The Devil’s Curve: A Journey into Power and Profit at the Amazon’s Edge
By Arno Kopecky
Douglas & McIntyre, 306 pp., $29.95
Arno Kopecky, 35, has been working as a freelancer for the past decade since graduating from the University of Victoria. He recently participated in an alumni reading sponsored by the Department of Writing as part of UVic’s 50th anniversary celebrations. In The Devil’s Curve, Kopecky has written an intelligent, witty and informative book about his year of independent research in both Peru and Colombia. In his travels, he met Indigenous leaders, visited their villages, and surveyed the rivers and forests put at risk by North America’s lust for gold. Kopecky trusted to the hospitality and decency of the local Awajun people he met, and his book illustrates both their struggle and Canada’s complicity through its free trade agreements. The Devil’s Curve is a must-read for all Canadians; throughout the book, Kopecky asks the questions we all should be considering; he presents an international problem in compelling human terms. Lynne Van Luven met Kopecky on his recent visit to Victoria and conducted this interview with him later. Sanguine in the face of his publisher’s fiscal troubles, he is now working on a new book about the Northern Gateway project and its proposed tanker routes in West Coast waters.
Can you talk a bit about what event (s)was/were the catalyst for the research that lead to Devil’s Curve?
On June 5, 2009, the Peruvian army opened fire on a crowd of 3000 Awajun Indians who had been camping on a stretch of highway known as the Devil’s Curve for 57 days; it was a scene straight out of Francisco Pizarro’s conquest of the Incas, and it made international headlines by noon of that same day because a few journalists were on hand to record the attack (not me – I got there four months later).
The tragedy grabbed my attention because I was planning a trip to that part of the world at the time, to look into the free trade agreements Canada was then signing with Peru and Colombia. Thinking about free trade can quickly become an exercise in abstraction, but suddenly here was this very concrete example of the human consequences these deals can have. The reason those Awajun had been blockading the highway was to protest the free trade agreements that were locking in the rights of foreign companies operating on their territory…and so the traveling research began.
From reading your book, I learned a huge amount, both about Canada’s part in mining the Amazon and about the feisty Awajun people; in fact, I realized how seldom national media covers these issues. Was educating the public part of your goal in writing the book?
Interesting to hear you say that, since the one review that has come out about this book so far criticizes me for not being informative enough – I’m too gonzo, spend too much time drinking with natives and slum dwellers, not enough time interviewing corporate CEOs…
At any rate, I did want to educate the public, but I didn’t want to bore the hell out of them, so I ended up writing something that kind of slips between (occasionally inebriated) travel narrative and (sober, I promise) investigative journalism. South America may not be in the news much lately – a good sign that much has improved in the last fifteen years – but I do think everyone’s heard the story about the bad corporation despoiling the good Indian’s land. It’s not a subject that tends to captivate readers who aren’t already interested in these things, and the people I most want to reach are precisely those who aren’t normally interested in these things. For that you need a lure, and mine was story.
Whether my story’s any good or not, I dunno, but at least bad writing was not among my aforementioned reviewer’s complaints.
Well, I think the writing is terrific. You traipse across a lot of territory in Peru and Colombia in your narrative, yet you manage not to overwhelm the reader with unwieldy amounts of data. Was there a key organizing principle behind that achievement?
I wish I had an organizing principle, and not just for writing. But when I look back on it, I realize that I stuck pretty close to the notes I took during my year of travels. These were basically journal entries of compelling scenes, impressions, interesting conversations…
One big structural question was how to juggle the two stories at the heart of this book, one taking place in the Peruvian Amazon and another taking place in the city of Medellín, Colombia. In the end, I decided to keep the two countries out of one another’s chapters, which made my life (and hopefully the reader’s) a lot easier.
The Awajun’s struggle against North American mining firms, including Canadian Dorato Resources, seems to me to be incredibly brave, but the book left me wondering how optimistic you are about their chance of success. Can you comment?
Dorato is a gold exploration company with some prime real estate in Awajun territory, but their stock hasn’t budged above nine cents despite several years of enthusiastic reports. They’ve had a couple devastating exposés in the media – David Suzuki executed them in a documentary called The Real Avatar – so for a number of reasons I actually am quite optimistic that the Awajun’s water source will not be drenched in mercury or arsenic any time soon.
As for the bigger question about how to reign in the resource extraction firms now having a field day in Peru and Colombia, and basically everywhere on earth – for me, this is one of the stories of our times, and no it isn’t looking good at the moment. We’re eating up our world at a terrifying rate. But Obama’s just been re-elected as I write this, and I find hope creeping unreasonably into all current outlooks.
There is so much about The Devil’s Curve that presages the current resistance on the West Coast, especially amongst First Nations leaders, to Northern Gateway and Kinder Morgan. You planned that, right?
Obviously. It took all my powers of persuasion to convince Stephen Harper and Natural Resources Minister Joe Oliver to wait until I’d finished writing The Devil’s Curve before they started elaborating their theory of foreign-funded radicals and obstreperous Indians blocking Canada’s foreign-funded path to prosperity. Thankfully, both gentlemen co-operated, and then repeated almost verbatim the same arguments I first heard emanating from the presidents of Peru and Colombia.
That gave me just enough time to spend the summer and fall exploring the Northern Gateway’s proposed tanker routes, on a sailboat between Kitimat and Bella Bella. I’ve just returned home from that misadventure and am writing it up now – a Canadian sequel to The Devil’s Curve, assuming I can find someone to publish it!