The southern region of Thailand, known fondly to badly behaving foreigners, has since the 1990s functioned as a reliable stronghold of reactionary, ultra-royalist politics, historically fiercely supporting the ultra-monarchist Democrat Party and today backing the new ultra-reactionaries of Bhumjaithai. The region is also well known for its vicious right-wing mafias; their executions, extortion and their marketised criminality. This political orientation stands in sharp contrast to the Northern and Isaan regions, which typically lean left and retain strong anti-Bangkok political memories- yet historically, the south was known for its peasant organisers and communist insurgent activity. The transformation of the region into a bastion of right-wing loyalism has long presented a puzzle: Why did the South get so Salim?
Here we present a speculative history.
Note: This examination excludes the nearby, but politicaly largely separate, Patani armed struggle.
The Para-Political Origins of Southern Reactionary Networks
The foundations of southern political reaction can be traced to the 1950s, when the United States facilitated the Thai state in establishing a vast array of coercive anti-democratic apparatuses. Some operated within formal state purview, though many functioned beyond it. In 1953 General William “Wild Bill” Donovan, was appointed as U.S Ambassador to Thailand, Donovan was the “Father of American Intelligence” and founder of the OSS (the predecessor to the CIA)
Under close supervision of the Americans organisations were formed such as the Border Patrol Police (BPP, 1951), the Police Aerial Reinforcement Unit (PARU, 1953), the Communist Suppression Operations Command (CSOC, 1965), the Volunteer Defense Corps (1954) and the Village Scouts (1971) were granted vast extrajudicial impunity in the name of anti-communist counter-insurgency.
Over the subsequent decade, these groups used their substantial localised autonomy, particularly in border regions, to develop complex networks of power and financial capital. By the 1980s, the communist threat to Thailand had concluded, yet these networks remained. Lacking an ideological enemy, they consolidated into criminal mafia networks and integrated into the political machinery of what has been described as the “network monarchy”.
Particularly in periphery regions, they became shadow assets of major capital and establishment political power, maintaining a stranglehold on lucrative legal and illicit trade networks, as well as a substantial pool of refugee labour from conflicts in Myanmar and Cambodia- this is the basis on which Bhumjaithai’s foundations were built. Today’s reactionary southern mafias draw a direct institutional lineage from Cold War counter-insurgency to contemporary reactionary politics.
Communist Insurgency and the State’s Carrot-and-Stick Response
During the 1960s, the southern periphery shared substantial commonalities with the north and Isaan peripheries: masses of landless peasants, minimal infrastructure development in rural areas, and extreme poverty. These factors precipitated mass peasant organising and insurgency across all three regions. In the south specifically, the Communist Party Thailand also maintained a large and active presence throughout the upper southern region. The Thai state responded with a uniform carrot-and-stick approach across all three regions. The carrot consisted of state infrastructure, social services, and land reform. The stick included bombing campaigns and the mass killing of local peasant agitators.
The Stick: Red Barrel Killings
The following is almost entirely based on Tyrell Haberkorn’s work Getting Away with Murder: State Violence and Impunity in Phatthalung. One of the most horrifying peaks of extrajudiciary state violence during the height , two cases from Haberkorn’s study are instructive.
On August 7, 1972, teacher Lim Phaosen was taken from his home by a soldier and never returned. When his wife arrived home that evening, she learned Lim had left without medication for his chronic illness. A fellow villager, Chom Kaewpong, who was also taken but later released, told her he had seen Lim at a Thachiet military camp. But when she rushed there, soldiers denied arresting him. After searching multiple camps and provinces, she learned from a survivor that Lim had been burned in a red barrel for opposing a corrupt school-building contract. Lim was not a communist, rather a villager who opposed local corruption.
A second case: teacher Ploy Prap-in, age thirty-nine, was taken on August 10, 1972 to Thachiet military camp. There, officials accused him of working with Lim to distribute communist tracts and burn government buildings. Interrogated daily, he was told that if he did not confess, he would be killed in a red barrel. He saw over sixty villagers inside a tent, many bearing torture marks. Each night, those inside saw fires from the red oil barrels and bodies burnt to non-existence. On his fifth night, Ploy was forced to sign a release paper but returned to the tent. After twelve days of ideological “training” he was released, providing us with a rare account of survivor testimony.
These are the Red Barrel killings: mass murder targeting suspected communists in and around the southern province of Phatthalung in 1972–73, led by the Internal Security Operations Command (ISOC) with local paramilitaries. Officially today the state recognises 80 victims, other estimates are up to 3,000. This is a highly localised case which bares close resemblance to The Jakarta Method mass killings of leftists and Chinese in Indonesia.
In Phattalung the communist threat was minimal; as Haberkorn notes, the boundary between communist and villager was nearly arbitrary. Haberkorn traces the violence to one leading Village Defense Force volunteer (or Volunteer Defense Corps), Yongyut Dusithamo. Yongyut had his men shoot guns into the air at night and kill chickens to spread their blood so as to fake evidence of firefights with armed communists. With no real communists to kill, the state turned to near arbitrary arrests. Villagers informed on neighbours to settle scores, almost certainly reinforcing the position of reactionary local elites, such is the case of Teacher Lim who was killed for knowing too much about the corrupt networks that governed the area.
The Red Barrel killings constitute an extraordinarily difficult topic to navigate, and other acts of mass killings during the region during this period are likely still buried in history. The testimony of survivors like Ploy and the work of researchers and activists presents us with a glimpse into how these parapolitical apparatuses of state violence (the Village Defence Forces) operated alongside local elites (the corrupt contractor) and the institutional power of the Royal Thai Military. Again, a tremendous thanks to the work of Tyrel Haberkorn for her research on this topic.
The Carrot & Developmental Divergence
While the campaign of mass political violence was underway across the entire country, so too was a parallel project of rural development. In the northern region, investment manifested primarily through opium eradication policies, including royal project initiatives designed to integrate upland populations into the Thai agricultural economy. However, agricultural development in hilly terrain presents considerable challenges: difficult field clearance, problematic irrigation installation, and soil requiring substantial maintenance. Furthermore, many upland populations lack Thai citizenship and identification documents, severely limiting land ownership opportunities. This restriction extends to ethnic Thai populations as well, as vast northern areas were not incorporated into the land reform acts of the 1970s and 1980s, remaining royal lands designated as national parks. Farm tenancy remained high in northern paddy lands, and major infrastructure projects including highways, rail networks, electrification, and water systems remained inadequate. Consequently, resentment toward Bangkok never really diminished.
Similarly in Isaan, where policy centred more heavily on urbanisation across the vast plateau lands. Cities including Udon Thani, Ubon Ratchathani, and Khon Kaen received substantial urban infrastructure funding. Khon Kaen served as a flagship project, with the state constructing administrative offices that provided employment for hundreds of thousands of aspiring middle-class bureaucrats, along with state hospitals and universities. However, these projects concentrated on urban areas, while rural poor populations received minimal assistance beyond the opportunity of urban relocation. Many of those who relocated to Isaan cities were already centrally located Thai or Sino-Thai business owners from Bangkok and the central region. Millions of peasants remained landless and burdened with generational debt. The Isaan soil presents well-documented challenges, routinely suffering drought, flooding, and poor quality. These factors largely explain the subsequent success of Thaksin Shinawatra and his Thai Rak Thai (Red Shirt) party and the continued resentment towards Bangkok.
The Southern Exception
The southern region follows a markedly different trajectory. Over the past forty to fifty years, masses of plantations have been established, made possible by two key differentiating factors. First, vast tracts of the forested land in the south was freed by the land reform acts of the 1960s & 70s, which operated on a simple principle: clearing and agricultural development over a prescribed period entitled the settler to land title deeds. Second, the southern land is exceptionally high in quality, featuring good soil and favourable weather for constant crop rotations. Compared to the north, establishing a plantation in the south requires neither substantial labour nor financial investment, and farmers face neither the persistent threats of flood and drought nor the poor soil conditions characteristic of Isaan.
Infrastructure investment in the south, compared to other regions, then followed the favourable harvests- the motorway from Satun to Songkla for example appears notably advanced compared to the crumbling northern road network, with well-paved roads extending even beyond the main highways. These roads were financed through agricultural development funding, which facilitated settler migration for the cultivation of banana, palm, and rubber plantations carved directly from forestland.
The scale and productivity of southern agricultural operations substantially exceed what is typically observed in the north. Along the highway corridor between Songkla and Satun, numerous new roads descend from the mountains, most terminating as dead ends rather than connecting to adjacent provinces. This road layout, reminiscent of central Bangkok’s sois, represents classic counter-insurgency design. Its essential function is to prevent insurgent forces from using road networks to connect disparate villages, instead forcing them into separated channels that military forces can easily patrol and control, further evidence that the region has therefore not developed organically through community agricultural processes.
The consequence of these policies is that southern settlers obtained land ownership and achieved relatively comfortable livelihoods from agricultural production. While southern peasants are not wealthy in absolute terms, their economic stability substantially exceeds that of their counterparts in Isaan and the north. Indeed, this can be seen by the large numbers of economic migrants from Isaan & the North to the south. These southern farmers, whether consciously or not, participated in a mass counter-insurgency movement and experienced significant quality-of-life improvements during and after the communist insurgency. This experience reinforced the lesson that cooperation with the state produces tangible results. Teaching peasants that compliance with the state yields material rewards, while simultaneously providing genuine economic stability through land ownership, has produced a political constituency with little incentive for leftist or anti-Bangkok mobilisation. The absence of the chronic debt, landlessness, and infrastructural deprivation that characterise the north and Isaan has, in turn, deprived left-wing movements of their southern foothold. Combined with the enduring networks of reactionary local mafia that grew out of the aforementioned para-political anti-communist networks, the south has become what it is today: a region physically and politically shaped by anti-leftist counter-insurgency, where reactionary politics flourish.
A widely held theory of settler colonialism posits that such projects function as a kind of release valve for domestic socio-economic tensions. The idea, briefly stated, is that settler colonial projects—for example, those of the British and Dutch in the New World—served to resolve metropolitan tensions by displacing them onto new land and markets. To put the mechanism simply: a second son of a mid-level British nobleman, due to inherit no land and facing the absence of available new land domestically, represented a socio-political tension.
In previous eras, such an individual might have been compelled to enter a monastery or even raise an army to take his perceived inheritance by force. Under British settler colonialism, however, he could relocate to the Americas, where ostensibly ample free land was available, thereby resolving that tension. The same logic applied to the proto-proletariat stagnating in urban slums with no prospects. Emigration by boat to the New World in search of fortune similarly dissolved the tensions accumulating in metropolitan urban slums, insulating the proto-capitalist class and landowning elites. This programme continued into the independent bourgeois settler state of the United States, as settlers moved westward in the process of manifest destiny. More broadly, then, virgin land constitutes a mechanism for resolving socio-economic tensions while simultaneously opening new markets- at the expense of any indigenous inhabitants and, as is the case in the USA, creating a large reactionary base of petite bourgeois landowners.
Prem
If only one name can be referenced in this history, it is undoubtedly Prem Tinsulanond, a native of southern Songkhla province. Prem is the elite figure binding the para-political violence of the Cold War era to the financialised mafia networks that came to define the southern political landscape. As a general who rose to prominence commanding counter-insurgency operations in Isaan and later appointed as prime minister (in a civilian role, very democratic) from 1980 to 1988, Prem was central to institutionalising the state’s carrot-and-stick approach across the periphery.
While known for officially accepting the surrender of the Communist Party Thailand, much of Prem’s most enduring legacy was structural. He emerged as the linchpin of what has been termed the “network monarchy”: an informal but powerful coalition of military, judicial, bureaucratic, and business elites operating under royal patronage to manage political outcomes extra-constitutionally.
This network absorbed the remnants of the para-political militias, Village Scouts, and covert action units originally funded and organised by the CIA in the 1950s and 1960s. Under the umbrella of the network monarchy, they consolidated into what can only be described as financialized political mafias: hybrid entities that blended outright criminality (control over smuggling routes, extortion, gambling, and cross-border logistics) with formal political power, often in the form of The Democratic Party. Within the south, this transformation was particularly pronounced. The Democrat Party, despite its public veneer of royalist conservatism, became deeply enmeshed with these networks, embracing organised crime as a political and economic mechanism.
This created a reproductive political ecosystem in which violence had been successfully financialised, making it part of routine political management, having along with the more predictable machinery of patronage politics.
After stepping down as premier, Prem became president of the king’s Privy Council in 1988. During the era of Red Shirt protest (2006-2014), when the rural and urban‑poor- largely from North and Northeast of Bangkok- rose up against the coup d’etat of left-populist Thaksin Shinawatra, Thaksin himself publicly accused Prem of being the coup’s mastermind.
In April 2009, around 100,000 Red Shirt protesters surrounded Prem’s Si Sao Thewes residence in Bangkok, demanding an end to the behind‑the‑scenes interference of unelected elites. It was when the Red Shirts began to seriously challenge such elites that the same para‑political apparatuses that had been built during the anti‑communist campaigns were reactivated.
These networks operated in conjunction with the military’s 2nd Cavalry Division and plainclothes death squads later dubbed the “men in black”. The Democrat Party worked in parallel to supply the spear of counter-protesters who knew how to fight- the Yellow Shirts.
The southern region, Prem’s own home territory, supplied a substantial portion of the Yellow Shirt protesters who took to the streets of Bangkok during the mass mobilisations of 2006, 2008, and 2010. By the time of the 2010 massacres of Red Shirt protestors, the southern Yellow Shirt mobilisation had become the principal mass cover for an elite-led counter-offensive against Thaksin’s red-shirted supporters. Prem had been the lynchpin for successfully transforming the para-political inheritance of the Cold War into a financialised, electoral, and now highly mobile street-based machine capable of contesting politics in the streets, hand in hand with the military.
To This Day
The transformation of southern Thailand from a region of peasant agitation and insurgency to a stronghold of reactionary, ultra-royalist politics cannot be understood as an organic or inevitable development. Rather, it is the product of deliberate state policies executed over several decades, combining para-political network-building, counter-insurgency violence, and tactical land reform.
The para-political apparatuses established back in the 1950s created enduring structures of extrajudicial power that deployed frenzied violence against the peasantry, they outlived the communist threat and consolidated into criminal-political networks integrated with the politicised reactionary state and capital.
Critically, the south’s politics diverged from the north and Isaan because state land reform policies and rural development applied to exceptionally fertile territory, produced a settled peasantry that achieved land ownership and relative economic stability. Applying settler colonial theory as a release-valve model to resolve domestic socio-economic tensions. Southern farmers, having experienced tangible material improvement through compliance with state counter-insurgency programmes, learned that cooperation yielded results. The absence of the chronic debt, landlessness, and infrastructural deprivation that sustained left-wing mobilisation in the north and Isaan, combined with the continued presence of reactionary para-political networks, rendered the south a reliable base for right-wing royalist politics. The region was not born reactionary; it was made so through the intersecting logics of land distribution, the strategic channelling of state resources and violent counterinsurgency apparatuses that remains in place to this day.
Regardless of ideology, whether one is a royalist reactionary or a socialist revolutionary, class war and class domination is at its ugliest in spaces of hyper-exploitation like the palm oil processing plants of Surat Thani, or among the fishing fleets of Phang Nga. The history of the south, like all history, is one of a brutal war on those who sell their labour, on the poor. Many will point to essentialist readings of Buddhist doctrines or Islamophobia to explain this away, and to pigeonhole a population of millions as arrogant rightwing lizards. The reality though is that, lizards or not, these people are victims, be they the children of migrant workers from Isaan or the grandchildren of southern communists. The stranglehold of the reactionary para-political networks is deeply despised by those it continues to dispose, and despite its strength, this hold is breakable.
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