Entre o Mar de Lama e a Luta por Direitos: o Serviço Social nas Assessorias Técnicas Independentes na Bacia do Rio Doce

Abstract

The socio-environmental “disaster” in the Rio Doce basin, caused by the collapse of the mining tailings dam, articulates a mode of social (re)production, state (de)regulation and the struggle for reparation of rights in a national and Latin American scenario, historically marked by the violent expropriation of territories, environment and human lives! Given the context of environmental crime, among the professions required to intervene in the rights reparation process is Social Service. From this perspective, based on the concrete case of the socio-environmental “disaster” in the Rio Doce basin, we researched a specific socio-productive chain – from the production of iron ore to the violation-reparation of rights – the role of Social Services in this context. The objective was to analyze the professional practice of social workers included in the Independent Technical Advisory (ATI) teams of the population affected in the area adjacent to the collapse of the Fundão dam, in the municipalities of Mariana-MG and Barra Longa-MG, to identify the process of work, the demands and requests that arise for Social Service, the trends in professional practice. With this objective, we carried out bibliographical, documentary and empirical research, through the production of interviews with Social Workers inserted in the ATI and under the foundation of critical theory, the Marxist theory of dependence, we held the debate on central categories in the socio-environmental, a field under construction and competing in the category. The research hypothesis is that Social Workers included in ATI teams have the potential to break with the immediate, punctual and fragmented bias of Social Service interventions in the context of disasters. We assume that the Independent Technical Advice for the affected population is a space that enhances the professional practice of social workers aligned with the Social Service Political Ethical Project. This assumption was ratified in the research, in which the methodology used was content analysis, which allowed, from data analysis, to identify four fields of mediation: 1) Socio-educational dimension; 2) Investigative dimension; 3) Professional autonomy; and 4) Profile of the affected population. The results indicate that professional practice based on popular education, in collective spaces of construction and participation in the repair process, in articulation with social movements stand out as enhancing the performance of social workers aligned with the Social Service Political Ethical Project.