O jogo da reparação: a vida social das políticas do pós-desastre em Mariana (MG)

Abstract

On November 5th, 2015, in the city of Mariana (MG), the Fundão dam, owned by Samarco Mineração SA, collapsed and released millions of cubic meters of toxic mining tailings in the Rio Doce Basin. This work analyzes the reparation and compensation programs that followed this event, henceforth called post-disaster policies. The main issue addressed concerns the ways and means by which different actors – institutions and individuals – negotiated, in conflictive or non-conflictive manners, what came to be established as reparation. To that end, I analyzed legal regulations, formal structures, programs, interactions, conceptions and discourses aiming at identifying the processes and dynamics that constitute what I call the social life of programs, pervaded by the reparation game. In this way, it was possible to identify the five axes by which the reparation is negotiated: who should repair, who should be repaired, what should be repaired, how should the reparation be designed and when should it occur. The research is mainly based on participant observation and formal interviews conducted during fieldwork in the city of Mariana (MG), in January and August 2019. In addition to contributing to the specific understanding of the consequences of the Mariana dam collapse, this work belongs to the field of social studies of disasters and dialogues strongly with studies on policies, both predominantly marked by the methodological and theoretical interaction between anthropology and sociology.