Deaths in the Mud: Law and Grievable Lives in Minas Gerais

Two hundred and seventy-two people died in the mud that poured out when the Vale dam near Brumadinho broke on 25 January 2019. At the time of writing, 63 dams across Brazil are categorised as dangerous by the National Mining Agency, including 41 in Minas Gerais. Three are assessed as level 3: ‘imminent rupture or is occurring’. Drawing on empirical work with groups affected by the tailing dam collapse, this chapter explores how the law has produced mass death in this context. Drawing on Butler and Mbembe, the discussion includes the intersections of death, law, necropolitics, necroeconomy, and the disposability of life. The chapter first analyses how Vale reacted to the deaths resulting from the Vale dam rupture and forms of compensation that, we argue, are a way of avoiding accountability, while those affected demand engagement with other forms of legal response that might allow the elaboration of mourning. We discuss the intersection of those experiences with legal distributions of risk and reward that make past and future deaths good for business. The chapter then examines the judicial system’s response and questions whether it has delivered justice or merely reinforced the necropolitical and necroeconomic cycles, producing deaths that cannot be grieved. Finally, the chapter explores the role of the law in making justice for the deaths at Brumadinho and examines the timid advances of the judicial system to provide other approaches that we suggest can offer some resistance to the dominant trends highlighted earlier in the chapter.