On 25 January 2019, an ore tailings dam broke in Brumadinho, Minas Gerais, Brazil, releasing a tsunami of toxic mud that instantly killed 272 people, invaded the course of the Paraopeba River, and destroyed homes, gardens, forests, and everything in its path. Based on an ethnography conducted with the inhabitants of Brumadinho in 2022, I try to understand the complexities of this disaster, which extends in time and space - a disaster that begins with the mountain torn apart by extractivism and continues in what I call the dust-presence of Vale (the mining company responsible) in the city and in the medicalization of social suffering that arrives with the mud. Based on the weaving of these images from the field, I seek to think about the ways of living in a world in processes of destruction, with the following problem as a guiding thread: what can the Brumadinho disaster and the extractivist and colonial relations that built it and that are built from it tell us about the ways of living a particular end of the world? To this end, I try to escape from dominant discourses that insist on the separation between health and environment, basing myself on indigenous theorists such as Ailton Krenak and Davi Kopenawa, who point out that, for traditional populations, extractivism and illness have always gone hand in hand. It is based on this that I attempt to reflect on the transformation of social suffering through medical frameworks of mental health, understanding that this process of medicalisation of pain ends up once again hiding and reiterating extractive colonial contexts that produce disasters.
