The Beltrán Leyvas got their start as hired guns for the most notorious of the Mexican drug traffickers, Joaquín Guzmán, better known as el Chapo, or "Shorty," and eventually became Guzmán's business associates.
He says there is a continued mistrust between the Myanmar government and ethnic groups and a feeling among traffickers that they better make money from illegal activities while they can.
In March the UK passed its first Modern Slavery Bill, designed to increase the prosecution of traffickers and give better protection to victims of modern slavery in the UK.
"By reserving the most severe penalties for serious, high-level or violent drug traffickers, we can better promote public safety, deterrence and rehabilitation, while making our expenditures smarter and more productive," he said.
"Most of our sources said Ghassan was the better trafficker," Soiles told me.
A century later, the world's narco-traffickers are still better financed and equipped than the officials who try to foil them.
The emerging political landscape, in which power may well be fragmented among rival groups, may actually prove better for traffickers than the Taliban was.
Jagdeesh's family paid £10,000 to traffickers who promised a better life and smuggled him from India to Britain with dozens of others in the back of a lorry.
Instead, redouble efforts to go after the cocaine laboratories, the chemical suppliers, the traffickers and the money launderers, with better intelligence and better policing.
In addition, End Demand Illinois advocates the very solutions Ms. Thrupkaew puts forward: better accountability for traffickers, and social services for survivors.
