dams that have drastically altered its natural rhythm and ecology.

In the Mekong’s upper reaches, inside China, almost a dozen huge hydropower dams have been built, including the Xiaowan and Nuozhadu dams, which are said to be capable of holding back a huge amount of the river’s flow.

Further downstream, Laos has staked its economic future on hydropower.

According to the Mekong Dam Monitor, which is hosted by the Stimson Centre think tank in Washington, DC, at least 75 dams are now operational on the Mekong’s tributaries, and two in Laos – Xayaburi and Don Sahong – are directly on the mainstream river.

As a rule, hydropower is a cleaner alternative to coal.

But the rush to dam the Mekong is driving another type of environmental crisis.

According to WWF and the Mekong River Commission, the Mekong River basin once supported about 60 million people and provided up to 25 percent of the world’s freshwater fish catch.

Today, one in five fish species in the Mekong is at risk of extinction, and the river’s sediment and nutrient flows have been severely reduced, as documented in a 2023–2024 Mekong Dam Monitor report and research by International Rivers.

“The alarming decline in fish populations in the Mekong is an urgent wake-up call for action to save these extraordinary – and extraordinarily important – species, which underpin not only the region’s societies and economies but also the health of the Mekong’s freshwater ecosystems,” the WWF’s Asia Pacific Regional Director Lan Mercado said at the launch of a 2024 report titled The Mekong’s Forgotten Fishes.

In Houayxay, the capital of Bokeo province, the markets appeared mostly absent of fish during a recent visit.

At Kad Wang View, the town’s main market, the fish stalls were nearly deserted.

“Maybe this afternoon, or maybe tomorrow,” said Mali, a vendor in her 60s. In front of her, Mali had arranged her small stock of fish in a circle, perhaps hoping to make the display look fuller for potential customers.

At another market, Sydonemy, just outside Houayxay town, the story was the same. The fish stalls were bare.

“Sometimes the fish come, sometimes they don’t. We just wait,” another vendor said.

“There used to be giant fish here,” recalled Vilasai, 53, who comes from a fishing family but now works as a taxi driver.

“Now the river gives us little. Even the water for irrigation – people are scared to use it. No one knows if it’s still clean,” he told Al Jazeera, referring to the pollution from Myanmar’s mines.

‘The river used to be predictable’

Ian G Baird, professor of geography and Southeast Asian studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, said upstream dams – especially those in China – have had serious downstream effects in northern Thailand and Laos.

“The ecosystem and the lives that depend on the river evolved to adapt to specific hydrological conditions,” Baird told Al Jazeera.

“But since the dams were built, those conditions have changed dramatically. There are now rapid water level fluctuations in the dry season, which used to be rare, and this has negative impacts on both the river and the people,” he said.

Another major effect is the reversal of the river’s natural cycle.

“Now there is more water in the dry season and less during the rainy season. That reduces flooding and the beneficial ecological effects of the annual flood pulse,” Baird explained.

“The dams hold water during the rainy season and release it in the dry season to maximise energy output and profits. But that also kills seasonally flooded forests and disrupts the river’s ecological function,” he said.

Bun Chan, 45, lives with his wife Nanna Kuhd, 40, on a floating house near Houayxay. He fishes while his wife sells whatever he catches at the local market.

On a recent morning, he cast his net again and again – but for nothing.

“Looks like I won’t catch anything today,” Bun Chan told Al Jazeera as he pulled up his empty net.

“The other day I caught a few, but we didn’t sell them. We’re keeping them in cages in the water, so at least we have something to eat if I don’t catch more,” he said.

Hom Phan has been a fisherman on the Mekong his entire life.

He steers his wooden boat across the river, following a route he knows by instinct. In some parts of the river, the current is strong enough now to drag everything under, the 67-year-old says.

All around him, the silence is broken only by the chug of his small outboard engine and the calls of distant birds.

“The river used to be predictable. Now we don’t know when it will rise or fall,” Hom Phan said.

“Fish can’t find their spawning grounds. They’re disappearing. And we might too, if nothing changes,” he told Al Jazeera.

Evening approaches in Houayxay, and Khon, the fisherman, rolls up his nets and prepares dinner in his floating home.

As he waits for the fire to catch to cook a meal, he quietly contemplates the great river he lives on.

Despite the dams in China, the pollution from mines in neighbouring Myanmar, and the increasing difficulty in landing the catch he relies on to survive, Khon was outwardly serene as he considered his next day of fishing.

With his eyes fixed on the waters that flowed deeply beneath his home, he said with a smile: “We try again tomorrow.”

Bethany Clarke, 27, and her best friend Simone White, 28, met in Laos, Southeast Asia, for the trip of a lifetime, but after consuming vodka shots that are thought to have been tainted with methanol, it ended in tragedy

It was meant to be a fun-packed couple of weeks travelling through Southeast Asia for Bethany Clarke and her best friend Simone White. Enjoying free shots of vodka at their hostel, the pair couldn’t wait to find out what their adventure would bring.

Sadly, it ended in tragedy after the pair were poisoned by what they believe was methanol.

Bethany, who was 27 at the time and lived in Brisbane, Australia, and Simone, who had turned 28 just a week before the trip and lived in London, Greenwich, met in Laos as a halfway point for a holiday together. They had been best friends since the first year of primary school, and after amending their plans to include two Southeast Asia countries, they were excited to explore Laos before heading to Cambodia.

During the first few days of their trip in November 2024, they spent time in Vang Vieng, a small town on the Nam Song River in Laos, which had once been a notorious party destination for backpackers. In between activities, like tubing down the river, they stayed two nights at the Nana Backpackers Hostel after being impressed by its numerous “positive reviews”.

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At the hostel, they met one of their friends from home who had also been travelling, and on their second night, the three friends took advantage of the hostel’s happy hour, offering free vodka and whiskey shots from 8pm to 10pm. That night, Bethany and Simone drank vodka with a mixer, like Sprite, but Bethany recalled it tasting “quite weak”.

“I remember thinking ‘that’s unusually weak’, but I didn’t think anything of it. I just thought it’s happy hour, the chances are they’re wanting to cut costs, so they’re probably putting water in it,” Bethany exclusively told the Mirror. “I hadn’t heard about methanol poisoning and about how organised crime rings would add methanol in, to cut costs.”

Looking back, Bethany recalled that the whiskey was “black” and that her friend didn’t like it, but again, didn’t think much of it. When the happy hour ended, Bethany went to bed feeling tired, while Simone and their friend went across the road to an Irish bar for some more drinks.

“I just remember thinking I’m unusually tired, and I do get tired after drinking, but that was quite extreme. I don’t know whether it was the methanol already kicking in, or whether it was jet lag. Looking back, it was probably the methanol”.

She explained that being asleep could have “masked” some of her symptoms. According to the UK Health Security Agency, the substance can cause “convulsions, blindness, nervous system damage, coma and death.”

The next morning, Bethany said she felt “weak and not very well coordinated”. She added: “My brain wasn’t really able to problem-solve or think very clearly. I had no hunger whatsoever, which, again, is quite unusual if you’re hungover, but I just had no interest in food at all.”

Putting it down to being hungover, Bethany and Simone “forced themselves to eat something” and went out for their booked tour to the Blue Lagoon in the morning, before a kayaking experience in the afternoon. However, during the day out, Bethany said that they didn’t have “any sensible conversation” but instead were just talking about how they were feeling, “it was like having the brain of a five-year-old, it was really, really strange.” She also recalled Simone being sick off the kayak, which she said was “unusual”.

Later that day, they caught a bus to their next destination in Vientiane, but halfway through, Simone was sick and Bethany fainted and hit her head. “We didn’t have any conversations with anyone around us, and nobody seemed concerned,” Bethany said.

Showing no signs of improvement, they went to a public hospital after being dropped off by the bus. Still unaware of the severity of the situation, Simone and Bethany were checked over and were told that it could be “food poisoning”.

“We had different diets, so that didn’t make sense,” Bethany shared. “They put an IV in me, which I reluctantly agreed to, and eventually Simone came into the room, still walking and talking. I gave her some electrolytes once she got a bed, but she threw them up immediately.

“I checked her heart rate, and it wasn’t bad. And given that she had eaten something, I wasn’t too worried – at that point she had eaten more than me, so I thought maybe I was worse as I had fainted. We also thought that, as she had chosen to come in this last minute, she was presumably feeling a little bit better, but turns out the opposite was true.”

She continued: “Less than two hours later, she went into respiratory distress and was gasping for air. Simone wasn’t able to talk anymore or look at me, her eyes were glazed, looking in a different direction.” Simone was moved to the ICU part of the hospital before their friend suggested going to a private hospital for further care.

They arrived at the private Kasemrad International Hospital in Vientiane, around 27 hours after they consumed their drinks at the hostel. Tragically, Simone’s condition deteriorated, and she needed emergency brain surgery before being placed on life support.

Simone’s mum flew in from Kent to be with her daughter, and was given the heartbreaking ultimatum on whether to keep her on life support. Bethany said that doctors had to explain to Sue how to switch off her daughter’s life support, and she was told she’d have to do it herself, due to religious reasons.

Sue made the heart-wrenching decision to take the tube out of her daughter’s mouth and turn off her life support. The 28-year-old died on 21 November 2024, just nine days after drinking the shots at Nana Backpackers Hostel in Vang Vieng.

An inquest into her death earlier this year confirmed that Simone tragically died from a bleed on the brain. Simone is one of six tourists to have died from suspected methanol poisoning in Laos.

The hostel closed, but now appears to be rebranded as Vang Vieng Central Backpacker Hostel. According to Tripadvisor, it is planning to reopen and is taking bookings from August this year.

Bethany recovered, but has been left with the devastating heartache of losing her best friend. Now, she has launched the Simone White Methanol Awareness campaign to help raise awareness and prevent this from happening to anyone ever again.

She has called for the government to do more to help travellers understand the dangers of drinking alcohol abroad, including putting up warning posters in airports. In addition, Bethany set up a petition for the dangers of methanol poisoning to be taught in schools across the UK.

Bethany shared with us: “Since the poisoning, I’ve found out more information about Vang Vieng in general, because it does seem to have a history of very loose safety regulations. There were no documented cases of methanol poisoning in Laos when we were there, so how were we meant to know? It’s frustrating that these cases go undocumented because no one really understands the true extent of what’s actually going on.”

Worryingly, Bethany claims that “so many” of the hostel’s reviews had been deleted, which she found out just days after the alleged poisoning happened. She claimed: “On reviews, people were saying that people were being poisoned and to stop serving these drinks, but they’d come back immediately, saying this is slander and all that. Then, less than a day later, the review would be gone from Google.”

This led Bethany to actively share warnings and messages on social media, while they were still in hospital, about the Vang Vieng hostel in a bid to warn others about the serious risk of the drinks. “I’m so glad I did that at the time, you don’t know how many more people could have gone, it’s so scary,” she added.

Describing her best friend, Bethany shared: “She was a very caring person, she had great listening ears and if I had any problems, she would help me out. She was an organiser, and she had a very busy social schedule and so many friends. She was my best friend, and I probably won’t ever meet anyone like that again.”

China has agreed to sign a Southeast Asian treaty banning nuclear weapons, Malaysia’s and China’s foreign ministers confirmed, in a move that seeks to shield the area from rising global security tensions amid the threat of imminent United States tariffs.

The pledge from Beijing was welcomed as diplomats gathered for the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) foreign ministers’ meeting, where US Secretary of State Marco Rubio is also due to meet regional counterparts and Russian counterpart Sergey Lavrov.

Malaysia’s Minister of Foreign Affairs Mohamad Hasan told reporters on Thursday that China had confirmed its willingness to sign the Southeast Asian Nuclear Weapon-Free Zone (SEANWFZ) treaty – an agreement in force since 1997 that restricts nuclear activity in the region to peaceful purposes such as energy generation.

“China made a commitment to ensure that they will sign the treaty without reservation,” Hasan said, adding that the formal signing will take place once all relevant documentation is completed.

ASEAN has long pushed for the world’s five recognised nuclear powers – China, the United States, Russia, France and the United Kingdom – to sign the pact and respect the region’s non-nuclear status, including within its exclusive economic zones and continental shelves.

Last week, Beijing signalled its readiness to support the treaty and lead by example among nuclear-armed states.

Rubio, who is on his first visit to Asia as secretary of state, arrived in Kuala Lumpur on Thursday amid a cloud of uncertainty caused by President Donald Trump’s aggressive tariff strategy, which includes new levies on six ASEAN nations as well as key traditional allies Japan and South Korea.

The tariffs, set to take effect on August 1, include a 25 percent duty on Malaysia, 32 percent on Indonesia, 36 percent on Cambodia and Thailand, and 40 percent on Laos and Myanmar.

Japan and South Korea have each been hit with 25 percent tariffs, while Australia – another significant Asia Pacific ally – has reacted angrily to threats of a 200 percent duty on pharmaceutical exports to the US.

Vietnam, an ASEAN nation, along with the UK, are the only two countries to have signed separate trade deals with the US, whose administration had boasted they would have 90 deals in 90 days.

The US will place a lower-than-promised 20 percent tariff on many Vietnamese exports, Trump has said, cooling tensions with its 10th-biggest trading partner days before he could raise levies on most imports. Any transshipments from third countries through Vietnam will face a 40 percent levy, Trump said, announcing the trade deal on Wednesday. Vietnam would accept US products with a zero percent tariff, he added.

Reporting from Kuala Lumpur, Al Jazeera’s Rob McBride says Southeast Asian nations are finding themselves at the centre of intensifying diplomatic competition, as global powers look to strengthen their influence in the region.

“The ASEAN countries are facing some of the highest tariffs from the Trump administration,” McBride said. “They were also among the first to receive new letters announcing yet another delay in the imposition of these tariffs, now pushed to 1 August.”

The uncertainty has pushed ASEAN states to seek alternative trade partners, most notably China. “These tariffs have provided an impetus for all of these ASEAN nations to seek out closer trade links with other parts of the world,” McBride added.

China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi has been in Kuala Lumpur for meetings with ASEAN counterparts, underscoring Beijing’s growing engagement.

Meanwhile, Russia’s top diplomat, Sergey Lavrov, has also been holding talks in Malaysia, advancing Moscow’s vision of a “multipolar world order” – a concept backed by China that challenges what they see as a Western-led global system dominated by the US.

“Lavrov might be shunned in other parts of the world,” McBride noted, “but he is here in Malaysia, meeting with ASEAN members and promoting this alternative global structure.”

At the same time, Rubio is aiming to counter that narrative and ease tensions. “Many ASEAN members are traditional allies of the United States,” McBride said. “But they are somewhat nervous about the tariffs and recent US foreign policy moves. Rubio is here to reassure them that all is well in trans-Pacific relations.”

As geopolitical rivalry intensifies, ASEAN finds itself courted from all directions, with the power to influence the future shape of international alliances.

US seeks to rebuild confidence in ASEAN

Rubio’s presence in Kuala Lumpur signals Washington, DC’s intention to revive its Asia Pacific focus following years of prioritising conflicts in Europe and the Middle East.

The last meeting between Rubio and Russia’s top diplomats took place in Saudi Arabia in February as part of the Trump administration’s effort to re-establish bilateral relations and help negotiate an end to the war in Ukraine.

Analysts say Rubio faces a difficult task of rebuilding confidence with Southeast Asian countries unnerved by the US’s trade policies. Despite the economic fallout, he is expected to try and promote the US as a more dependable alternative to China in terms of both security and long-term investment.

According to a draft communique obtained by Reuters, ASEAN foreign ministers will express “concern over rising global trade tensions and growing uncertainties in the international economic landscape, particularly the unilateral actions relating to tariffs”.

Separately, a meeting involving top diplomats from Southeast Asia, China, Russia and the United States will condemn violence against civilians in war-torn Myanmar, according to a draft statement seen Thursday by AFP.

ASEAN has led diplomatic efforts to end Myanmar’s many-sided civil war sparked by a military coup in 2021.

United States President Donald Trump has unveiled steep tariffs on more than a dozen countries as he ratchets up his pressure campaign aimed at winning concessions on trade.

Trump’s latest trade threats on Monday put 14 countries, including key US allies Japan and South Korea, on notice that they will face tariffs of 25 to 40 percent from August 1 unless they take more US exports and boost manufacturing in the US.

In nearly identical letters to the countries’ leaders, Trump said the US had “decided to move forward” with their relationship, but “only with more balanced, and fair, TRADE”.

Trump warned that any retaliatory taxes would be met with even higher tariffs, but left the door open to relief from the measures for countries that ease trade barriers.

“If you wish to open your heretofore closed Trading Markets to the United States, eliminate your tariff, and Non Tariff, Policies and Trade Barriers, we will, perhaps consider an adjustment to this letter,” Trump said in the letters, using capital letters to emphasise particular words.

“These Tariffs may be modified, upward or downward, depending on our relationship with your Country.”

Speaking to reporters later on Monday, Trump said the August 1 deadline was “firm” but not “100 percent firm”.

“If they call up and they say we’d like to do something a different way, we’re going to be open to that,” he said.

Trump’s steepest tariffs would apply to Laos and Myanmar, which are both facing duties of 40 percent. Japan, South Korea, Malaysia, Kazakhstan and Tunisia would be subject to the lowest rate of 25 percent.

Cambodia and Thailand are facing a 36 percent tariff rate, Serbia and Bangladesh a 35 percent rate, and South Africa and Bosnia and Herzegovina a 30 percent rate. Indonesia would be subject to a 32 percent rate.

All 14 countries, many of which have highly export-reliant economies, had previously been subject to a baseline tariff of 10 percent.

Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba called the tariff on his country “truly regrettable”, but said the Japanese side would continue negotiations towards a mutually beneficial agreement.

South Korea’s Ministry of Trade, Industry and Energy said in a statement that it would step up negotiations ahead of the August 1 deadline to “reach a mutually beneficial negotiation result so as to swiftly address uncertainties stemming from tariffs”.

Malaysia’s Ministry of Investment, Trade and Industry said the Southeast Asian country would continue engagement with the US “towards a balanced, mutually beneficial, and comprehensive trade agreement.”

Lawrence Loh, the director of the Centre for Governance and Sustainability at the National University of Singapore Business School, said Asian countries are limited in their ability to present a united front in the face of Trump’s threats due to their varying trade profiles and geopolitical interests.

“It is not possible for these countries, even for a formal pact like ASEAN, to act in a coordinated manner. It’s likely to be to each country on its own,” Loh told Al Jazeera, referring to the 10-member Association of Southeast Asian Nations.

“That’s the trump card for Trump.”

Loh said countries in the region will feel pressure to make concessions to Trump to avoid damage to their economies.

“On balance for Asian countries, not giving concessions will turn out more harmful than playing along with the US,” he said.

“Especially for the smaller countries with less bargaining power, retaliation is out of the question.”

The US stock market dipped sharply on Trump’s latest tariff threats, with the benchmark S&P 500 falling 0.8 percent and the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite dropping 0.9 percent.

But Asia’s major stock markets shrugged off the uncertainty, with Hong Kong’s Hang Seng Index up about 0.8 percent, South Korea’s KOSPI up about 1.4 percent, and Japan’s Nikkei 225 up about 0.2 percent as of 05:00 GMT.

While the Trump administration has ramped up pressure on its trade partners to reach deals to avoid higher tariffs, only three countries so far – China, Vietnam and the United Kingdom – have announced agreements to de-escalate trade tensions.

US Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent earlier on Monday teased the announcement of “several” agreements within the next 48 hours.

Bessent did not elaborate on which countries would be involved in the deals or what the agreements might entail.

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told a media briefing that Trump would send more letters this week and that the administration was “close” to announcing deals with other countries.

Calvin Cheng, the director of the economics and trade programme at the Institute of Strategic and International Studies (ISIS) in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, said that while US partners will be eager to negotiate relief from the tariffs, many governments may be resigned to higher taxes on their exports going forward.

“In my view, many will likely be under greater pressure to deploy every available institutional and political lever to address legitimate US trade concerns, particularly around tightening rules of origin and legitimate IP [intellectual property] concerns,” Cheng told Al Jazeera.

“However, there could also be a cognisance that current tariff lines are more durable than expected, so measures could shift towards targeted accommodation, while preparing domestic exporters and industries for a future of trade where a significant proportion of this tariff barrier is likely to remain.”

“My personal view is that the bulk of the current tariff rate is stickier than perhaps initially assumed,” Cheng added.

“Future concessions could be within single-digit percentage points off the average rate.”

Eduardo Araral, an associate professor at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy in Singapore, expressed a similar view.

“Unless Tokyo, Seoul and key ASEAN capitals can bundle tariff relief with credible paths on autos, agriculture, digital trade and – in some cases – security alignment before 1 August, the higher rates will likely stick, adding another layer of uncertainty to an already litigated and politically fraught tariff regime,” Araral told Al Jazeera.

United States President Donald Trump is set to impose 25 percent tariffs on two key US allies, Japan and South Korea, beginning on August 1 as the administration’s self-imposed deadline for trade agreements of July 9 nears without a deal in place.

On Monday, the Trump administration said this in the first of 12 letters to key US trade partners regarding the new levies they face.

In near-identically worded letters to the Japanese and South Korean leaders, the US president said the trade relationship was “unfortunately, far from Reciprocal”.

Japan’s Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba has said that he “won’t easily compromise” in trade talks with the Trump administration.

The US imports nearly twice as much from Japan as it exports to the country, according to US Census Bureau data.

Currently, both Japan and South Korea have a 10 percent levy in place, the same as almost all US trading partners. But Trump said he was ready to lower the new levels if the two countries changed their trade policies.

“We will, perhaps, consider an adjustment to this letter,” he said in letters to the two Asian countries’ leaders that he posted on his Truth Social platform. “If for any reason you decide to raise your Tariffs, then, whatever the number you choose to raise them by, will be added onto the 25% that we charge.”

Trump also announced the US will impose 25 percent tariffs each on Malaysia and Kazakhstan, 30 percent on South Africa and 40 percent each on Laos and Myanmar.

US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said earlier on Monday that he expected several trade announcements to be made in the next 48 hours, adding that his inbox was full of last-ditch offers from countries to clinch a tariff deal by the deadline. Bessent did not say which countries could get deals and what they might contain.

In April, the White House said it would have 90 trade and tariff deals established within 90 days. That did not happen, and since that time, the administration has solidified two agreements — one with Vietnam, and the other with the United Kingdom.

“There will be additional letters in the coming days,” White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said, adding that “we are close” on some deals. She said Trump would sign an executive order on Monday formally delaying the July 9 deadline to August 1.

BRICS tensions 

Trump also put members of the developing nations’ BRICS group in his sights as its leaders met in Brazil, threatening an additional 10 percent tariff on any BRICS countries aligning themselves with “anti-American” policies.

The new 10 percent tariff will be imposed on individual countries if they take anti-American policy actions, a source familiar with the matter told Reuters news agency.

The BRICS group comprises Brazil, Russia, India and China and South Africa along with recent joiners Egypt, Ethiopia, Indonesia, Iran and the United Arab Emirates. Trump’s comments hit the South African rand, affecting its value in Monday trading.

Russia said BRICS was “a group of countries that share common approaches and a common world view on how to cooperate, based on their own interests”.

“And this cooperation within BRICS has never been and will never be directed against any third countries,” said Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov.

European Union at the table

The European Union will not be receiving a letter setting out higher tariffs, EU sources familiar with the matter told Reuters on Monday.

The EU still aims to reach a trade deal by July 9 after European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and Trump had a “good exchange”, a commission spokesperson said.

It was not clear, however, whether there had been a meaningful breakthrough in talks to stave off tariff hikes on the largest trading partner of the US.

Adding to the pressure, Trump threatened to impose a 17 percent tariff on EU food and agriculture exports, it emerged last week.

The EU has been torn over whether to push for a quick and light trade deal or back its own economic clout in trying to negotiate a better outcome. It had already dropped hopes for a comprehensive trade agreement before the July deadline.

“We want to reach a deal with the US. We want to avoid tariffs,” the spokesperson said at a daily briefing.

Without a preliminary agreement, broad US tariffs on most imports would rise from their current 10 percent to the rates set out by Trump on April 2. In the EU’s case, that would be 20 percent.

Von der Leyen also held talks with the leaders of Germany, France and Italy at the weekend, Germany said. German Chancellor Friedrich Merz has repeatedly stressed the need for a quick deal to protect industries vulnerable to tariffs ranging from cars to pharmaceuticals.

Germany said the parties should allow themselves “another 24 or 48 hours to come to a decision”. And the country’s auto company Mercedes-Benz said on Monday its second-quarter unit sales of cars and vans had fallen 9 percent, blaming tariffs.

Markets respond

US markets have tumbled on Trump’s tariff announcements.

As of 3:30pm in New York (19:30 GMT), the S&P 500 fell by 1 percent, marking the biggest drop in three weeks. The tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite Index was down by a little more than 1 percent, while the Dow Jones Industrial Average also fell by more than a full percentage point.

US-listed shares of Japanese automotive companies fell, with Toyota Motor Corp down 4.1 percent in mid-afternoon trading and Honda Motor off by 3.8 percent. Meanwhile, the US dollar surged against both the Japanese yen and the South Korean won.

Bokeo province, Laos – Khobby was living in Dubai last year when he received an intriguing message about a well-paying job working online in a far-flung corner of Southeast Asia.

The salary was good, he was told. He would be working on computers in an office.

The company would even foot the bill for his relocation to join the firm in Laos – a country of 7.6 million people nestled between China, Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam and Myanmar.

With the company paying for his flights, Khobby decided to take the plunge.

But his landing in Laos was anything but smooth.

Khobby discovered that the promised dream job was rapidly becoming a nightmare when his Ghanaian passport was taken on arrival by his new employers.

With his passport confiscated and threats of physical harm ever present, he endured months working inside a compound which he could not leave.

The 21-year-old had become the latest victim of booming online cyber-scam operations in Southeast Asia – an industry that is believed to have enslaved tens of thousands of workers lured with the promise of decently paid jobs in online sales and the information technology industry.

“When I got there, I saw a lot of Africans in the office, with a lot of phones,” Khobby told Al Jazeera, recounting his arrival in Laos.

“Each person had 10 phones, 15 phones. That was when I realised this was a scamming job,” he said.

The operation Khobby found himself working for was in a remote area in northwest Laos, where a casino city has been carved out of a patch of jungle in the infamous “Golden Triangle” region – the lawless border zone between Myanmar, Laos and Thailand that has long been a centre for global drug production and trafficking.

He said he was forced to work long days and sleep in a dormitory with five other African workers at night during the months he spent at the scam centre in the Golden Triangle Special Economic Zone.

Khobby recounted the original message he received from an acquaintance encouraging him to take the job in Laos.

“My company is hiring new staff”, he said, adding that he was told the salary was $1,200 per month.

“He told me it was data entry.”

Casino city

The Golden Triangle Special Economic Zone (GTSEZ) where Khobby was lured to for work operates as an autonomous territory within Laos.

Leased from Laotian authorities by Chinese national Zhao Wei, whom the US government has designated the leader of a transnational criminal organisation, life in the GTSEZ is monitored by a myriad of security cameras and protected by its own private security force.

Clocks are set to Beijing time. Signage is predominantly in Chinese, and China’s yuan is the dominant and preferred currency.

Central to the GTSEZ city-state is Zhao Wei’s Kings Romans casino, which the United States Treasury also described as a hub for criminal activity such as money laundering, narcotics and wildlife trafficking.

During a recent visit to the zone by Al Jazeera, Rolls Royce limousines ferried gamblers to some of the city’s casinos while workers toiled on the construction of an elaborate and expansive Venice-style waterway just a stone’s throw from the Mekong river.

While luxury construction projects – including the recently completed Bokeo International Airport – speak to the vast amounts of money flowing through this mini casino city, it is inside the grey, nondescript tower blocks dotted around the economic zone where the lucrative online scam trade occurs.

Within these tower blocks, thousands of trafficked workers from all over the world – just like Khobby – are reported to spend up to 17 hours a day working online to dupe unsuspecting “clients” into parting with their money.

The online swindles are as varied as investing money in fake business portfolios to paying false tax bills that appear very real and from trading phoney cryptocurrency to being caught in online romance traps.

Anti-trafficking experts say most of the workers are deceived into leaving their home countries – such are nearby China, Thailand and Indonesia or as far away as Nigeria, Ghana, Uganda and Ethiopia – with the promise of decent salaries.

Online ‘butchering’

Khobby told how his “data entry” job was, in fact, a scam known in the cybercrime underworld as “pig butchering”.

This is where victims are identified, cold-called or messaged directly by phone in a bid to establish a relationship. Trust is built up over time to the point where an initial investment is made by the intended victim. This can be, at first, a small amount of the victim’s money or emotions in the case of fake online relationships.

There are small rewards on the investments, Khobby explained, telling how those in the industry refer to their victims as pigs who are being “fattened” by trust built up with the scammers.

That fattening continues until a substantial monetary investment is made in whatever scam the victim has become part of. Then they are swiftly “butchered”, which is when the scammers get away with the ill-gotten gains taken from their victims.

Once the butchering is done, all communications are cut with the victims and the scammers disappear without leaving a digital trace.

According to experts, cyber-scamming inside the GTSEZ boomed during the 2019 and 2020 COVID lockdowns when restrictions on travel meant international visitors could not access the Kings Romans casino.

In the years since, the cyber-scam industry has burgeoned, physically transcended borders to become one of the dominant profit-making illicit activities in the region, not only in the GTSEZ in Laos but also in neighbouring Cambodia and in conflict-ridden Myanmar.

Though not as elaborate as the GTSEZ, purpose-built cyber-scam “compounds” have proliferated in Myanmar’s border areas with Thailand.

The Center for Strategic and International Studies estimates that cyber-scamming in Southeast Asia generates tens of billions annually, while the United States Institute of Peace equates the threat to that of the destructive fentanyl trade.

“Cyber-scam operations have significantly benefitted from developments in the fintech industry, including cryptocurrencies, with apps being directly developed for use at [cyber-scam] compounds to launder money,” said Kristina Amerhauser, of the Global Initiative against Transnational Organized Crime.

“Victims and perpetrators are spread across different countries, money is laundered offshore, operations are global,” Amerhauser told Al Jazeera, explaining that the sophisticated technology used in cyber-scamming, along with its international reach, has made it extremely difficult to combat.

Complicit victims?

About 260 trafficked scam-centre workers were recently rescued in a cross-border operation between Thailand and Myanmar. Yet, even in rare instances such as this when trafficked workers are freed, they still face complications due to their visa status and their own potential complicity in criminal activity.

Khobby – who is now back in Dubai – told Al Jazeera that while he was coerced into working in the GTSEZ, he did actually receive the promised $1,200 monthly salary, and he had even signed a six-month “contract” with the Chinese bosses who ran the operation.

Richard Horsey, International Crisis Group’s senior adviser on Myanmar, said Khobby’s experience reflected a changing trend in recruitment by the criminal organisations running the scam centres.

“Some of the more sophisticated gangs are getting out of the human trafficking game and starting to trick workers to come,” Horsey said.

“People don’t like to answer an advert for criminal scamming, and it’s hard to advertise that. But once they’re there, it’s like – actually, we will pay you. We may have taken your passport, but there is a route to quite a lucrative opportunity here and we will give you a small part of that,” he said.

The issue of salaries paid to coerced and enslaved workers complicates efforts to repatriate trafficking victims, who may be considered complicit criminals due to their status as “paid” workers in the scam centres, said Eric Heintz, from the US-based anti-trafficking organisation International Justice Mission (IJM).

“We know of individuals being paid for the first few months they were inside, but then it tapers off to the point where they are making little – if any – money,” Heintz said, describing how victims become “trapped in this cycle of abuse unable to leave the compound”.

“This specific aspect was a challenge early on with the victim identity process – when an official would ask if an individual previously in the scam compound was paid, the victim would answer that initially he or she was. That was enough for some officials to not identify them as victims,” Heintz said.

Some workers have also been sold between criminal organisations and moved across borders to other scam centres, he said.

“We have heard of people being moved from a compound in one country to one in another – for example from Myawaddy to the GTSEZ or Cambodia and vice versa,” he said.

Khobby said many of the workers in his “office” had already had experience with scamming in other compounds and in other countries.

“Most of them had experience. They knew the job already,” he said.

“This job is going on in a lot of places – Thailand, Laos, Myanmar. They were OK because they got paid. They had experience and they knew what they were doing,” he added.

‘What are we here for? Money!’

High-school graduate Jojo said she was working as a maid in Kampala, Uganda, when she received a message on the Telegram messaging app about an opportunity in Asia that involved being sponsored to do computer studies as part of a job in IT.

“I was so excited,” Jojo recounted, “I told my mum about the offer.”

Jojo told how she was sent an airline ticket, and described how multiple people met her along the way as she journeyed from Kampala to Laos. Eventually Jojo arrived in the same scam operation as Khobby.

She described an atmosphere similar to a fast-paced sales centre, with Chinese bosses shouting encouragement when a victim had been ‘butchered’ and their money stolen, telling how she witnessed people scammed for as much as $200,000.

“They would shout a lot, in Chinese – ‘What are we here for? Money!’”

On top of adrenaline, the scam operation also ran on fear, Jojo said.

Workers were beaten if they did not meet targets for swindling money. Mostly locked inside the building where she worked and lived; Jojo said she was only able to leave the scam operation once in the four months she was in the GTSEZ, and that was to attend a local hospital after falling ill.

Fear of the Chinese bosses who ran the operation not only permeated their workstations but in the dormitory where they slept.

“They told us ‘Whatever happens in the room, we are listening’,” she said, also telling how her co-workers were beaten when they failed to meet targets.

“They stopped them from working. They stopped them from coming to get food. They were not getting results. They were not bringing in the money they wanted. So they saw them as useless,” she said.

“They were torturing them every day.”

Khobby and Jojo said they were moved to act in case it was their turn next.

When they organised a strike to demand better treatment, their bosses brought in Laotian police and several of the strikers – including Jojo and Khobby – were taken to a police station where they were told they were sacked.

They were also told they would not be paid what was owed in wages and their overseers refused to give their passports back.

Khobby said he was left stranded without a passport and the police refused to help.

“This is not about only the Chinese people,” Khobby said. “Even in Vientiane, they have immigration offices who are involved. They are the ones giving the visas. When I got to Laos, it was the immigration officer who was waiting for me. I didn’t even fill out any form,” he said.

With help from the Ghanaian embassy, Khobby and Jojo were eventually able to retrieve their passports, and with assistance from family and friends, they returned home.

The IJM’s Heintz, said that target countries for scammer recruitment – such as those in Africa – need better awareness of the dangers of trafficking.

“There needs to be better awareness at the source country level of the dangers associated with these jobs,” he said.

Reflecting on what led him to work up the courage to lead a strike in the scam centre, Khobby considered his childhood back in Ghana.

“I was a boy who was raised in a police station. My grandpa was a police commander. So in that aspect, I’m very bold, I have that courage. I like giving things a try and I like taking risks,” he said.

Jojo told Al Jazeera how she continues to chat online with friends who are still trapped in scam centres in Laos, and who have told her that new recruits arrive each day in the GTSEZ.

Her friends want to get out of the scam business and the economic zone in Laos. But it is not so easy to leave, Jojo said.

“They don’t have their passports,” she said.

UN Office on Drugs and Crime says ‘explosive growth’ in synthetic drug trade led to record seizures of methamphetamine in East and Southeast Asia in 2024.

Drug production and trafficking has surged in the infamous “Golden Triangle“, where the borders of Myanmar, Laos and Thailand meet, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) has warned in a new report on the scale of the regional trade in synthetic drugs.

The UNODC said a record 236 tonnes of methamphetamine were seized last year in the East and Southeast Asia regions, marking a 24 percent increase in the amount of the narcotic seized compared with the previous year.

While Thailand became the first country in the region to seize more than 100 tonnes of methamphetamine in a single year last year – interdicting a total of 130 tonnes – trafficking of the drug from Myanmar’s lawless Shan State is rapidly expanding in Laos and Cambodia, the UNODC said.

“The 236 tons represent only the amount seized; much more methamphetamine is actually reaching the market,” the UNODC’s acting regional representative for Southeast Asia and the Pacific, Benedikt Hofmann, said in a statement.

“While these seizures reflect, in part, successful law enforcement efforts, we are clearly seeing unprecedented levels of methamphetamine production and trafficking from the Golden Triangle, in particular Shan State,” Hofmann said.

Transnational drug gangs operating in East and Southeast Asia are also showing “remarkable agility” in countering attempts by regional law enforcement to crack down on the booming trade in synthetic drugs.

Myanmar’s grinding civil war, which erupted in mid-2021, has also provided favourable conditions for an expansion of the drug trade.

“Since the military takeover in Myanmar in February 2021, flows of drugs from the country have surged across not only East and Southeast Asia, but also increasingly into South Asia, in particular Northeast India,” the report states.

The UNODC’s Inshik Sim, the lead analyst for Southeast Asia and the Pacific, said countries neighbouring Myanmar are becoming key trafficking routes for drugs produced in the Golden Triangle.

“The trafficking route connecting Cambodia with Myanmar, primarily through Laos PDR, has been rapidly expanding,” Sim said, using the acronym that is part of Laos’s official name, the People’s Democratic Republic.

“Another increasingly significant corridor involves maritime trafficking routes linking Malaysia, Indonesia, and the Philippines, with Sabah in Malaysia serving as a key transit hub,” he said.

Evolving, cell-based transnational organized crime groups based in East and #SoutheastAsia are increasingly adopting technologies across the entire drug supply chain while converging with other organized crime activities.

Read more in our latest report: https://t.co/oL416cuZJ3 pic.twitter.com/pqUfX5FmnF

— UNODC Southeast Asia-Pacific (@UNODC_SEAP) May 28, 2025

The UNODC report also notes that while most countries in the region have reported an overall increase in the use of methamphetamine and ketamine – a powerful sedative – the number of drug users in the older age group has grown in some nations.

“Some countries in the region, such as Malaysia, Singapore, and Thailand, have reported consecutive increases in the number of older drug users, while the number of younger users has declined,” the UNODC report states, adding that the age trend needed to be studied further.

The UNODC’s Hofmann said the decline in the number of younger drug users admitted for treatment may be due to targeted drug use prevention campaigns.

“It will be key for the region to increase investment in both prevention and supply reduction strategies,” he added.

Southeast Asian leaders are set to hold their first ever summit with China and the six-member Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), as they seek to insulate their trade-dependent economies from the effect of steep tariffs from the United States.

The meeting, in the Malaysian capital, Kuala Lumpur, is taking place on Tuesday, on the second day of the annual summit of the 10-member Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN).

It follows separate talks between leaders of the ASEAN and the GCC, which comprises of Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.

Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim, opening the ASEAN-GCC summit, said stronger ties between the two blocs would be key to enhancing interregional collaboration, building resilience and securing sustainable prosperity.

“I believe the ASEAN-GCC partnership has never been more important than it is today, as we navigate an increasingly complex global landscape marked by economic uncertainty and geopolitical challenges,” Anwar said.

Malaysia is the current chair of ASEAN, which also includes Brunei, Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam.

In written remarks before the meetings, Anwar said “a transition in the geopolitical order is underway” and that “the global trading system is under further strain, with the recent imposition of US unilateral tariffs.”

With protectionism surging, the world is also bearing witness to “multilateralism breaking apart at the seams”, he added.

China calls for stronger ties

China’s Premier Li Qiang, who arrived in Kuala Lumpur on Monday, will join ASEAN and the GCC in their first such meeting on Tuesday. He met with Anwar on Monday and called for expanded trade and investment ties between Beijing, ASEAN and the GCC.

“At a time when unilateralism and protectionism are on the rise and world economic growth is sluggish,” Li said, China, ASEAN and GCC countries “should strengthen coordination and cooperation and jointly uphold open regionalism and true multilateralism”.

China is willing to work with Malaysia to “promote closer economic cooperation among the three parties” and respond to global challenges, Li told Anwar.

ASEAN has maintained a policy of neutrality, engaging both Beijing and Washington, but US President Donald Trump’s threats of sweeping tariffs came as a blow.

Six of the bloc’s members were among the worst hit, with tariffs between 32 percent and 49 percent.

Trump announced a 90-day pause on tariffs in April for most of the world, and this month struck a similar deal with key rival China, easing trade war tensions.

Al Jazeera’s Rob McBride, reporting from Kuala Lumpur, said ASEAN members are “very much looking at building ties with other parts of the world, in particular China, but also the Middle East” to strengthen their economic resilience.

“A measure of the importance that the GCC is also placing on this meeting is the delegation that has been sent here and the seniority of its members,” he added. “The Emir of Qatar, Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani, is here, and we have crown princes from Kuwait and also Bahrain. We also have a deputy prime minister from Oman.”

Anwar said Monday he had also written to Trump to request an ASEAN-US summit this year, showing “we observe seriously the spirit of centrality.” However, his Foreign Minister Mohamad Hasan said Washington had not yet responded.

‘Timely, calculated’

ASEAN has traditionally served as “a middleman of sorts” between developed economies like the US and China, said Chong Ja Ian from the National University of Singapore (NUS).

“Given the uncertainty and unpredictability associated with economic relations with the United States, ASEAN member states are looking to diversify,” he told the AFP news agency.

“Facilitating exchanges between the Gulf and People’s Republic of China is one aspect of this diversification.”

Malaysia, which opened the bloc’s 46th summit on Monday, is the main force behind the initiative, he said.

China, which has suffered the brunt of Trump’s tariffs, is also looking to shore up its other markets.

Premier Li’s participation is “both timely and calculated”, Khoo Ying Hooi from the University of Malaya told AFP.

“China sees an opportunity here to reinforce its image as a reliable economic partner, especially in the face of Western decoupling efforts.”

Beijing and Washington engaged in an escalating flurry of tit-for-tat levies until a meeting in Switzerland saw an agreement to slash them for 90 days.

Chinese goods still face higher tariffs than most, though.