Resource Fever

When a young, unemployed, leftish-leaning Canadian journalist—as Arno Kopecky describes himself—heads off to South America to investigate a shootout between the Peruvian military and native people protesting against foreign oil and mining operations, you know someone is going to get a serious drubbing. If a lot of the companies in question are Canadian, and if Canadian government fingerprints are all over the disaster—in the form of a free trade agreement and aid programs “helping” the government with its mining legislation—then you might well anticipate a protracted rant aimed at Canadian mining firms and Ottawa.

That, surprisingly, is not what you get in Kopecky’s The Devil’s Curve: A Journey into Power and Profit at the Amazon’s Edge. Kopecky has, in fact, told several tales in a single book. One is about how a murderous clash on a stretch of Peruvian highway known as the Curva del Diablo came to pass. The second, interspersed with the first, is about...