Violência, memória e novas gramáticas da resistência: o desastre da Samarco no Rio Doce

Abstract

Based on the Samarco disaster, ongoing in the Rio Doce since 2015, the article reflects about forms of violence production around institutional and political practices that make neo-extractivism possible in Brazil.Thus, it points to processes such as the revision of laws and the dismantling of environmental protection institutions and agencies responsible for policies related to indigenous, quilombolas and traditional peoples rights; the displacement of politics to the police, signaling the strategies of criminalization of social movements, mediators and researchers by transnational extractive groups and the State. Finally, it presents new modalities of resistance that, in this ethnographic case, by updating elements of traditionality, such as the celebrations proper to popular Catholicism, stand for autonomy in face of the conventional models of political action under both market and State discipline. To make this analysis, the text triggers the heuristic principle of scale variation that intertwines global, national and local processes in the reproduction of historical patterns of violence that, on the other hand, give rise to new efforts of subjectivation in the territories.