By Edilene Santos on January 28, 2021.
Photo: MST
With the Brumandinho dam collapse that killed over 270 people in 2019 always in their memory, the women of the MST fight against agribusiness and capitalism, always in favor of life.
The population in general has suffered from continued exploitation and precariousness of work, reconcentration of land, mining exploration, expansion of ports, duplication of roads and railways. As a result, it is women who are the most affected and mining is the sector that has caused the most deaths, including mutilations and mental illnesses among women workers.
It is women who suffer from overwork when there is a shortage of water or when there is an increase in pollution caused by mining. They are the caregivers of their sick relatives, with asthma, bronchitis, cancer, among other illnesses also caused by mining. That is why the women of the Landless Rural Workers Movement (MST) affirm that their struggle is against agribusiness and capitalism because it is the root cause of their misery.
In 2007, these women dared to occupy the Capão Xavier Mine of Mineração Brasileiras Reunidas (MBR), part of the Vale do Rio Doce mill complex in the metropolitan region of Belo Horizonte. The occupation was part of the national day of women’s struggles in Via Campesina, whose slogan was “Peasant Women in the Struggle for Food Sovereignty and against Agribusiness”.
The women argued that the elements of nature are the basis of life and are not commodities. Capitalism advances in the world, without respecting limits or laws, putting the life of all living beings and humanity in its path at risk. We also denounce that mining companies pollute water, degrade nature and recklessly evicts countless families with the construction of dams.
In 2016, women broadened the struggle against agribusiness and dared to denounce the mining model that the country has adopted, which, among other effects, resulted in the collapse of the Fundão dam in the Mariana-MG region in November 2014. In March 2017, landless women from Minas Gerais occupied Eike Batista’s land and resisted in the Maria da Conceição camp in Itatiaiuçu, in the face of the predatory mining model that surrounds the Paraopeba basin.
And in January 2019, the bean stream dam in Brumadinho collapsed. The action of the women in the Southeast region was a break of silence and an affront to those who, even in the face of the crime committed by the mining company VALE, the representatives of companies and the state continued defending their mining expansion as if nothing happened by reinforcing and linking the dependence of the region on mining.
In this sense, we know that resistance in the territories depends a lot on the women who are the most affected by the crimes of capital, and for this reason we need to denounce daily the project of death that is behind this mining model.
Source: Resumen Latinoamericano, translation North America bureau