The crimes of mining companies and the popular struggle towards mining

Abstract

This narrative is the result of the round-table “Mariana, Barcarena, Brumadinho: mining and environmental crimes”, at the III Latin-American Congress of Political Ecology, in March 2019. We present the crimes in mining activities and the experiences born among the resistance to extractive projects that threaten the planet’s integrity and human life. We seek to understand and investigate the reactions to these projects, assessing economic, social and geographic dimensions. This transdisciplinary perspective contributes to understand that socioenvironmental and sociotechnical crimes are not isolated, and that extractive projects of mining companies are a result of a logic of global capital expansion and of a territorial structure where the mining activity takes place. This logic of accumulation is not only horizontal, with the expansion of the extraction frontiers, but is also vertical, because it penetrates the deepest parts of the earth, water, air and all the nature and living beings.