The collapse of a dam in the State of Minas Gerais left 270 people dead in 2019. Other dams are at risk of collapsing, endangering the lives of local and indigenous communities. Recently, prosecutors indicted 11 Vale employees, including its former CEO Fabio Schvartsman, and five TÜV SÜD employees on charges of homicide and on counts of environmental crimes.

CONSEQUENCES OF THE COLLAPSE

The collapse of a dam in the city of Brumadinho, Minas Gerais, in the southeast region of Brazil, in January 2019 caused the death of 259 people and the disappearance of 11 others. The dam held mining tailings of the Brazilian giants Vale. Its crash resulted in the destruction of many homes and the contamination of the River Paraopeba, which the indigenous community Naõ Xohã is heavily dependent on. A wave of 11,5 million cubic metres of waste affected 147,38 acres of vegetational areas.

THE BRUMADINHO COLLAPSE IS NOT AN ISOLATED INCIDENT

The tragedy in Brumadinho is not the first one of its kind. In 2015, the rupture of a dam, owned by Vale and BHP Billiton, in the municipality of Mariana, also in the state of Minas Gerais, killed 19 people and contaminated the River Doce, the land where the indigenous Krenak community lives.

UN REPORT

The Brumadinho case was recently cited in a Report by the United Nations on Global Extractivism and Racial Equality. The UN Special Rapporteur on Contemporary Forms of Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia, and Related Intolerance, Tendayi Achiume, affirms in the report that the extractivist industry frequently violates the human rights of ethnic and racial minorities, indigenous peoples, and other marginalised communities. She writes: “the recent collapse of a dam owned by an iron ore mining corporation, Vale S.A., in Brazil, in addition to killing hundreds and releasing almost 12 million cubic metres of mining waste, also threatens the very existence of indigenous groups in the area”.

She continues: “colonial-era sovereign inequality persists, and models of extraction that rely upon or produce racial, ethnic and indigenous exploitation remain a reality”.

OUTCOMES OF THE INDICTMENT

In the indictment, the prosecutor of the Brumadinho case, William Garcia Pinto Coelho, confirmed that Vale, with the support of TÜV SÜD, produced a great amount of technical information about various dams owned and managed by Vale that were internally recognised as dams with an unacceptable risk profile. Aside from Minas Gerais, Vale owns tailing dams in the State of Pará, in the north of Brazil. In 2018, a leak in a dam in the city of Barcarena contaminated the rivers Murucupi and Pará, risking the livelihood of the indigenous-quilombola communities that reside in these lands. The Xikrin indigenous community, that inhabit between the rivers Xingu and Cateté, are surrounded by Vale’s mining projects.

As many local and indigenous communities are exposed to dangerous situations, the Agência Nacional de Mineração (National Mining Agency) created an online monitoring system of the situation of mining dams within the national territory, giving the local people the option to check the risk level of the neighbouring dams. The monitoring tool can be accessed at SIGBM.