Collision on ‘Devil’s Curve’ claims at least 48 lives
HIGHWAY CRASH
Death perches at Devil’s Curve, no matter which one.
At least 48 people were killed Tuesday when a bus collided with a tractor-trailer and plunged from the sliver of highway running along Peru’s coastline. Helicopters buzzed overhead to pluck six survivors from the wreckage and recover bodies strewn across the rocky beach about 260 feet below the highway. There were also three people missing from among the 57 total passengers, The Associated Press reported.
Locals have christened the stretch of highway north of Lima “The Devil’s Curve” because of its proximity to the cliff and regular blankets of fog complicating navigation along its tight turns, where tractor trailers roar to and from the capital. Numerous accidents have occurred at the site, the AP reported. At least 37 people died in a threebus accident involving a truck in 2015 further north, and 51 Quechua people were killed when their bus fell off a cliff into a river in 2013.
The U.S. State Department prohibits diplomatic staff from traveling by motor vehicle outside Lima at night, especially as bus passengers, because of threats of armed bandits and poor road conditions.
Yet that is not the only Devil’s Curve in Peru. In the north, near Ecuador, where the jungle and jagged Andes peaks collide, indigenous protesters in 2009 clashed with police over federal plans to increase oil drilling and mining in the Amazon.
A coalition of indigenous people responded with protests culminating in the Battle of Devil’s Curve that June.
Peru is roughly the size of Texas, California and Oklahoma combined, with at least 20 mountains eclipsing 19,000 feet in elevation. Enormous sprawl and high elevation draws roadways snaking out from Lima. In the northwest Amazon basin, the 5N highway terminates near a protected reserve — one way in for oil transport, one way out to the highways leading to the northern coast.
Thousands of indigenous people made their stand at Bagua. Highway 5N is carved from steep terrain beside a river in a series of turns coined to open the road. Before dawn, police fired tear gas into the crowd, and protesters alleged that helicopters raked them with gunfire.
“The number of people injured is unimaginable,” reported Carlos Flores, a journalist for Radio La Voz de Bagua, according to Emily Schmall’s recounting of the incident for World Journal in 2011. “They’re strewn all over the highway.”
At least 34 people were killed by gunfire, including 23 police officers, the government alleged, though the numbers were disputed by both sides. Journalists reported seeing police dump bodies in the nearby Utcubamba River, Schmall wrote.
Then-Prime Minister Yehude Simon resigned following the incident and Congress repealed at least one drilling authorization that led to the protests. Protesters charged with violence at Bagua were acquitted in 2016.