Abstract
The recurrence of disasters as evidenced by the collapse of iron mining tailings dams in Minas Gerais, coupled with the repeated threats of disruption, has brought into question the neoextractivism as a driving force of the Brazilian economy. Based on ethnographic cases in Minas, the paper addresses the disaster as a crisis that includes elements of criticality and chronicity, event and process. In this sense, beyond a critical event, the analysis approaches the structuring dimensions of disasters, identifying their historical, political, institutional and socio-environmental patterns in the context of neo-extractivism. Emphasis is given to the slow violence, represented by the deregulation and dismantling of the environmental governance set up in the country since the 1980s; and by the economy of visibilities both in the environmental assessment of large projects and in disaster reparation, which accentuates the geography of the projects (or of the “mud”) above the geographies of social territories.
Keywords:
disasters; neoextractivism; crisis; environment