arino D’Ângelo Júnior regularly takes antidepressants and medication to help him sleep. A former resident of Paracatu de Baixo, a district of the city of Mariana in the Brazilian state of Minas Gerais, the 54-year-old says he has lost his sense of self since, forcing him to live in a rented property near the centre of an environmental disaster that shocked the world eight years ago.of the collapse of the Fundão tailings dam near Mariana.
The dam – which was managed by Samarco, a joint venture between the Brazilian mining company Vale and the Anglo-Australian company BHP – collapsed on 5 November 2015, and caused mining waste to flow nearly 700km down the Rio Doce into the Atlantic Ocean, devastating everything in its path. No one has yet been held accountable for the socio-environmental disaster. BHP, Vale, Samarco and eight other defendants stand accused of environmental crimes in a Brazilian court case that has been dragging on for seven years. They are due to face a judge for questioning
This is the case of Thatiele Monic Estevão, who travelled halfway around the world last week to address the board of BHP during the company’s AGM in Adelaide. “You are killing us,” she said, “There is no way of measuring how much we lost and how much we continue losing to this day. It’s irreparable,” says Anderson Krenak, 39, a leader of the Krenak Indigenous people.“My people feel isolated and abandoned,” says Wakrewa Krenak, 32, a female leader from the same community. “We believed that Watu was a father and a mother for our people. He would give us food and medicinal plants. Everything was the river.