The dead River, Rio Doce – Brazil, 2018
In Regencia, a small Brazilian seaside area, the tragedy in which a toxic mud ravaged the Rio Doce River, haunts the city and the entire shores of the river.
Since November 5, 2015 and the rupture of the dam holding back waste from an iron mine owned by Samarco group, an alliance of Australian BHP Billiton and Brazilian Vale industries, life has not been the same.
This industrial and ecological tragedy has not only submerged three villages, killed 19 people and ravaged the fauna and the flora, it has also destroyed a routine, a peaceful happiness. In Regencia reins from now on indolence, boring and melancholy of the past life.
How did it come to this? Samarco continues to minimize his responsibility and to argue that this tragedy is additional of ravages provoked by more than a century of gold iron and other metals exploitation from the Minas Gerais region, which have forever polluted an historic river. The company is not completely wrong. But this argument doesn’t make it less guilty, no more than the other mining companies supported by Brazilian governments.