{"id":127710,"date":"2019-02-11T12:00:53","date_gmt":"2019-02-11T12:00:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=127710"},"modified":"2019-02-18T11:00:52","modified_gmt":"2019-02-18T11:00:52","slug":"disaster-capitalism-in-brazil-mining-greed-produces-a-horrific-death-toll","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2019\/02\/disaster-capitalism-in-brazil-mining-greed-produces-a-horrific-death-toll\/","title":{"rendered":"Disaster Capitalism in Brazil: Mining Greed Produces a Horrific Death Toll"},"content":{"rendered":"

A Mining Disaster in the Brazilian Town of Brumadinho<\/em><\/p>\n

7 Feb 2019 – <\/em>On January 25, 2019, a dam burst in the town of Brumadinho, north of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The dam was built by the iron-ore company Vale to store residue after the iron ore had been extracted. Once the dam began to crumble, it did not take long for its 13 million cubic meters of iron waste to sweep down onto the workers and into their town.<\/p>\n

Approximately 300 people have been killed in this disaster. Many more have been injured. Within four hours of the breach, the sludge had swept down into the Paraopeba River, threatening to pollute the entire region\u2019s water.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Fl\u00e1vio Tavares\/Hoje em Dia\/Futura Press<\/p><\/div>\n

Accidents That Are Not Accidents<\/strong><\/p>\n

It is difficult to focus attention on these disasters, which are not really disasters. On April 18, 2018, nine months before the dam was ruptured, Vale admitted in an internal document that the dam was weak and that its collapse would cause a large loss of life. It mentioned the fact that in the sludge\u2019s path was the workers\u2019 cafeteria. The dam burst just after noon. Workers were in that cafeteria eating lunch. They took the first brunt of the mud\u2019s force. This is what had been predicted by Vale\u2019s study, which was leaked to the press after the disaster.<\/p>\n

It is also what Brazil\u2019s Mining Agency had found last September. It said that the dam had a \u201clow risk of rupture,\u201d but that if the dam went, it would have a \u201cstrong impact\u201d in terms of loss of life and environmental damage. The agency had obviously miscalculated regarding the chance of rupture but had been correct in terms of the impact.<\/p>\n

Men Who Never Pay<\/strong><\/p>\n

Vale, a Brazilian firm whose market capitalization is at $77.4 billion, is one of the world\u2019s largest producers of high-quality iron ore. Last year, Vale announced record profits from its sale of iron ore. The Chinese economy has slowed down, which means Chinese firms are more circumspect when it comes to sourcing iron ore. Vale produces low-impurity iron ore, which produces less pollution and allows steel mills to improve their blast furnace productivity. This is why Vale has seen an increase in its sales and its profits. Warnings about dam ruptures and other accidents were not going to interrupt the flow of money into Vale\u2019s coffers.<\/p>\n

The Brazilian government has hastily gone after local-level managers, but it has not touched senior management including F\u00e1bio Schvartsman, one of the most powerful Brazilian businessmen. Two years ago, the UN Environmental Program and the Norwegian foundation GRID-Arendal did a study<\/a> of mine failures and found that most of them gave sufficient warnings and that these warnings could have led to prevention of the disasters. \u201cThe tragedy,\u201d they wrote in their study, \u201cis that the warning signs were either ignored or not recognized by under-resourced management.\u201d It is these \u201cunder-resourced managers\u201d who often hold together the undercapitalized mines that are pushed hard to produce more to increase the firm\u2019s overall profits.<\/p>\n

Policy is not set at the level of the mine, but from the boardrooms. No one like Schvartsman, however, is going to pay the cost. People like him will stand alongside the Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro and cry crocodile tears. There will be no real reform of the system, since any real reform would undermine the economic and political power of men like Schvartsman.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Sacrifice Zones<\/strong><\/p>\n

Brumadinho lies squarely in Brazil\u2019s sacrifice zones. Living in these zones are people who are being treated as disposable\u2014people whose land is being destroyed as corporations drive their giant excavators to tear into the earth and to leave the soil polluted and the landscape destroyed. The large corporations have declared a war against the planet, their machinery digging deeper and deeper to make mountains of profit for the few as many millions of people perish into starvation and disorientation.<\/p>\n

The sacrifice zones are in every country, from the lands on which live Native Americans in North America to Adivasis in central India. No tree is safe, no stream is to be left alive.<\/p>\n

As long as the newspapers keep Brumadinho and Vale in the news, the corporations will keep their heads down. Vale has already been forced to stop its operations at the Brucutu mine, the second-largest in Brazil after Vale\u2019s Caraj\u00e1s\u2014the largest iron-ore mine in the world. But all this is temporary. Vale knows that business will proceed once the tears have dried.<\/p>\n

Not far from the Caraj\u00e1s mine, Vale has vast concessions to extract copper, gold and manganese\u2014putting it at odds with nature and the local residents, the Kayapo community. In 2015, the Kayapo community asked<\/a> a professor from the Federal University of Par\u00e1 to measure the water in the Catet\u00e9 River. The professor\u2014Dr. Reginaldo Saboia de Paiva\u2014found<\/a> shockingly elevated levels of iron, chromium, copper and nickel in the water. The polluted water is what the Kayapo community must use, even as it poisons them. They live in a sacrifice zone. They are being sacrificed so that Vale can make its fabulous profits.<\/p>\n

The capacity of the Kayapo to take on Vale and the Brazilian state is negligible. President Bolsonaro has appointed General Franklimberg Ribeiro de Freitas to run the indigenous affairs agency (FUNAI). Neither Bolsonaro nor Franklimberg has any care for the survival of the Kayapo. Policy will support the bulldozers and the heavy diggers, the mining and the agro-business corporations. There is money to be made, nature and people be dammed.<\/p>\n

Canada\u2019s Ugly Side<\/strong><\/p>\n

The firms know that. Franklimberg had been on the advisory board of Belo Sun, a Canadian mining firm with its tentacles in Brazil. Belo Sun is not the only Canadian mining firm to operate in Brazil. Most of those with their machines deep into Brazilian earth are from Canada\u2014Barrick Gold, Reunion Gold, Kinross Gold, Jaguar Mining, Largo Resources, Emerita Resources, Equinox Gold, Yamana Gold and Leagold Mining Corporation. Along with the British firm Anglo American and the Australian firm Mirabela Nickel, these firms take a pause each time there is a disaster and then proceed all guns blaring into the sacrifice zones.<\/p>\n

If you are confused by Canada\u2019s role in the Lima Group that seeks to overthrow the government in Venezuela, pause and read about the Canadian companies that are tearing South America apart<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The Brazilian Solicitor General Andr\u00e9 Mendon\u00e7a went to the town of Brumadinho and said that Vale must change its behavior. Vale said that it would cooperate with the authorities and it would provide support for the families who had been affected. The right noises have been made. There will soon be silence. And then the sound, once more, of the engines from the 793F CMD Caterpillar 240-ton trucks as they carry iron ore away from the mine, away from the sacrifice zone.<\/p>\n

_______________________________________________<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/em>Vijay Prashad is an Indian historian, editor and journalist. He is a writing fellow and chief correspondent at <\/em>Globetrotter<\/a>, a project of the Independent Media Institute. He is the chief editor of LeftWord Books<\/a> and the director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. <\/em>He is the author of 18 books, including <\/em>Arab Spring, Libyan Winter (AK Press, 2012), <\/em>The Poorer Nations: A Possible History of the Global South (Verso, 2013), Red Star Over the Third World <\/a>(LeftWord, 2017) and The Death of the Nation and the Future of the Arab Revolution <\/a>(University of California Press, 2016).<\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original – go.ind.media<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

7 Feb 2019 – On January 25, 2019, a dam burst in the town of Brumadinho, north of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The dam was built by the iron-ore company Vale to store residue after the iron ore had been extracted. Once the dam began to crumble, it did not take long for its 13 million cubic meters of iron waste to sweep down onto the workers and into their town.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":104534,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[224,180,53,55,61],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-127710","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-human-rights","category-brics","category-latin-america-and-the-caribbean","category-capitalism","category-environment"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/127710","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=127710"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/127710\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/104534"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=127710"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=127710"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=127710"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}