A wave of mud: the travel of toxic water, from Bento Rodrigues to the Brazilian Atlantic

Uma onda de lama: viagem de águas tóxicas, de Bento Rodrigues ao Atlântico brasileiro

For people who did not live in Bento Rodrigues or surrounds, news of the wave of mud came through newspapers but also, later, through activist artistic representations. These are examples of our first sort of wave talk: works in which the wave image is mobilized to keep alive in memory the sudden, but long-in-building, disaster of corporate engineering, to prevent the event from being silently erased.

In May 2017, one of us attended a play entitled Hotel Mariana, about the disaster. Staged at Estação Satyros in São Paulo, the play consisted of actors speaking the words of people from Bento Rodrigues who had been interviewed by the director of the play. The play began in quiet darkness-a darkness broken by recorded sound, the recreated noise of the breaking dam and the following, disastrously rushing water. One might think back to an early report on the burst, which gave an account of the sound of the event: “Then there followed a cloud of dust and the fluttering of birds. The villagers realized there was something wrong. In a matter of minutes, screams and horns filled the streets: the wave of mud was approaching”¹⁸. With the dam constructed in part of sand and silt (an earthen dam, made using a hydraulic landfill system), which was likely saturated by water over many months¹⁹, the sound may also have been of the dam’s “liquefaction”²⁰. In the play, it sounded like the crash of a wave-reminiscent of a dark Biblical story of the creation of a world from water, though bringing destruction rather than creation into being. The sound of the wave resolved into the voices of confused people-a reverse tower of Babel, with the people not the constructors of a collapsing structure, but victims of a corporate construction project gone wrong. Eventually the audience heard from all of the people on the stage. Each actor wore headphones, repeating the words of survivors to whom they were listening (the “Verbatim” mode of theatre). Hotel Mariana offered “intimacy without proximity”²¹ a replaying of the disaster to make the wave matter to those brought into this virtual witnessing.

Wanting to find out more about the aftermath of the disaster, and the negligence that led to it, one could turn to an interactive, virtual-reality-styled documentary published on YouTube in April 2016, five months after the burst. “River of Mud”, directed by Tadeu Jungle, features images that allow the user to navigate in 360º. A narrator’s voice is interspersed with voices of Bento Rodrigues villagers who remember life before the disaster. The movie allows the user to navigate, using her mouse, images of debris, personal objects, dead animals, and destroyed plants, now covered with muddy orange water.

The documentary shows what is left after the wave has torn over the landscape. Attention centers on sound-that evanescent phenomenon always passing into memory. The viewer/listener hears: (1) a bell (not a siren, which some commentators argue would have saved lives); (2) a priest who remembers the screams of villagers on the day of the breach; (3) a couple who sing a mournful song²² while standing where their house once sat; (4) a teenager singing “Beyond the Blue River,” in a mud-filled church (“beyond the blue river, the streets are golden and crystal, there everything is life, everything is peace, death and crying no more, sadness and pain no more”²³); (5) an inconsolable woman crying. The narrator concludes with a demand for a Memorial to Mariana²⁴.

The director later commented that he sought to create a narrative contrasting “sweet” memories (a reference to the river’s name (Doce)) with “the scorched earth.” He hoped with virtual reality to create empathy and anger, declaring that: “my aim is for these criminals to be blamed, to be arrested, and to be held accountable for their crime”²⁵.

Both play and documentary move beyond the simple relay of images, which, on their own, in excess, might produce an anesthetic effect²⁶-or, for the people affected might exacerbate the pain²⁷. The fast violence of the wave is arrested in time, preserving the chaos caused by the event²⁸, a guard against the wave washing over or aiding in the forgetting of the calamity, as river waters sometimes do²⁹. These artistic activist representations make the past a part of the present and of a cautionary future.

In December 2015, researchers from different disciplines at the Federal University of Espírito Santo traveled up the Doce River to visit localities at Espírito Santo that depended on the river’s waters for power, fishing, and leisure³⁰. A report, dated 16 November 2015, provided updates on two Doce River hydroelectric plants: the Baguari dam, in Governador Valadares, and the Aimorés hydroelectric power station, at the border between the states of Minas Gerais (MG) and Espírito Santo (ES). The operation of both plants had been halted, given fears that toxic water could damage turbines or spillways. Regarding Aimorés, the news reported that officials were “monitoring the situation of the arrival of the wave in the Doce River, through the bulletins issued by the Brazilian Geological Survey… and its field team”³¹.

This team joined the mayor of the municipality of Baixo Guandu, on the border with MG, and interviewed him. Baixo Guandu had drawn the attention of the public, institutional agents, and mining companies because of an occupation that protesters were staging on the rails of the Vitória-Minas Gerais Railroad (through which iron ore is transported between Minas Gerais and the Port of Tubarão, in Vitória, Espírito Santo). The occupation responded to the dam break and the subsequent dispersal of tailings. It was also a response to the mayor making public a laboratory analysis of the waters of the Doce River. A Brazilian news agency reported:

The result of the laboratory analysis of water samples collected from Doce River in Minas pointed to levels above the acceptable concentrations of heavy metals such as mercury, arsenic, iron and lead in the mud that flowed into the river with the disruption of the dams in Mariana (MG). The Mayor of Baixo Guandu (ES) […] confirmed the information. “To give an idea, the quantity of arsenic found in the sample was 2.6394 milligrams, and the acceptable is at maximum 0.01 milligram,” he clarified. […] “We practically found the entire periodic table in the water. I want to see what the president of Vale will do to help all the people,” he said³².

The mayor reported that the municipality had 31,000 inhabitants and survived on an economy based on agriculture, retail, and granite mining. It was also home to 260-270 professional fishermen. “Why does the city exist?” he asked. “Because of the water. We are a river!” Water was life-and politics. The mayor was mindful of avoiding conflicts over water distribution of the sort that had unfolded at Governador Valadares, Minas Gerais, upstream, and Colatina, Espírito Santo, downstream. The present was thus a moment of anticipation: “The mud has not arrived. It is coming to Valadares now. The solid, dense matter is arriving slowly”. This was also true for a worried populace: “Before arriving, the mud generated a wave of rumors.” Wave language mattered here as a material-semiotic relay and organizer of emotion and affect³³.

Several solutions had been presented in anticipation of the mud. People considered displacing the mud to a crater or using the floodgates of the Aimorés hydroelectric plant to block the mining tailings. This last possibility was discarded because of the risk of damaging plant equipment. The mayor also recalled how the hydroelectric plant had been created in the first place-that the course of the Doce River had been diverted by 12 km, so that the lake and the powerhouse were in Minas Gerais, and not in Espírito Santo, a position of political subordination that was now having potentially toxic effects: “we are here in the Espírito Santo state, so we are the recipient of the garbage”. The muddy water thus flowed into many histories³⁴. As Franz Krause suggests, drawing upon fieldwork along the Kemi River in Finnish Lapland,

Water does not simply flow; it flows in certain rhythms of varying intensity, tempo and direction negotiated by human labour, infrastructure, the weather and the river bed… Fishing and hydroelectricity production illustrate precisely that flow is about the articulations of different kinds, directions and tempos of movement. Flow is not simply an antithesis to stasis. Flows of particular materials move through, along or past particular other flows, which in turn influence how they flow³⁵.

The wave of mud changed the “intensity, tempo, and direction” of the Doce River’s social-natural flow. Talk of the wave of mud called for thinking about how to manage the unexpected yet inexorable, the artificial and toxic mixing with and poisoning the putatively natural.

After the dam of Fundão broke, one of us traveled to the village of Regência Augusta, more than six hundred miles down the river, meeting apprehensive citizens who continued their daily activities even as they anxiously anticipated the influx of water. Kids played in the waters of the river, fishers headed out to sea, surfers paddled out to the waves. There was uncertainty, and, in Espírito Santo, legal and administrative measures were taken when the color of the water changed at the mouth of the Doce River. Beaches were closed, and residents were left with water of dubious quality³⁶.

The minister of the Environment downplayed the effects of tailing dispersion in the ocean³⁷. Engineer Paulo Rosnan of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro also sought to minimize environmentalists’ concerns about the effects of tailings in marine waters: “At sea […] There will be only one very large colored patch that will disperse normally, as the spots that come out of the rivers are dispersed in times of great rains” ³⁸. The company also claimed the waste was not toxic.

But waves of mud eventually did appear at the shore, as one can see in photos from Regência Augusta, which show surf breakers contaminated with iron ore. If, in Hughes’ (2005) account of the Limpopo River, water animates imaginations of virtuous futures (for conservation biodiversity activists), here there were contests between corporate apologists who imagined the wave as a simple “patch dispersing” and others who saw the wave repeating and amplifying its risks, its negative potentials, again and again, reincarnated in brown ocean waves-signs of the travel of inland pollution into coastal ecology.

On 25 November 2015, after the mud reached the ocean, a meeting was held among governmental and military authorities, technicians working for ES state agencies, academics, and residents of the municipalities affected. The governmental authorities were considering strategies of action, focusing on mitigation that might come from financial relationships with Samarco and its partners, representatives of which were present. The majority of participants had institutional links recognized by the government, and, at the same time, it was not a public hearing. Discussions centered on a federal maritime presence in the ship Vital Oliveira, whose purpose was to conduct studies near the mouth of the Doce River, on the presence of “heavy metals and other components” in the water³⁹. The environmental management body of ES presented a matrix of impacts. Some measures undertaken at the time were: removal of animal bodies and their disposal in landfills; establishment of bases of “governance” in affected municipalities; installation of oil spill containment buoys at the mouth of the river; and monitoring of water quality. Local communities viewed these interventions with suspicion. Kane writes that, “coastal infrastructure is the material and symbolic dimension of the state in confrontation with nature”⁴⁰. And, here, in confrontation, too, with local residents.

During this meeting, one person from the federal environmental agency worried that the two hydroelectric plants, Aimorés and Mascarenhas, were clogging with sediments. Animals killed upstream were sources of concern: “death in the river is very high, tons and tons.” Since the movement of sediments near the coast was monitored daily, the same agent pointed out that an increase in turbidity at the shore had been observed. Researchers in the natural sciences avoided the image of mud, preferring the terminology of a plume of sediments, so also avoiding the wave rhetoric, which emphasized suddenness and unstoppable agency. Staying away from what had become the charged language of mud, describing the substance in more scientifically neutral terms (and neglecting the possibility that the “sediment” contained toxins), effectively naturalized the disaster.

The image of the wave of mud, though, was used in another event focused on the Doce River event, convened by legal professionals. If rivers are natural-cultural sites were people argue over potentials, good and ill⁴¹, this meeting might be read as a social drama⁴². It was held in October 2016, at UFES, and included (1) a public defender; (2) a lawyer; (3) a public prosecutor; and (4) a resident of a fishing village who identified herself as affected by Samarco’s mud.

The public defender emphasized the difficulties of defendants in dealing with human and nonhuman effects of the dam break, linked to the wide territorial extension of what he called environmental damage⁴³. He, along with other legal professionals, social scientists, and affected communities, did not consider official concepts of victimhood and territorial extension satisfactory in addressing the damage⁴⁴. The lawyer took an accusatory tone⁴⁵: “We’re not just talking about toxic sludge sweeping to the Atlantic Ocean. We’re talking about the biggest social-environmental crime in the history of this country! We are speaking against a criminal company!”. In this speech, emphasis was given to the ways the Brazilian state, through weak environmental and safety regulatory frames, had enabled and protected transnational corporations devoted to extractivist activities, such as mining and oil exploration⁴⁶. The wave of mud was materialization and symbol, then, of the problems of Brazil: “I usually say that the Samarco crime has become emblematic because it reveals several Brazils. The first Brazil I see in this mud, killing people, is colonial Brazil.” Other “Brazils” were punctuated in this speech-the “patrimonialist, privatist Brazil,” the “antidemocratic Brazil”, “the Brazil of the hidden negotiations” and, finally, aspirationally, a “Brazil of resistance”. The sweeping toxic sludge carries with it these forces, all at once. There is a larger implication, too, about colonial histories of mining reaching into today’s multinational enterprises.

Coming third at this meeting was a speech by the public prosecutor, following a more academic argumentative line. He defended the necessity of the development of “a legal technology that could give account of documentary measurements being made by the responsible entities.” He also spoke in defense of “rights”. He told a story:

A professor has recently been here at the university offering a new classification of collective litigation. Do you know what he presented as an example? Disputes about irradiated nature. It’s like you throw a rock in a lake and it sends out waves. It’s like that with the dam-those around the dam are hit, the environment, the fauna and the flora, those who live along the river, those who drink the river water, those who live on the river. Everyone is struck.

The analogy here between radiation and a wave suggests that there is an originating cause for the disaster. The wave, in other words, did not happen by itself. As Geertz⁴⁷ has suggested, “Theory-whether scientific or not-advances primarily thanks to analogy, a kind of understanding that ‘sees’ what is less intelligible through a comparison with the most intelligible”. In this pronouncement, the appeal to analogy made a case not just about the laws of nature, but also about the criminal law that might point to who has responsibility and guilt.

The final pronouncement came from a resident of a fishing village. She spoke about the effects of the mud on human health and on other beings: “So they will dredge the sea? Can they get it out of the sea? And with regard to the contaminated fish... a fish does not have a GPS! You can’t tell it ‘Stay here!’ The fish that is on your table, which you are eating, is contaminated!”. For this resident, the disaster was part of a larger pattern of destroying artisanal fisheries; she associated the dam disruption with previous development projects. She doubted reports about the water conditions that had been produced with Samarco financing: “If I were the company, I would never pay anyone to produce evidence against me! No matter how credible this lab is, I would not believe this lab”.

Haraway has written that “Nobody lives everywhere; everybody lives somewhere. Nothing is connected to everything; everything is connected to something”⁴⁸. These were precisely the sentiments expressed in the speeches of the lawyer and the resident, making their earthly and watery claims. As Kane⁴⁹ observes about the politics of rivers, “actors involved in aquatic struggles track back and forth, linking events in hinterlands to cities, making the patterns of exploitation and resistance legible to wider audiences.” These are arguments about riverine potential⁵⁰. They are also posed in terms of the direction of the flow-or “fluvitory” dimensions; space-making happens in “‘riverbank inhabitants’ engagement with and stories about… [a] river’s flows, especially in fishing, travel and transport”⁵¹. Waves and flows have a powerful directionality to them. Here the wave of mud comes from the past to the future, from the corporately controlled inland to the fishing and recreational coast.

Figure 2
Comboios beach with mining tailings in seawater Regência Augusta. Nov. 2016⁵²

During Creado’s fieldwork in Regência Augusta, she took pictures of children’s schoolyard paintings of the Doce River. One showed a pure blue wave colliding with a dirty wave of mud. In the foreground were references to the village, including its lighthouse. In the two inscriptions we read, on the left, “water is the source of life”, and on the right: “this mud is not ours”. Reading from left to right gives existential priority to the blue wave, and to water as life. If a thing comes to be alive when it moves, the wave and the mud have been woven into the imagination of the village and its daily life⁵³. The image refers to the repetitive character of social time and the recurring and never-fully-over disaster and crime of Samarco. The wave of mud has washed into and continues to exist in the waves of the sea.

Figure 3
Children’s painting in school of Regência Augusta. Sept. 2017

The negotiations being made to secure an agreement between the two Brazilian states (MG and ES), the companies responsible for the Fundão dam and the governmental agencies responsible for environmental and indigenous protection were neither transparent nor democratic. Neither did these discussions admit questions about the viability of mining as such nor query the politics or beneficiaries of the technocratic language of “risk”. They resulted in an agreement, signed on 2 March 2016, that created the Renova Foundation, meant to implement socioenvironmental and socioeconomic programs to deal with the consequences of the dam disruption⁵⁴. Renova has as founders Samarco Mineração S.A., Vale S.A. and BHP Billiton Brazil Ltda., the very companies responsible for the disaster (its community advisory board, meanwhile, does not have the power of imperative decisions⁵⁵). In Portuguese, the name Renova means “Renew our Renewal”-but activists have taken to calling the organization rather “The Crime that Renews Itself”-an association bolstered by their reading of the organization’s logo, a closed circle that loops together companies and leaves out citizens, activists, and environments.

Figure 4
A repurposing of the Renova Foundation logo. Found on Facebook, Oct. 2016.

The circularity of this design evokes the recurring wave, but also the continued, looped presence of toxins, scattered to the sea every time it rains, and/or when the waters of the ocean become turbulent and the mining tailings are brought to the surface; the mining tailings have now been made part of the hydrosocial cycle⁵⁶.

How did the image of the wave matter in the iterations we have traced here? For residents and activists, the image emphasized the Samarco burst as fast violence, a force out of place, a becoming-physical-organic-poisonous of a corporate mistake. For people at Baixo Guandu, it created a sense of dread and anticipation. For people at Regência Augusta it was about the future and, after it arrived, became a physical-material ghost of a disaster that kept replaying, repeating, re-breaking as contaminated ocean waves. Company bureaucrats and state engineers sought to downplay the disaster, avoiding words like wave and mud, preferring the more putatively neutral and technocratic plume and sediments. Wave talk thus united as well as divided people⁵⁷. Kane suggests that “Both the researcher-writer and the activist […] must learn how to creatively link the rather technocratic subjects of water management and environmental crime to cultural impulses for change and social justice”⁵⁸. In examining the rhetorical and political work that the figure of the wave of mud has (and has not) done, we have hoped to offer new ways of thinking about the links between river management, environmental crime, and justice.