The crime/disasters of Minas Gerais: Brumadinho and Mariana, cities devastated by mineral commodities

Abstract

Keywords: mining, environmental crimes, public policy, environmental policy, urban policy, commodities

On January 25th, 2019, in the Brazilian city of Brumadinho (Minas Gerais), in the metropolitan area of Belo Horizonte, Córrego do Feijão’s tailing dam breached. On occasion, more than 250 people were dead, including residents of the site and workers, and some remain missing.

The dam was part of the infrastructure of Vale S.A. company, a multinational mining company that used to be a Brazilian State company, privatized in 1996. The so-called accident happened less than five years after a similar one in Mariana and Minas Gerais.

Even though the accidents happened during different governments, the first was when Fernando Pimental (Workers Party) was the governor, and the second was when Romeu Zema (Novo) was the governor. In both situations, the Secretary of the Environment was the same. It is worth pointing out that the two governors were in opposition.

While the Workers Party can be considered a leftist or center-leftist party, Novo is regarded as a neoliberal and explicitly rightist party, leading to questions about the reasons to maintain the same person in an important position.

There is an ongoing process of reparation, responsibilization, and accountability of the responsible. Several lawsuits were filed against the company, and several attempts to reach agreements between the State, the company, and those impacted by the breach are taking place in different institutional instances.

Multiple stakeholders are involved in the ongoing processes, and this research focuses on the post-disaster. The first step is to identify the stakeholders, their interests, and the formal and informal coalitions to understand the broader picture and possible outcomes. Those stakeholders are but are not limited to residents’ associations, unions, professional associations, different actors of the State (and all the federation branches), NGOs, and social movements.

The primary purpose of this research is to comprehend the responsibilization, reparation, and accountability process, taking into account a matter of legality and a critical approach to the impacts and how to adequately address them.

The results of the discussion should give insights into how policies should address environmental disasters related to mining. That is one of the reasons why this will not be a work focused only on analyzing if the current legal framework is being respected. However, if it is appropriate to address such risks, once Brazil is a country that still relies a large part of its economy on commodities, such as iron and other extractivist products.

The interests of the communities and environmental sustainability will be the center of the discussion, aiming for a harmonic approach to inhabited space and social, economic, cultural, and natural needs.

The main objective is to understand if the State’s rationality through the tools of legality and policies can provide more adequate answers for the expectations of those affected. Also, it aims to build an open model design for public policies to be used in similar cases in which vulnerable populations will have to face the bureaucracy to be repaired, get financial reparations and hold the ones responsible accountable.

The work will be conducted on a dialectical approach of questioning the institutionalized legality to empower those who need them, to manage the legal system as it is, and at the same time to be able to criticize how it works or its existence itself if needed. Humans and non-humans and their relations with the environment will be the focus of the model to be developed, not profit. It also analyzes how the economy still relies on commodities and their connections with large scales of production.

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