The Brazilian mining giant Vale has agreed to pay US$7 billion in compensation for a deadly dam collapse that killed 272 people.
The Brumadinho disaster on Jan. 25, 2019, is considered one of worst environmental tragedies in Brazilian history.
At just after noon that day the tailing dam’s sudden collapse caused a toxic torrent of mining waste to sweep across a rural pocket of Minas Gerais state at speeds of up to 80kph, swallowing everything in its path. Many of the dead were Vale employees and 11 victims were never found.
Photo: Reuters
On Thursday, Minas Gerais Governor Romeu Zema announced that Vale had agreed to pay the state 37.68 billion reais in what he claimed was “Latin America’s biggest reparation package.”
“We did it,” Zema wrote on Twitter, adding that the multibillion-dollar settlement would not affect criminal or civil claims relating to the collapse’s human and environmental cost.
“We can’t change the past, but we can improve the future,” Zema said, according to the newspaper Estado de Sao Paulo.
“Vale is committed to fully repair and compensate the damage caused by the tragedy in Brumadinho and to increasingly contribute to the improvement and development of the communities in which we operate,” chief executive Eduardo Bartolomeo said in a statement.
“We know that we have work to do and we remain firm in that purpose,” he added.
The deal was reportedly less than the 54 billion reais Minas Gerais had been demanding from Vale over the disaster in Brumadinho, a town of about 40,000 inhabitants just southwest of the state capital, Belo Horizonte.
However, Zema claimed the funds would help repair the local economy and environment, both battered by the mining disaster.
Civil society groups and the families of some victims were less convinced, pointing out that a large chunk of the settlement would be used to finance infrastructure projects in other parts of the state.
“It was an agreement made behind closed doors, without the participation of those affected,” Joceli Andrioli from the Movement of People Affected by Dams group said.
Marconi Machado, whose nephew, Wanderson da Silva, was killed in the disaster, said he feared the money “would probably end up in the hands of people who have nothing to do with the tragedy.”
Additional reporting by AP
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