“Attention, attention! This is an emergency! Attention, attention! This is a real emergency situation involving a dam collapse. Leave your homes immediately. Use the escape route to get to the meeting point, then remain there and await further instructions.”

At 4 a.m. on Feb. 8, 2019, residents of four villages Barão de Cocais municipality, in the Brazilian state of Minas Gerais, were awakened by this message blaring over loudspeakers, with sirens also going off. This was just two weeks after the collapse of a dam holding back mining waste, or tailings, in the nearby municipality of Brumadinho, that killed 272 people.

That prompted Daniel Neri, a physics professor at the Federal Institute of Minas Gerais, to conduct a study, which later culminated in a thesis on what’s now known as “dam terrorism.” “It’s a strategy of dispossession,” Neri says.

He points out that shortly after the collapse of the tailings dam at the Córrego do Feijão iron ore mine in Brumadinho, companies that provided services to the iron ore industry in Minas Gerais suddenly declared that the safety certifications for some dams, known as the DCE, were no longer valid. This was despite the fact that most of these dams weren’t even due for their routine assessments by Brazil’s national mining regulator, the ANM.

“In other words, DCEs guaranteed that the dams were safe,” Neri says. “Then, the certifiers revoked the DCEs, and the dams began to be considered unsafe. As a result, mining companies could use this supposed lack of safety to terrorize residents — with the aggravating factor that it was not even the time established by the ANM for this type of certification. This was one of the main reasons for people to suspect that the whole thing had been forged.”

The idea for the research came in 2019, when Neri learned about this alleged scare tactic by mining companies from a long-running environmental monitoring project by medical researchers at the Federal University of Minas Gerais (UMFG). “After UFMG’s Manuelzão Project exposed it, we quickly realized that many residents had doubts about the real risks of some dams that had been suddenly ascribed risk classifications, such as Sul Superior in Barão de Cocais, and B3/B4 in Nova Lima municipality,” he says.

Then came a 2020 study by Klemens Laschefski, a professor at UFMG’s postgraduate geography department, that coined the term “dam terrorism” and showed how it was used to carry out “hidden land grabbing.”

“Daniel Neri attended a course in which I presented my work on what I used to call ‘dam terrorism’ in debates with environmentalists,” Laschefski says.

His work, in turn, originated from two workshops he held with people forced to move from their homes due to the alleged risk of dam collapse in Barão de Cocais (later studied in more depth by Neri) and in São Sebastião de Águas Claras municipality.

According to Laschefski, Neri’s research is very relevant as it presents many elements and empirical data to support his initial hypothesis, consolidating the concept of dam terrorism. “Neri’s work provided evidence of a strategy adopted by mining companies to influence not only the population but also government institutions and the courts through fear,” he says. “His thesis makes an important contribution to understanding the actions of mining companies in the political arena.”

Sirens in the middle of the night

Neri says the main purpose of his research was to demonstrate that some dams had their risk levels artificially inflated in order to force people from certain areas. “Other questions emerged throughout the research, such as how can companies subvert the licensing and inspection procedures for these structures at so many agencies,” he says, citing the Minas Gerais state environmental department, or SEMAD, mining regulator ANM, and the judiciary.

“What was this coordinated action that enabled these companies to achieve their corporate goals?” Neri adds.

The main conclusion, he says, is that Vale, the Brazilian mining giant behind the Brumadinho mine and several others across the state, used dam terrorism to get people removed from the four villages of Socorro, Piteira, Tabuleiro and Vila do Congo in Barão de Cocais’s São João River Valley. This would then allow it to carry out a large-scale mining project in the area: the Apolo project.

According to Neri, Vale is now trying to get the project licensed for the sixth time. “Since 2020, Vale began to transfer its mining rights to other companies, under a ‘mini-mines’ scheme,” Neri says. “In other words, instead of getting licenses for a large mining project, it works with several small ones, operated by smaller companies. And that is exactly what it is doing now.”

Neri says the main evidence for the practice of dam terrorism is the way the removals took place. In the case of the Socorro community, he says, the DCE safety certification for the Sul Superior dam was abruptly declared canceled at a meeting on Feb. 7, 2019 — 13 days after the Brumadinho disaster. “At the time, the ANM, SEMAD, the prosecutors’ office and the Barão de Cocais municipal government decided that people would be removed, but there was no abnormal condition, no sign of risk, no change in the structure, and Vale itself says so in its reports.”

To make matters worse, Neri says, residents were evacuated at night, amid the sounds of sirens and loudspeakers blaring “Attention, this is a real dam collapse situation.” “Every day for two weeks, people had been watching the removal of hundreds of bodies from Brumadinho on TV,” he says. “Then, in the middle of the night, sirens went off indicating real risk, even though the evacuation had been decided in the afternoon. It’s clear that they used the terror of the tragedy in Brumadinho to make people leave everything behind.”

Life under Vale’s control

Leaving everything behind is what engineering geologist Ana Carla de Carvalho Cota had to do on Jan. 19, 2022, but because of another dam. She lived in what she calls the death zone of Vale’s Doutor dam in Mariana municipality, Minas Gerais — formally known as the self-rescue zone such because the risk is considered so high that rescuers won’t venture there in the event of a disaster. “It was raised to emergency level 2, and the company announced that it would remove everyone who lived within the [zone] as a precaution,” Cota says. “If the dam collapsed, the sludge would reach my house in six seconds.”

Cota and her two children, aged 12 and 14 at the time, were removed, together with all of their neighbors — around 600 people. Since then, for two years and nine months and counting — the family has been living in a room at the Providência Hotel in Mariana. “We are barely surviving, without proper conditions for a family and the healthy development of my children,” Cota says. “It’s not a home; it doesn’t provide the basic conditions for the healthy development of two children.”

For her, living in the hotel is like being a prisoner on work release. “I have the right to go out, but I must be back at the hotel to sleep at night,” she says. “My life is controlled by Vale; our daily meals are at the hotel; we’ve lost autonomy in our lives. And that’s sickening. To this day, I don’t know what my future will be like. I haven’t received any compensation, I no longer have my own home, and all of this remains invisible. Vale continues to deny me my rights.”

As bad as living at the hotel has been, the self-rescue zone was no better. “Living there until the removal caused irreversible damage to my health,” Cota says. “Because the fear, the panic of a collapse in the dam, especially during periods of heavy rain, was what we call dam terrorism, promoted by Vale in our territory. I was diagnosed with panic syndrome at the time. There were many crises. Every time it rained and I was at home in the zone, I’d have panic attacks. I also developed atopic dermatitis due to prolonged stress, and I started having uterine bleeding.”

Vale’s response

In response to Mongabay’s request for comment, Vale issued a statement from its press office in Portuguese, which we’ve translated below:

Vale states that any attempt to suggest that the company uses schemes to obtain any type of benefit is unfounded. Vale acts in a transparent, responsible manner, and it is committed to ethics and strict compliance with the law.

Additionally, the company will monitor the watercourses. If any changes are detected, replacement will be carried out as required by law. It should be noted that the flow will be replaced with the same water from the aquifer, without changing the volume or quality of the water.

 
Banner image: A wedding portrait in the ruins of a home after the November 2015 collapse of a Vale tailings dam in Mariana municipality. Image by Romerito Pontes via Flickr (CC BY 2.0).

This story was first published here in Portuguese on Oct. 9, 2024.

Citations:

Neri, D. (2023). Terrorismo de barragens: Estratégias de despossessão produzidas pela mineração de ferro em Minas Gerais (Doctoral dissertation, State University of Campinas, Campinas, Brazil). Retrieved from https://www.repositorio.unicamp.br/acervo/detalhe/1373977

Laschefski, K. A. (2020). Rompimento de barragens em Mariana e Brumadinho (MG): Desastres como meio de acumulação por despossessão. AMBIENTES: Revista de Geografia e Ecologia Política, 2(1), 98. doi:10.48075/amb.v2i1.23299