Mafia bosses, black magic and marijuana
The story of Thailand's shadiest political party
Thailand’s notorious Bhumjai Thai Party is back in the spotlight for all the wrong reasons as usual.
Health minister Anutin Charnvirakul has overseen a disastrous coronavirus vaccine procurement policy that relied far too heavily on royal company Siam Bioscience producing AstraZeneca doses in Thailand. Anutin, an ally of King Vajiralongkorn, wanted the monarchy to get the credit for saving the kingdom, but instead the policy has left Thailand languishing at the bottom of global league tables with fewer than one percent of Thais receiving a dose so far. Now a virulent third wave is spreading at exponential speed, dashing hopes that the country can soon reopen to tourists, and the regime is desperately scrambling to secure vaccines from other sources, something it should have done months ago.
The vaccine debacle follows a year of gaffes and blunders by Anutin during which he had to repeatedly apologise for embarrassing outbursts denouncing medical workers and “dirty” foreigners who “never shower”. He had to shut down his Facebook and Twitter pages after regrettable posts that were widely criticised.
Several of his colleagues in Bhumjai Thai, including transport minister Saksayam Chidchob and senior party officials, are directly responsible for spreading the latest outbreak after partying in high-end Thonglor hostess bars that were ground zero of the virulent third wave of the virus now sweeping the country. The 58-year-old Saksayam continues to deny he fraternised with bar girls at Thonglor nightclubs Emerald and Krystal and has blamed his subordinates for infecting him, but he has failed to release a convincing timeline of his movements on April 2 and 3.
It’s no surprise that Bhumjai Thai is heavily implicated in the country’s unfolding coronavirus catastrophe, because for years the party and its de facto leader Newin Chidchob have played a central role in Thai politics — and not in a good way.
Newin has been at the heart of most of the toxic developments in Thailand over the past three decades, including the 1997 financial crisis, the excesses of Thaksin Shinawatra, the emergence of organised colour-coded street violence, and the rise to power of the clique of generals, businessmen, criminals and corrupt politicians that currently dominates the kingdom. From his stronghold in Buriram, he continues to exert immense influence over Thailand, operating in the shadows.
This is the tale of Thailand’s shadiest political party.
I. Burmese name, Lao face, Khmer tongue
The story begins a century ago in Thailand’s impoverished lower northeast region on the border with Cambodia, where Chai Chidchob was born in Surin province to a family of elephant mahouts in 1928. As a young man he migrated to neighbouring Buriram and established a gravel quarrying business. Buriram is the sixth most populous of the kingdom’s 77 provinces, but also one of the poorest. Most of its people make a living from rice farming or cultivating cash crops like corn, cassava, sugarcane, rubber trees and eucalyptus. The most powerful families in Buriram all have a background in gravel quarrying, and this is how Chai first became rich.
As US money flooded into Thailand from the 1950s onwards and the kingdom began to rapidly industrialise there was huge demand for gravel to build roads. Clans that ran quarrying firms in Buriram made vast profits and parlayed their wealth into political influence that allowed them to dominate illicit activities in the province too. Chai became a subdistrict chief, or kamnan, and unsuccessfully ran for parliament in 1957. He tried again in 1969 and won, and over the half century afterwards he was elected nine times as a candidate for seven different parties, standing for whatever faction seemed most likely to win at the time.
Kamnan Chai, as he called himself, was an archetypal Thai godfather. The provincial powerbrokers of this era — known as เจ้าพ่อ or jao por in Thai, a direct translation of the English word popularised in the 1972 movie The Godfather — were local businessmen who made a fortune during the rapid economic expansion of the Vietnam War years, achieving a dominant position in both legitimate and criminal local business networks and then using their clout to establish a career in politics that allowed them to enrich themselves exponentially more.
As professor Kasian Tejapira explains in his article “Toppling Thaksin” on the deficiencies of Thai democracy, the godfathers, who he calls electocrats, were “elected politicians who usually had a provincial entrepreneur-cum-local mafia-boss background, and were hence largely ignorant of national and macroeconomic matters; they were mainly interested in short-term personal or factional gains”:
The student activists’ uprising of 1973 and subsequent establishment of a parliamentary democracy were unexpected gifts, which provided them with a golden opportunity to convert their hitherto shady local wealth and influence into legal power at the centre of national politics. The typical electocrat had built his personal fortune in the 1960s and 1970s under the patronage of corrupt local officials, exploiting American aid intended for war efforts against neighbouring states and the military government’s market-oriented development projects. They generally engaged in semi-legal businesses involving licences, title deeds and permits—in short, those in which political connections were key—such as land speculation, logging, public works, trucking, cash crops, entertainment, gambling, underground lotteries, prostitution, bootlegging, gunrunning, drug-trafficking, smuggling, etc. Intractable conflicts with business rivals and uncooperative officials were often solved with the help of hired gunmen…
Once elected, they treated politics as a kind of business, effectively selling public policy, office, concession or title deed to the highest bidder. Shameless avarice was fuelled by the need to gather enough ‘ammunition’ for election campaigns to enable them to stay in power.
Like most godfathers, Chai used violence when necessary — decades later Democrat Party spokesman Buranaj Smutharaks told US diplomats that “the Chidchob family had a tradition of gangsterism” with Chai “directly responsible for the murder of at least one political rival in his province”. He had a daughter and five sons, and the family managed to significantly increase their wealth in the 1980s by supporting the government of Prem Tinsulanonda, and influencing bidding on a road project from Nakorn Ratchasima to Ubol Ratchasima.
By now Chai was a powerful figure in Buriram, but he wasn’t the most significant of the province’s godfathers. The clan rose to dominance thanks to his second son Newin, born in 1958 and named in honour of the notorious Burmese military dictator Ne Win. His unusual name and mixed heritage inspired one of his many nicknames — “ชื่อพม่า หน้าลาว เว้าเขมร”, or “Burmese name, Lao face, Khmer tongue”. The ascent of the Chidchob family is covered in fascinating detail in a study by Thammasat University professor Prajak Kongkirati, and many of the details in this section are taken from his work.
Ambitious and unscrupulous, Newin became a Buriram council member in his twenties and provincial administration chief at 27 — the youngest in Thailand at the time. He was elected to parliament in 1988, and in 1992 he switched to the Chart Thai party, an amoral political vehicle led by notorious Suphanburi godfather Banharn Silpa-archa whose nicknames included “Mr ATM” and the “Slippery Eel”. Newin and the equally unprincipled Suchart Tancharoen became leading members of an aggressive faction of young MPs known as the Group of 16 who relentlessly attacked the coalition led by the Democrat Party that had taken power after the Black May upheavals of 1992.
Meanwhile, Newin was also acquiring a reputation as an incorrigible crook. In November 1993, a bomb exploded at his house a few days after a censure debate in parliament in which he’d lambasted the government. Nobody was hurt and there was little damage. It eventually transpired that Newin himself had paid some policemen to bomb his house in a bid to boost his popularity and tarnish his opponents.