Chapter 8 - From the muddy banks of the Watu: The Krenak and the Rio Doce mining disaster in Brazil

Abstract

On November 5, 2015, the iron ore tailings dam known as the Fundão Dam, owned by the Samarco Mining Inc. Company, a joint venture involving Vale S. A. and BHP Billiton Brasil Ltda, collapsed in the municipality of Mariana, Minas Gerais. Around 50 million cubic metres of mining waste were released into the Rio Doce and carried for over 600 km to its mouth on the Atlantic Ocean. Among many communities deeply affected are those of the Krenak indigenous people who inhabit the left margins of the Doce river. Based on historical and ethnographic description of the Krenak and the conflicts they have experienced in their territory over the years, the chapter analysis how this people found themselves affected by the Rio Doce mining disaster. Six years on, the disaster prevails as a process constantly renewed in the everyday life of privations to which all the affected groups have been subjected. For the Krenak people, the Watu is much more than a river that provides food, leisure, watering for animals and irrigation, a natural resource, in short, for survival. It is a relative with whom they establish relationships. A relative that welcomes, counsels, protects, and contributes to the construction of the Krenak person. Their loss, thus, poses a challenge to the Western justice system: the recognition of rights that can be formulated from other systems of valuation, based on cosmovisions and ontologies that question the reach of the forms of commensurability and translation imposed by the Western world.