Da lama ao caos, do caos à lama : uma leitura do racismo ambiental a partir das barragens de rejeitos da mineração em Minas Gerais

Abstract

Over the last 30 years, there has been an increasing expansion of mineral exploration projects throughout Latin America. Mines, ports, railroads and tailings dams have been built in areas of environmental protection, rural settlements and traditional indigenous and quilombola communities. In Brazil specifically, mining has been one of the main economic activities since colonial times. The growth of large scale mining activities has been even more intense since the early 2000s, with a series of investments in the exploration of new areas and the intensification of production in already consolidated areas, as a result of Brazil's repositioning within the global market. The knowledge of enslaved blacks brought from Africa was used in the mines of colonial Brazil. The relationship between mining and the racial issue and today, their descendants are the most affected by mineral extraction projects, according to scientific studies. This thesis discusses the ethnic-racial composition of the surroundings of mining tailings dams in Minas Gerais, highlighting the impact of capitalism, coloniality and its devices on black bodies. The study concludes that the location of dams in areas with a high concentration of black people is not fortuitous, but the result of a process of environmental injustice that reproduces historical and structural inequalities. This research therefore not only provides quantitative evidence on the concentration of risks in black territories, but also invites us to rethink extractive and environmental policies from a social justice and decolonial perspective.