In a small dimly-lit room at the Burmese immigration office, on the border of northern Thailand and Burma, there is a large, luminous portrait of General Than Shwe, festooned with medals and ribbons.
His steely gaze surveys the hundreds of foreign tourists who cross the border bridge to visit the ramshackle, open air market at Tachilek each day. He is also the embodiment of the strict and relentless censorship of everything, from poetry to the latest Rambo film (set in Burma), controlled by his Orwellian regime.
Less than 50 meters away, under the bridge on the Burmese side, you can buy, for a little over a dollar, films depicting the sexual abuse and torture of British, American, European and Asian children. Some are aged as young as four while none is older than 12.
And unless you are a saffron-robed monk, you will not be searched on the way back across the border into Thailand.
While the market at Tachilek is notorious for fake designer goods, dubious precious gemstones, the teeth, skulls and skins of endangered animals and phony pharmaceuticals, the child pornography is real. The tears and shrieks are not the result of dubbing or digital manipulation.
The graphic footage of a five-year-old Cambodian girl having her arms strapped to her legs with electrical tape before being subjected to unspeakable violations is unrehearsed.
The diminutive seven-year-old British girl who is raped by a 200 pound, black-hooded man while another man films, has been deceived by a man she trusts.
The Indian girl, aged about six, wearing only school socks and shoes has not been groomed to look like a primary school student — she is one. And she is violently raped.
While the fake designer goods are mass produced for a large diverse market, thousands of such films are sold exclusively to a dedicated group of connoisseurs by the world's most malevolent cottage industry.
The market and the bridge crossing at Mai Sai are well known to international human rights groups, NGOs and law enforcement bodies as strategically important to regional human trafficking and narcotics smuggling.
On the Burmese mountains and in the dark ravines there are dozens of makeshift camps where ethnic minorities, uprooted, persecuted and displaced by Burma's military regime, seek refuge. Many of them make their way to Thailand to find work.
On the Thai side, in the lowlands of rice and corn fields, are hundreds of crumbling orphanages