Fifty-four migrants died in the tiny truck headed for the resort town of Phuket after the driver abandoned the vehicle -- normally used for transporting seafood -- when its air conditioning failed Wednesday night.
Fourteen of the 67 survivors were minors who were almost immediately returned to Myanmar. The adult survivors were tried and convicted of entering the country without permission. Those who can't pay a $63 fine will be jailed for two months and then deported, police said.
The truck's owner has been detained. The truck driver and organizers of the smuggling are being sought.
Prosperous Thailand is a magnet for people from Cambodia, Laos and Myanmar who take menial and dangerous jobs shunned by Thais, and face exploitation in their efforts to earn a living. More than 1 million migrants from Myanmar are believed to be working in Thailand.
One hospitalized survivor said he came with his 19-year-old wife from Mon State, a coastal province in eastern Myanmar.
Ko Ko Lah, 32, said they paid about $380 each to a human trafficking gang to arrange the trip, meeting his fellow migrants on the southern tip of a peninsula just across a spectacular island-specked bay from Thailand's Ranong province.
They were taken at night by fishing boat to a quiet pier in Ranong town, where they were all crammed into the truck's sweltering container area, measuring 7 feet wide by 7 feet high and 20 feet long.
"The container was very jammed and dark, my wife and I were trapped in the middle, after about 30 minutes we found that we did not have enough air to breathe, everyone begged for help," he said. "I heard many people call the driver on mobile phones but it seemed he did not answer."
"It was horrible, I heard people screaming, shouting and banging on the walls until I passed out," he said. "I regained consciousness and found that I was lying on the ground, confused. I crawled to the roadside and found some water there to drink."
Ko Ko Lah said he married just four days before the incident, with hopes that he and his wife could find work on a rubber plantation in Thailand's Phuket or Phang Nga province, where three relatives had earlier found jobs.
"I do not know the fate of my wife, but pray that she is still alive," he said.
Others in the group were believed to have been seeking service jobs in Phuket's booming tourism sector.
Col. Kraithong Chanthongbai, police chief for Ranong's Suksamran district, said the truck's owner denied any knowledge of the smuggling but was being held on a charge of conspiring to traffic the migrants.
The U.N.'s International Labor Organization said the demand by Thai employers for migrant workers -- documented or undocumented -- "is continuing and may even be accelerating. However, the formal systems of recruitment are not working."
It called for the Thai government to overhaul its system for employing foreign workers.
The reason for the failure include "a slow and expensive migrant registration system, a breakdown in the sending countries' abilities to provide the initial documentation required and legitimate concerns of migrants who are worried that they will not be able to change employers, even if they suffer abuse," said the ILO.
"Within such an environment, trafficking for labor exploitation is bound to flourish," it said.
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