A Sea of Mud and Feelings

Bringing Visibility to the Tragedies of Mariana and Brumadinho

I still vividly remember, during my freshman year of high school, walking to the bus stop after school and seeing graffiti all over Belo Horizonte, with the message: Vale assassina (Vale [Mining Company] murderer). It was 2019, and I recall hearing my fellow students debating between classes, unsure whether they should refer to the recent events as accidents or crimes. Brumadinho, Vale’s Córrego do Feijão dam had just collapsed, unleashing Brazil’s largest humanitarian disaster.

At home, I watched as my mom called our relatives who lived in Brumadinho to check in on them, while my dad complained about canceling his annual fishing trip due to the current state of the polluted rivers in the Minas Gerais state. As the years went by, these moments faded away: the graffiti was painted over by the government; my friends stopped talking about the incidents and my dad found somewhere else to fish. One mural, though, was especially remarkable and stuck with me to this day. It said: Vale’s inhumane people, you are worth nothing. Interestingly enough, the mining company’s name, Vale, originally comes from the Doce River valley but also means worth, value, in Portuguese. In a profit-driven world where accountability and responsibility come in second place, how much is life truly worth?

Street art in Belo Horizonte in 2019 condemning the mining company Vale. Source: personal archive.

In 2015, in Mariana, the Samarco-operated Fundão mining dam collapsed, releasing 1200 million cubic feet of iron ore tailings into nature and impacting 38 municipalities in what would become Brazil’s largest socio-environmental catastrophe. Less than four years later, in 2019, history repeated itself: in Brumadinho, Vale’s Córrego do Feijão dam collapse triggered the beginning of the world’s longest rescue operation in history, lasting more than a thousand days. Beyond their immeasurable human and environmental impact, these tragedies were marked by the impunity of the negligent companies involved and the continuous fight for justice by the affected communities. Nowadays, nine years after the Mariana disaster and five years after the Brumadinho disaster, Vale, the world’s largest producer of iron ore and pellets, remains among the top three most valuable Latin American companies.

After the second disaster, the company momentarily lost around a quarter of its value, but the market quickly forgot about the 291 lives lost in both tragedies, which included both dedicated employees and local residents. Community leaders, survivors and sympathizers, however, remain fighting for justice and reconciliation until today and are committed to not letting the disasters fall into oblivion.

 Source: Jornal G1.

The invitation to help organize the panel series on predatory extractivism on campus on April 11 and 12, 2024, aroused both excitement and fear in me. As an intern at the DRCLAS Brazil Studies Program, I saw it as an opportunity to raise awareness about the dangers of aggressive mining practices and discuss their ongoing challenges in my home state, Minas Gerais, where iron mining represents about 15% of the state’s economic profit. At the same time, it was clear how arduous it would be to appreciate the different perspectives on such a delicate topic and ensure that the best people would be invited to rightfully represent their communities. Finding specialists on the matter, surprisingly, proved to be one of the first and main challenges, as the field is yet underexplored in academic spaces despite its global relevance and multidisciplinary character. Such obstacles only made it clear how impactful and enriching discussions between local leaders, professors and attorneys could be, setting a precedent for the need for continuous collaboration and investigation to combat predatory extractivism.

Even though I had some previous knowledge of the disasters, it was only after I read Tragédia em Mariana by Cristina Serra, and Arrastados by Daniela Arbex, that I started grasping the complexity of the crimes that transpired. Both dams had numerous records of structural instability and maintenance inconsistencies that were knowingly overlooked by the companies’ management team and leadership. Government and third-party inspections had expressed safety concerns regarding the dams’ structure for years, but the corporate response was a stark decrease in safety investments prior to the accidents. Even the emergency responses proved to be problematic—for many, the financial reparations were used to win over the community and over-benefited people who could sustain themselves without that support. The environmental restoration efforts were insufficient, to say the least, and the displaced communities’ lifestyles have been completely destroyed, with significant parts of their culture and history neglected.

Numbers cannot make justice to the aggressiveness of the avalanche of toxic sludge and mud, moving in waves that surpassed speeds of 62 miles per hour and immediately killed victims upon impact—one survivor described it as being sucked into a giant blender. Overall, more than 950 body parts have been identified only in the Brumadinho area, and, in many cases, the victims had lost even the skin that gave them color and had mud inside their internal organs. Testimonies of survivors and relatives of the victims are emotionally overwhelming, as these carry the pain of lives unfairly interrupted in such heartbreaking ways and the hardship of living with the trauma and void that haunts the ones left behind. Years after the events took place, the affected communities are still plagued with the burden of involuntary displacement, physical and mental health issues, constant self-harm attempts and the erosion of social bonds.

A broken, mud-covered photo hangs on a damaged wall, a glimpse of the personal loss left behind after the Mariana dam disaster. Photo by Douglas Magno Third image: Before and after images of the Bento Rodrigues town and the Rio Doce region after the Brumadinho dam disaster. Source: Jornal O Tempo.

The dangers of predatory extractivism are numerous, and its impacts are long-lasting, especially for the environment. After the Fundão dam breach, the mudflow polluted 112 tributaries and 373 miles of the Doce River, which covers an area larger than Austria, Ireland or Scotland. In the river’s first 63 miles, the biocide sludge annihilated all forms of microscopic and macroscopic life, killing more than 14 tons of fish and leaving hundreds of thousands of people without water for weeks. Indigenous communities, which rely on agriculture and fishing, watched powerlessly as their sacred land and rivers became permanently infertile and contaminated by heavy metals.

Described by a survivor as crimes without perpetrators, the catastrophes in Mariana and Brumadinho still have pending lawsuits. In Mariana’s case, the litigation process was started in 2016, with 21 people accused of the death of 19 victims and of causing harm to 250 injured people. However,  significant delays in the legal proceedings have stopped the process from moving forward. Simultaneously, the largest class action lawsuit in the world, with more than 700,000 plaintiffs, was filed in 2022 in the courts of England and Wales, in an international attempt to bring justice and closure to the victims and their families. In the aftermath of Brumadinho’s tragedy, some employees were investigated and accused of premeditated murder and severe environmental crimes, but up to this day no one has been held accountable for the  crimes. Amidst several legal and jurisdiction challenges, justice is yet to be attained—although the companies have reached legal settlements and compensation agreements with the government and the population, there is ultimately no sufficient reparation for death, and impunity prevails.

On April 11 and 12, I sat in the back of Harvard’s Tsai Auditorium, attentively listening to Andresa Aparecida, president of the Association of Families of Victims and People Affected by the Córrego do Feijão Mine Dam Crash in Brumadinho (AVABRUM), Alexandra Andrade, treasurer of AVABRUM and Mônica dos Santos, member of the Fundão Dam Commission of Affected People (CABF). They had come all the way from Brazil to share their restless fight for justice and legacy. I was taken aback by their strength and commitment to ensure that the memory of victims and impacted communities would endure, no matter how much time has passed and how relentlessly the companies tried to move on from their crimes.

The panels were marked by powerful statements on the impacts of the tragedies on people’s loss of identity, life satisfaction, sense of the future and fruitful discussions on what proper remediation would look like. All panels had at least one community leader give testimony,  as well as law and environment specialists—an essential mix to blend firsthand perspectives with expert analysis, underscoring the importance of integrating insights from grassroots leaders in academic spaces like Harvard. Other distinguished guests included Mônica Viegas, who studies health-related quality of life losses among affected communities, André Carvalho, who is actively working to create media spaces to preserve the memory of victims, and Guilherme de Sá, who was working alongside the public ministry to promote the reparation of rights in Mariana. Despite the hardship of addressing such topics, the panels also provided space for laughter and smiles, as well as the celebration of hope for justice soon and dreams of a future in which similar crimes will no longer happen.

Panel discussion with Márcia Castro, André Luís Carvalho, Mônica dos Santos, and Alicia Yamin.

For me, those highly emotional days can be summarized in two words: luto e luta (mourning and struggle), constantly emphasized by members of AVABRUM. Luto, because the crimes took 291 valuable lives, destroyed historical communities and irreversibly affected the ecosystem, and luta, because the road to justice is long and winding, with several amendments yet to be made. Those who have survived bear the weight of having to keep going forward and upholding the memory of those gone. Despite all the grief, they have successfully managed to turn their pain into fuel to keep fighting and prove that it is possible to move away from predatory extractivism if human and environmental safety are prioritized over profit and criminal companies are properly held accountable for their wrongdoings.

For an outsider, the most striking aspect of the panels might be how the guests referred to the victims who lost their lives. In the aftermath of the tragedies, media channels and powerful figures would use different terms to describe what took place, in accordance with their interests and perspectives. For some, it could be described as disasters, crimes or accidents, while others called them events or incidents. Similarly, the subsequent impacts could be labeled as damage or harm, or even as consequences or results. The main source of contention, though, was reaching an agreement on how to call the people who suffered from the dam collapse. Were they victims? Affected people? Casualties? In an attempt to fully appreciate the uniqueness of these individuals and emphasize their true value, which can never be compensated through reparation agreements, family members and community leaders came up with the term joias [jewels] to refer to those who have passed away. That is how much life is worth: it is priceless and irreplaceable.