Violence, resistance and women’s voices in the Samarco disaster, Brazil

The rise of neoextractivism as a driving force of development in Latin American countries has been followed by environmental deregulation and the violation of rights established since the country's re-­democratisation in 1988. In the state of Minas Gerais, the recurrence of mining disasters points to disruptive and fragmenting social processes, which call into question the trust placed in modern expectations of control and security. Against this backdrop, the political subjectivities of people affected by mining are constructed through multiple paths. Based on long-term ethnographic research on the governance of the Samarco disaster in Rio Doce, Brazil, the article looks at the diversity comprising the universe of the women affected to understand how they express their experiences of fighting for reparation. Resistance is an experience that profoundly transformed their subjectivities and lives, launching them into processes of learning, networking, struggling and achieving. Taking ecofeminism and Latin American political ecology as a reference, the analysis points to the limits of the male perspective that generally prevails in the formulation of governance mechanisms, which are rarely guided by an intersectional dimension, thus contributing to aggravating the harm caused to women.