the black world has more lifeSUPPORT

FUNDAÇÃOROSALUXEMBURGO

The ancestral struggle of the quilombolas of Santa Rosa dos Pretos against the new colonial domains present in works by Vale S.A and DNIT

the black world has more life

PROJECT TEAM 

Development, Modernity and Environment Study Group of the Federal University of Maranhão

GEDMMA/UFMA

Coordinator

Reseacher

Reseacher

Reseacher/Illustrator 

Vias de Fato NewspaperReporter

 REPORTS

Investigation

Additional interviews

Text 

Photos

ILLUSTRATIONS/ARTWORK

DOCUMENTARY FILMCinematography

Film Editing Screenplay

Additional Images

Visual identity

Cíndia Brustolin

Dayanne Santos

Mateus Tainor Batista Everton

Zica Pires

Sabrina Felipe

Cíndia Brustolin, Dayanne Santos

Sabrina Felipe

Andressa Zumpano

Zica Pires

Andressa ZumpanoIngrid BarrosAndressa Zumpano, Ingrid Barros, Sabrina FelipeCaio Castor, Dayanne Santos, Patrícia YamamotoRaquel Thomé

Pablo Lopes

Patrícia Yamamoto Gustavo Motta

Bruno GolaFlávio AmieiroMarina SarnoTres Folly

WEBSITE 

PUBLICATIONGraphic Design and Diagramation

Translation to English[in order of reporting]

Emílio Antonio Lima de Azevedo

About the illustrator

Quilombola Zica Pires is from Santa Rosa dos

Pretos territory (Itapecuru-Mirim/MA). Besides

being an illustrator, she has a degree in Pedagogy

of the Earth from the Federal University of

Maranhão (UFMA), is a researcher at GEDMMA

/ UFMA, and currently coordinates the activities

of the collective Quilombola Agroforestry

Agents (AAQ).

Mundo Preto [Black World] is a journalistic

project by the independent reporter Sabrina

Felipe.

The project won, in 2017, the Investigative

Journalism and Human Rights notice, from

the Brazil Human Rights Fund. The reports,

videos and photos, in addition to the

illustrations, were financed with funds from

the notice.

The project was carried out throughout 2018

in the quilombola territories Santa Rosa dos

Pretos and Santa Maria dos Pinheiros, in

Itapecuru-Mirim city, state of Maranhão.

http://mundopreto.com.br/

THE PROJECT

About the translation to English

We are very grateful to the team that

voluntarily performed the English translation

from the original Portuguese version.

Due to the presence of countless words used in

Brazilian Portuguese without correspondence

to English, and to their historical and cultural

specificities, we chose many times to keep the

original expressions in Portuguese in the text

and arrange the content of their meanings

at the end of the publication in “Translators’

Notes”, even for some English words that need

contextualization.

KIDNAPED IN GUINÉ-BISSAU, ROBBED IN

MARANHÃO

CARAVEL IN SIGHT: THE INVADERS NEVER STOP ARRIVING

DRAININGTHE PRODUCTS FROM THE

LOOTQUILOMBOLA COSMOLOGY

DOES THE

BLACK

WORLD HAVE MORE

LIFE?

TRANSLATOR’S

NOTES

12 23

37

49

07

4[ ]

3

.... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . . .

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. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .60

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By using the same strategies that European colonizers used to invade the

lands of the original peoples of Brazil in 1500 - physical violence, moral and

systematic and institutional denial of the dignity of the assaulted peoples -

DNIT (National Department of Transport Infrastructure) and Vale S.A. are now

appropriating quilombola lands of Santa Rosa dos Pretos, in the municipality

of Itapecuru-Mirim, Maranhão.

CARAVEL IN SIGHT: THE INVADERS NEVER STOP ARRIVING

• DohumLord of the portals, watch over us and guard us from threats

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Maria planted a mango tree and waited four years to see it grow and sprout. The manga manteiga - or de massa, or de quilo - has that name because of its texture. Melts in mouth when ripe. It is large, sweet and fleshy, and has small core.

Already sprouted, the mango tree fed Maria, her husband José, the neighbours and the passers by the side of the BR 135, bordering the mud house of the couple of farmers in the quilombola territory Santa Maria dos Pinheiros, precisely in the community of Colombo , rural area of the municipality of Itapecuru-Mirim, Maranhão.

For the northeastern summer time, between June and December, when the rains cease and the sun burns more, Maria has created a method of irrigation not to leave the mango tree thirsty. She made a 30-centimeter hole in the bottom of the tree, and put a plastic bottle of soda without one end and a hole in the lid on the other side, providing a slow, continuous flow of water.

The bottle operated as a direct access to the earth’s throat and to the mouth of the mango tree, its roots, which Maria watered up to three times a day with fresh water from the artesian well .

On a day in May 2018, a worker from the DNIT (National Department of Transport Infrastructure), in charge of a bulldozer, tore off the mango tree. The operation lasted less than ten minutes. Maria saw the undugging, and when the tree was falling, went inside to not cry. In addition to the mango tree, the worker also took three plants of jambo planted by Maria. Close to the mango tree, they made a comfortable shade in the peasant’s yard.

A train loaded with iron ore passed over Igarapé Grande, which vale

has silted. Dona Dalva used to fish in this stream, which had the

reputation of never drying out.Photo: Andressa Zumpano

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Even dead, one of the jambo plants was replanted by the workers in front of the couple’s residence. Rickety and with leaves dried out by the sun, the tree still carried a red numbering on the body made in ink by a laborer. The dead, numbered jambo became a strange monument in front of the taipa house, a standing dead man guarding the duplication works of the BR 135.

To put more asphalt in BR 135, they cut the trees of Dona Maria.

Photo: Andressa Zumpano

The caravel docksSince mid-2017, DNIT has been carrying out duplication works of BR 135 within quilombola lands and traditional communities in the municipalities of Miranda do Norte, Itapecuru-Mirim, Santa Rita and Bacabeira. Some of the works are irregular. The Environmental Impact Study (EIA) carried out by the company Zago Consultoria at the request of the DNIT and obtained by the report through the Law of Access to Information (LAI) shows that the municipality did not conduct prior consultation with the quilombola people or public hearings before beginning the construction.

Consultation is an obligation under Convention 169 of the International Labor Organization (ILO), of which Brazil has been a signatory since 2002. Whenever works or actions of the public power or private sector impact indigenous and tribal peoples’ territories - in which are the quilombolas -, the consultation must be carried out before the beginning of the actions and impactful works. Even without the consultation made, the State Department of Environment of Maranhão (SEMA) granted the autarchy the licenses to setup the work.

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Violations in seriesThe DNIT also violated conditions of these licenses, among which, the obligation to submit a document of agreement of the Palmares Cultural Foundation (FCP) to carry out the works in quilombo lands. The FCP is one of the federal bodies responsible for guaranteeing and implementing quilombola rights, but was never consulted by the DNIT for the preparation of the EIA nor for the search of the consent document. Another condition violated was the prohibition to suppress vegetation and to carry out hydraulic works that affect natural water courses. Only in the Quilombola Territory Santa Maria dos Pinheiros, in Itapecuru-Mirim, of the 12 existing streams, 10 were channeled, clogged or had their course changed by DNIT.

At Vila Cearense, in Bacabeira, the clogging of an igarapé by the autarchy left dozens of families under water in April 2018, a period of heavy rains. The same happened in the Picos I community, in the Quilombola Territory Santa Rosa dos Pretos. By diverting the course of an igarapé and obstructing it, the DNIT created a kind of dam at the entrance of the community. The quilombolas had to improvise a bridge with stake to overcome the water obstacle, that reached the waist of a person of average stature.

The four trees of Maria and José were killed to give place to a hydraulic work carried out in the course of a streaming that passes next to the house of the farmers. A crater of 240m2 and five meters deep was opened about four meters away from the residence of the couple.

The mud house was built by Seu Zé. Now it is damaged by the action of the DNIT, and can not last another

rainy period. Photo: Andressa Zumpano

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With the rains, the crater walls gave in, and the house was only three meters from being swallowed by the hole. Two of the five meters deep were filled with concrete, as well as ironwork and grade beams. The clogged streaming overflowed and almost invaded the couple’s residence during the rainy season.

Planned exterminationThe first allegations of violations of quilombola rights committed by DNIT were filed with the Federal Public Defender (DPU) and the Federal Public Ministry (MPF) in October and December 2017, respectively. Those who signed the complaints were the Association of Quilombola Rural Producers of Santa Rosa dos Pretos. Having access to the DNIT Environmental Impact Study (EIA), leaders from Santa Rosa discovered that the municipality wanted to eliminate 345 properties along the 8 km of the territory that are on the sides of BR 135. This section corresponds to the quilombo that takes the same name of the territory and is one of the it’s main nuclei. With the demolition of the houses, the quilombo would be extinguished. Family businesses, churches, terreiro de Tambor de Mina, community club, flour house, kitchen house, in addition to hundreds of fruit trees that serve as a source of food and income would be overthrown.

Some of these trees are centuries old, like a pequi tree planted by the enslaved Guinea- Bissau who came to inhabit Santa Rosa dos Pretos in the 18th century and who today remain in the territory through their more than four thousand descendants.

Century old pequi tree centenário planted by enslaved

receives a metal plate indicating it will be taken down by DNIT.

Photo: Sabrina Felipe

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When questioned for a report by the newspaper Vias de Fato1 on expropriations, DNIT stated that the term “expropriation” is a mistake, since the quilombolas that are in the domain range of the DNIT - 35 meters for each side from the axis of the track - are “invaders.” Thus, says the DNIT, the correct term is “unoccupying” of the domain, and not expropriation of the quilombolas: expropriates who owns legitimate, removes who is invader.

The people of Maranhãoand the quilombolasIn the mega-projects logistic infrastructure context, such as railroads, roads and ports, it is common for both the public and the private sector to argue that quilombolas and other traditional peoples are invading the Union’s lands and because of that should be withdrawn from these lands. It is also said in official speeches, explicitly or implicitly, that logistic infrastructure projects are carried out in the name of development, and that these invaders are obstacles to progress and collective interest. “It is important to emphasize that the duplication project of BR 135, from São Luís to Miranda do Norte, is a longing for the people of Maranhão,” argues the DNIT to justify the removal of quilombolas from the area they consider as their own.

“The official narrative builds, on the one hand, a notion of ‘Maranhão people’, which does not contemplate the quilombolas; on the other hand, it builds the idea that the quilombolas are invaders, and that therefore they take the place of the illegitimate, the one that can be eliminated in the name of the nation”, reflects the sociology professor of the Federal University of Maranhão (UFMA) Cindia Brustolin, who has been conducting research with the quilombolas of Santa Rosa dos Pretos for three years.

The invention of the enemyThe creation of a common enemy to be annihilated is a centuries-old strategy of expropriation of lands and bodies. It is used at least since 1500, when the first Portuguese invaders arrived in the lands of Pindorama, renaming it as Land of Vera Cruz and, later, as Brazil.

1 https://viasdefato.jor.br/2017/12/23/dnit-preve-remocao-de-casas-em-territorio-quilombola-semantes-consultar-a-populacao/

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The original peoples that they found in the lands they named Indians. Considered savages by the Portuguese, the Indians were killed and enslaved. Those who survived were pushed into the territories and kept isolated by the constant threat of violence. The invention of the enemy is based on the structures inherited by the invention and hierarchization of the races. “The idea of race, in its modern meaning, has no known history before America. It may have originated as a reference to the phenotypic differences between conquerors and conquered, but what matters is that very early it was constructed as a reference to supposed biological differential structures between these groups”, explains the Peruvian sociologist Aníbal Quijano. The colonizers, according to him, used color and other physical characteristics to group different peoples into different races, the dominators being called whites, the original peoples being called indians, and black men and black women the men and women kidnapped on the African continent and brought to Brazil to work in the condition of enslaved years after the beginning of colonization. As relations established were of domination, race indicated not only a physical distinction, but above all a “natural” social condition. Thus whites belonged to a biologically superior race - and therefore naturally apt to dominate - and blacks and indians belonged to biologically inferior races, and therefore naturally apt to be dominated. Nothing, however - much less biology - proved the inferiority or superiority of physically different persons, except the fiction of racial superiority invented by the white settlers, who gave arbitrary and ideological interpretations to biological characteristics.

The normalization of brutalityThe normalization of the colonial idea of racial superiority and inferiority was made possible by the use of physical and institutional violence throughout the centuries. “The colonized world is a world divided in two. The dividing line, the border, is indicated by barracks and police stations. (...) In the colonial regions, the gendarme [military] and the soldier, by their immediate presence, by their direct and frequent interventions, maintain contact with the colonized and advise them, with the rifle butts or with napalm explosions [set of flammable liquids used as military weapon], not to move. (...) It is seen that the intermediary of power uses a language of pure violence. (...) The intermediary takes violence to the house and brain of the colonized”, wrote the martinian psychiatrist and philosopher Franz Fanon. The flogging and torture in a public square; formal abolition without economic or social reparation; state policies of whitening by encouraging the immigration of Europeans; the Land Law of 1850, which allowed only landowners who could pay for them - which excluded the enslaved -; the structuring of the prison system as the contemporary senzala (quarters); the confinement of black bodies in favelas and economic peripheries; the mass murder of black people by state repression forces; contemporary slave labor in the textile and civil construction industry and other institutional mechanisms of domination and subjection of the black bodies that are still in force today: everything is still colonial.

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Strategies for maintaining the race fiction created by the first invaders of Pindorama are alive and being modernized. The structure of the idea of race, says Aníbal Quijano, “proved to be the most effective and durable instrument of universal social domination, since it depended on another, equally universal, yet older, the intersexual or gender: conquered and dominated peoples were placed in a natural situation of inferiority, and consequently also their phenotypic traits, as well as their mental and cultural discoveries.”

The update of brutalityBy considering the quilombolas invaders and entering their territories illegally and violently, eliminating the trees and streamings that provide them with food and income, the DNIT updates the colonial strategy of invention of the enemy to justify the expropriation of their lands. The autarchy’s argument that the lands on which the BR 135 is based are of the Union does not find support in the oral and documentary records of belonging, just as the colonial discourse on a superior race from biological differences has never found support in human nature.

The imposition and normalization of this fiction, therefore, is given with violence, both institutional and physical, institutional being the violation of legal procedures, such as the absence of prior consultation, and physical being the destruction of forests and water courses with the consequent and progressive elimination of traditional ways of life.

Inside the house of Dona Maria and Seu Zé, from Colombo, in the Santa Maria dos Pinheiros quilombola territory, in Itapecuru-Mirim. Photo: Andressa Zumpano

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I leave as heritage the lands I stoleThe BR 135 was opened in 1942. The people, more than 800 families - about four thousand people - living in the Santa Rosa dos Pretos territory are direct heirs of the men and women kidnapped in Guinea Bissau in the 1700s and brought to Maranhão. They were forced to work as slaves on the farms of the Irish family surnamed Belfort, who invaded the region and appropriated the lands known today as the territory Santa Rosa dos Pretos, formed by 20 quilombos spread on 2,178 hectares - or 21,780,000 m². Joaquim Raimundo Nunes Belfort, of the family of the invaders and called “Baron of Santa Rosa”, had a son with the ex-enslaved América Henriques. In 1898, Belfort signed a testament where he left the lands he stole in Itapecuru-Mirim for América, for his son Américo, and for “all those who served me as slaves, during their lives and that of their own children, not being permitted at any time to be sold, alienated, or given in payment to the said lands, which constitute a perpetual patrimony to those declared above and their descendants.” Both the ancestral orality and the contemporary formality of the documents confirm the centuries-old presence of the black men and black women of Guinea- Bissau in Santa Rosa. “I am against them wanting to invade here and saying that we invaded. Not here! I’ve known this here as native forest. The baron left it here, but it was at the tip of the whip, it was not for free”, says Paulo Leonel Pires, 93. His Guinean ancestors lived in Santa Rosa dos Pretos almost 300 years before the arrival of the BR 135. “DNIT is an invader, we are not,” concludes Pires.

The “public interest”: the sophistication

of colonial strategies The violations committed by DNIT in the duplication process of BR 135 are not new. They were used in 2009, also in Santa Rosa dos Pretos, by the transnational mining company Vale S.A. during the duplication process of the Carajás Railroad (EFC). The works started without prior compulsory consultation; the licenses were issued by IBAMA (Brazilian Institute of Environment) in an irregular manner; forests and streamings were destroyed. And the main thing: to legitimize the expropriation of the slaves and their descendants centuries-old lands, Vale alleged that the quilombolas of Santa Rosa illegally occupied lands that the Union supposedly granted to the company.

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In January 2009, Vale filed a contestation to the Technical Identification and Delimitation Report (RTID) of the territory made by INCRA (National Institute for Colonization and Agrarian Reform) and published in the Official Gazette of the Federal Government in October 2008. The RTID is an initial and fundamental part of the titration process. In it are presented evidence of quilombola ancestry, and the geographical limits of the territory to be titled are defined. With the contestation of the RTID by the transnational, the titling process was paralyzed. The company alleged that the delimitation by INCRA, which excluded from Santa Rosa an area of 7,1630 hectares (71,630 m²) referring to the area occupied by EFC since 1985, when it was inaugurated, was insufficient to execute the duplication project, and it was necessary the appropriation of another 70 meters for each side of the railroad along the segment to be duplicated, totaling 6.9502 hectares (69,502 m²). To defend its alleged right to those lands, Vale cited a 1982 decree - upgraded by another in 1997, when it was privatized - in which the Brazilian government grants the mining company a concession to build and operate the railroad. By means of this decree, the transnational claimed as its own the quilombola lands of Santa Rosa dos Pretos that said to be necessary for the doubling. Like the DNIT, Vale also appealed to the public interest argument of the project, isolating the quilombolas as an antagonistic group that should bow to that interest. “Of course, the interests of the quilombola community...will be compatible with the public interest, particularly with regard to national development and land use necessary for rail transport. Thus, one must reserve the necessary areas mentioned above in the process of delimitation and demarcation of the remaining quilombola community Santa Rosa”, the company wrote.

Strain to winLess than a month after filing the petition, an INCRA federal prosecutor Ismênia Maria Gama de Carvalho issued an opinion echoing Vale and relativizing the ancestral and constitutional right of the quilombolas to have definitive ownership of their lands.

According to Ismênia, this right “may eventually have to yield to national needs and unequivocally more valuable as linked to the security of the State, society, or limiting values of the rule of law, the Republic and the Federation, provided they have been demonstrated by the competent authority.” In May 2009, another INCRA federal prosecutor, Luis Fernando Pedrosa Fontoura, presented an opinion contrary to the petition filed by Vale. In June, it was the turn of INCRA anthropologist Fernanda Lucchesi, technically responsible for the RTID, to contest the petition.

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In September of that year, the Committee of Decision of the Regional Superintendence of the institute decided by the rejection of the petition. At the end of 2009, Vale appealed to the rejection, initiating a process of about two years of going and coming technical and legal opinions. With the exception of the opinion of Ismênia Maria Gama de Carvalho, all the others were against the petition. Even so, the distress caused by Vale to the communities was immense. Through meetings, technical visits and an endless number of bureaucracies unconnected with the routine of communities, the transnational corporation has strained the resistance. More than that, Vale was able to suspend for three years the titling process, which is already delayed, generating great uncertainty in the community about whether one day they would be able to resume the legal stages of the process to have the definitive title. With this strategy, the company reached the negotiation, arriving at the final stage of the juridical blackmail that it created: Vale undertook to withdraw the petition against the process of titling of Santa Rosa dos Pretos in exchange for the lands that were lacking for the duplication of the EFC. On March 8, 2012, the agreement was signed between the transnational, quilombolas, IBAMA, INCRA and the Palmares Cultural Foundation. Of the commitments signed by the parties - such as Vale’s recovery of the streamings it destroyed - only the quilombolas fulfilled 100% of the agreement, giving up the portion of land expropriated by Vale in the legal maneuver. Today, at the end of 2018, the duplication of the Carajás Railroad is almost complete, with 542 km of the total of 637 km. The lands of Santa Rosa dos Pretos have not yet been definitively titled. The decree of expropriation of farms superimposed on the territory was published on June 22, 2015 by President Dilma Rousseff. Since then, quilombolas of Santa Rosa have been waiting for the federal government to release the compensation to the farmers to leave the lands and those lands finally be titled. 

Updating the past“The past is something happening now”, says the 600-year-old hero of Brazilian animation “A Story of Love and Fury.” Born as a Tupinambá warrior in the 15th century, the protagonist tells his saga of six centuries, until 2096, having to fight for what was always his and his people: the lands and natural assets first stolen by the European invaders in 1500, and later by the successors of these early invaders until the end of the 21st century. The past has never stopped happening in the quilombola territory Santa Rosa dos Pretos. Since the end of the 19th century, the testament of land left by the Irish colonizer has been tampered with by public managers owners of notary’s offices in

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partnership with descendants of enslaved people seeking private gain at the expense of the collective good - reproduction of colonial relations imposed on the mind of the colonized by affection, by violence and by material necessity, forcing them to negotiate like white men and women. Portions of land were sold to farmers; fences spread over part of the land that was not even bought; other portions were simply taken by the federal and state government for the construction of logistical and energy infrastructure. Santa Rosa dos Pretos holds two lines of the Energy Company of Maranhão (CEMAR) and three of Eletronorte, three railroads - one Transnordestina highway linking São Luís (MA) to Teresina (PI), and two of the Carajás Railroad (EFC) of Vale SA - and BR 135 itself, which the federal government now intends to double, taking new portions of quilombola lands.

These structures were settled on productive lands, removing from the quilombolas the areas of land that are fundamental for their subsistence. “The robbery lands has emptied our table,” summarizes Anacleta Pires da Silva, 52, one of the main leaders of Santa Rosa dos Pretos. The quilombolas of the territory never received indemnifications or reparations for the environmental, social and cultural damages suffered during decades. The Federal INCRA, responsible for the titling of the quilombola lands, seeks to legalize the improper take of the land by excluding from the official document that gives the limits of the territory more than 180 hectares - almost two million square meters of land - referring to the areas occupied by the lines, the BR 135 and the railways.

Rise of the quilombolaBefore even filing the complaints with the DPU and the MPF in late 2017, leaders of Santa Rosa dos Pretos stopped the illegal works in their territories. In October of that year, they went to the construction site and demanded that DNIT employees remove the machines from their lands. After the complaints were filed, SEMA suspended work on quilombos in the municipalities of Itapecuru-Mirim and Santa Rita in February 2018. In May, the MPF followed SEMA’s decision and notified both the secretariat and DNIT with a recommendation to not resume work or upgrade licenses before new studies of impact are produced and prior consultation is conducted under ILO Convention 169. In August 2017, the MPF extended the same decision to the quilombo lands of the municipality of Miranda do Norte. “Since the first meeting [with the DNIT] it was seen and acknowledged that there was no previous hearing. This accountability of the DNIT we will follow when we need to eventually judicialize these issues if the damages that have already been evidenced are not met in this process of dialogue and out-of-court settlement that began months ago”, reveals the federal attorney Hilton Araújo, responsible for opening the civil investigation that investigates the actions of the autarchy.

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Regarding consultation of quilombolas affected by duplication, DNIT reported that “it has met the requests for clarifications from the MPF and DPU, and that it has the greatest interest in rapidly defining communities that must be consulted in order to comply with the legislation and give haste to the advance of this work that is fundamental to all the people of Maranhão.” In a joint effort, DPU and MPF are carrying out work with the communities, the university and federal government agencies, such as INCRA (National Institute for Colonization and Agrarian Reform) and FCP (Cultural Foundation Palmares), to map and then consult communities that will be affected by the duplication in a radius of 40km from the path of the runway, as determined by Inter Ministerial Ordinance 60. The ordinance disciplines the performance of public agencies in environmental licensing processes. The autarchy states that it is not possible to say at the time - mid-November 2018 - when the duplication works will be finalized. It states, however, that “in the coming months all obstacles related to indemnities and expropriations will be solved, in addition to the remaining quilombola issues.”

Colonial arroganceEven with the paralyzed works, residents of Colombo stopped the works of duplication for at least five times in 2018 by catching the DNIT violating the order of suspension in its territory. The first time, about 30 people gathered at the house of Dona Maria and Seu José to prevent the municipality from completing the hydraulic works that would destroy the peasant couple’s residence. The public defender of the Union Yuri Costa, who gives assistance to the communities affected by the duplication of BR 135, sees with concern this strategy of fragmentation of big projects adopted by governments and private companies.

“The continuity of the work in a sliced form weakens the performance and organization of impacted communities. This is because, even if in a fragmented way, the construction of the enterprise creates a ‘mark’, which is the beginning of the works - although not in its totality -, concomitant with the work of the organized communities and the institutions that assist them, as the DPU.”

The mark created, explains the public defender of the Union, reduces the chances of a successful judicial or extrajudicial action to ensure compliance with the rights of affected populations, as governments and companies try to work the idea that the enterprise is already consolidated - even if it is not finalized - and that, therefore, it would not be necessary to suspend or stop the works of something that is almost completed.

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the fight is also updating

If the past happens today and the history of the colonial expropriations is updated, also the resistances and struggles are renewed, the same that gave origin to the quilombos in the centuries of the formal slavery. The territories of Santa Rosa dos Pretos and Santa Maria dos Pinheiros, in Itapecuru-Mirim, and Joaquim Maria, in Miranda do Norte, are articulated in activities of political formation and actions of resistance and strengthening to deal with the DNIT violations.

The Law on Access to Information (LAI) is a fundamental weapon in the process. The public documents obtained through the LAI are shared and discussed among the quilombolas; entities considered allies are called, in and out of Maranhão, for training activities, news dissemination, legal and logistic support and other demands.

Dona Maria produces chilli sauce with the malagueta

chilli she plants in her yard. The relationship she has with

the land is one of life. Photo: Andressa Zumpano

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In June 2018, a national campaign was launched for the prior consultation to the Maranhao quilombola people affected by the works of BR 135. The campaign has no date to finish, and its focus is the internal strengthening of the communities before the beginning of the formal consultation procedure. For the defense of their lands and natural assets, the quilombolas of Santa Rosa dos Pretos, Santa Maria dos Pinheiros and Joaquim Maria are appropriating contemporary weapons and strategies, but they are still guarded by the secular ancestry of the black men and women who preceded them in the struggle. From afar they see the caravels docked, and are preparing to prevent the invaders from landing and settling in their lands this time.

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The impacts of Vale S.A.’s Carajás Railroad and the Federal Government’s BR

135 update in the life of the quilombolas from Santa Rosa dos Pretos the same

violence that their ancestors suffered during the formal slavery: robbery of

lands, starvation and death.

KIDNAPED IN GUINÉ-BISSAU, ROBBED IN

MARANHÃO

• Manman KazïLady of the land, mother of the ancestors and of everybody

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During the first night in a house flanked by the BR 135, rest is interrupted countless times. Horns, and vehicles suddenly starting and breaking mix themselves into dreams and turn them into nightmares. The cold body and the eyes wide open after another scare search the murk for some orientation.

For one week, the noises of the highway in the night are always the announcement of a disaster. Later, with time, something changes. And it is life itself, which turns into a continuous startle, in sleep as in waking life.

72 years ago, the inhabitants of the quilombola territory Santa Rosa dos Pretos in Itapecuru-Mirim, Maranhão, could not imagine a simple path opened in the middle of the forest by the Federal Government would turn into an asphalt highway that would steal their sleep, their trees, their streams, their lands and even their lives and those of their relatives.

In the quilombo Santa Rosa dos Pretos, one of the main nuclei of the territory with the same name, it is hard to find someone that hasn’t lost a relative ran over in the BR 135.

“Craziness in this highway”One day before this story started being written, the girl Vitória, eight years old, was run over by a biker. Under the sight of her father, that waited for her on the other side of the single lane highway. Vitória was waiting to cross the BR.

Anacleta Pires da Silva still feels in her spirit and flesh, 17 years later, the pain from the day when she gathered

the pieces of her daughter from the tarmac on BR 135.

Photo: Andressa Zumpano

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She was close to one of the only two crosswalks that exist in the 8km of road that tear through the quilombo – both, as the speed radar and the speed bump, were only implemented by DNIT (National Department of Transport Infrastructure) after protests following the death, in May 2008, of Claudiane Cabral Sales, 11 years old, ran over in the roadside while she walked home from school.

The crosswalk is in the same stretch as the speed radar that forces the drivers to reduce the speed from 80 to 40km/h. There was traffic – it was the 9th of September, Sunday, the day people were coming back from the independence day holliday.

After seeing the girl, a driver stopped so she could cross. That was when the father, watching the traffic and judging the crossing was safe, signaled Vitória to go forward. Nothing, however, stopped a biker from emerging suddenly from between the cars, in high speed, and hitting the child.

Drivers’ recklessness is a constant threat to the quilombolas that have

their life crossed by the BR 135. Print from the documentary O mundo

preto tem mais vida.

Vitória was dragged for a few meters. Part of the sink on her right leg was peeled of by the friction with the asphalt and her mouth was teared inside and outside by the impact. The biker fled the scene.

“Kid, there came a time when we could not leave the house, because there were cars driving through both lanes and on the roadside, it was craziness in this highway”, tells Anacleta Pires da Silva, 52 anos, one of the leaders of the territory, about the afternoon in which Vitória was run over.

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Gathering piecesOn the 31st of July 2001, it was Anacleta who saw herself in the middle of the BR 135 gathering pieces of her five year old daughter hit by a driver.She was warned by one of the neighbors that Jôsedalia, the youngest of her four children, had just been run over and killed. When arriving at the tarmac, she saw pieces of flesh scattered. She would gather what she could and pile them in her hands, as if she could recompose the child that had just been torn apart.

Someone came close to her with Jôsedalia in their arms, alive, with only a few scratches and said: “Hey woman, your daughter is here, take her, she is fine”.

But Anacleta was blind with pain, and where there where pieces of plucked chicken that fell from the shopping bag of a boy that was also hit, she saw her daughter in pieces.

“It was something unexplainable, uncontrolled, from the mind. They would tell me ‘it’s not your daughter, it’s not your daughter’, and I would say ‘it is! it is! you don’t want to help me gather the pieces of my child’”, recalls the quilombola from Santa Rosa dos Pretos.

Scarce security infrastructureThe violence of the drivers that drive through the BR 135 knows no speed limits, road signs or roadsides and is multiplied when it does not find any of these obstacles due to the scarce security infrastructure, that should be implemented by DNIT.

According to the federal authorities, in the length of around 76km of the BR 135, that includes the stretch to be widened between the cities of Bacabeira, Santa Rita, Itapecuru-Mirin and Miranda do Norte, there are, currently, 22 speed bumps, 12 crosswalks and 14 electronic speed radars.

In an even distribution of these security devices between the four cities, each would have 5.5 speed bumps, three crosswalks and 3.5 electronic speed radars in the stretch of highway.

Numa divisão igualitária dessas infraestruturas de segurança entre os quatro municípios, cada um deles teria 5,5 lombadas físicas, três travessias de pedestres e 3,5 controladores eletrônicos de velocidade no trecho de BR.Questioned about the amount of these devices that would be installed in the mentioned stretch after the widening of the BR 135, DNIT informed that it is still not possible to say because “new studies and projects are in planning phase to adapt the new characteristics of the stretch to be widened”.

About the deployment of security infrastructure in the already wider part of the BR 135, between Campo de Peris e Bacabeira, the authority informed that “currently DNIT is, throught it’s BR-Legal program and the National Program for Speed Control (PNCV), finishing the signaling and security project that best fits the stretch under discussion.”

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the “Mina” felt

Ten years ago, Sebastião Pires, 65 years old, rode his bicycle back home after work and needed cross a bridge with no roadside. He was ran over by the driver of an ambulance from the city of Coroatá.

Ironically, the driver of the ambulance fled without giving medical attention. Sebastião died instantly. “More than ten people, that I know of, died in these bridges with no roadside”, says Jorge Luiz Brito da Silva, 58 years old, friend of the deceased.Bastião, as people called him, was Abatazeiro Guia from the Terreiro de Mina “Tenda Nossa Senhora dos Navegantes”, in Santa Rosa dos Pretos. His widow, Francisca Silva Pinto, 65 years old, is Guia in the same Terreiro, lead by her sister, Mother Severina Silva, 64 years old.

Bastião, Abatazeiro Guia from terreiro de Mina, went into the forest

of Codó better than anyone else. The Mina felt his absence.

Print do documentário O mundo preto tem mais vida

“The responsibility of the Abatazeiro Guia is that everything there is by his hands. Calling the friends, talking to the friends, tell when it’s time to start and when it’s time to end. Whatever he says is the final word. The Guia has the strength and the power to call the Caboclo. Some Abatazeiros drum, but just for drumming. He drummed because he knew, because he called, because he could. Think of an Abatazeiro that enters the Codó forest [home of the Enchanted], to enter the forest in the right way… for the love of God. I struggle to find a person to enter the forest of Codó as Bastião used to. He entered it right, slowly.”

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- When Sebastião died, did the Mina feel?- Ôxi!- How?- I don’t explain. It’s crazy. They don’t speak, but know. Don’t speak because they can’t speak. Don’t say because can’t say. What you gonna do?

No life escapesBesides people, also die after being ran over the pet dogs and cats, the chicken and pigs raised by the quilombolas for sale and for food.

After the road was built and with the increased flow of trucks carrying the agribusiness grains, the pigs and chickens that used to stay in the backyards, started going to the roadside, looking for the soy beans that fall from the trucks.

All you have to do is walk by the roadside to find their carcasses besides the remains lizards, chameleons, snakes, monkeys and anteaters. With the prospect of the widening of the highway, the quilombolas fear that the deaths of people and animals will increase.

Convenient omissionEven though they state publicly and in the BR 135 Enviromental Impact Study (EIA) that the widening will increase the security for drivers and pedestrians, DNIT does not mention the car accident data provided by The Highway Federal Police (PRF) that proves exactly the oposite.

According to data from 2007 to 2017 release by PRF, the already widened stretch of the BR 135 in Maranhão, which extends from KM 0 to 25, is responsible for 59.4% of all accidents that occur between KM 0 and 125.

The widened stretch corresponds to 20% of this 125km part of the road, but is where more than half the accidents happen.

In the EIA for the widening project, DNIT does not declare they will built structures for the security of those that use the road by bicycle or on foot.

These and many other evidences that the federal authorities have a tendency to ignore the security of pedestrians were presented to the Federal Prosecutors Office (MPF) and to the Public Defendants (DPU) in a technical analysis signed by the geographer Patrícia Caldeira, formar environmental analyst for the Center of Ecological Restauration in the Biodiversity and Natural Resources office of the Environmental Secretary of the state of São Paulo, by the geographer Saulo Barros da Costa, Geography professor in the Federal Institute of Education, Science and

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Technology in Maranhão (IFMA), and by the geographer José Nascimento Santos, researcher in the Nucleus for Study and Research in Agrarian Issues (NERA/UFMA) and technical consultant for the Maranhão Center for Socioenvironmental Studies and Rural Advisory.

Selectivly run overProgress is like a truck driver driving on a road and, when it meets a black person, just runs over it, because it is as if they were transparent. “That is how progress runs over the traditional territories”.

The metaphor and the quote are from the black movement activist, professor and doctor in Social Anthropology at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS) José Carlos Gomes dos Anjos. In his view, what makes the black bodies and territories transparent and “run overable” is the legacy of European colonialism over the world.

“The society that was built starting with the European colonization is structurally traversed by a certain pattern of power relationships in which both the state authorities and the agents that occupy dominant position in non-state institutions feel free to make use of the black corporality and territoriality as if they were mere prolongations of nature, available to being explored by the white man and white civilization patterns. People and institutions organize themselves strategically to invade these spaces occupied by black bodies, by black lives”, explains Dos Anjos.

By silting the streaming, Vale left Dalva and hundreds of other quilombolas with no fish to eat.

Photo: Andressa Zumpano

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Slave labor in the BR 135Libânio Pires, 84 years old, one of the main leaderships of Santa Rosa dos Pretos and living memory of the quilombo, says that at the time of the opening of the path that would become the BR 135, in 1942, quilombolas were subjected to slave labor in the construction.

His father and uncle, tells Libânio, carried on their shoulders Babaçu Palm logs that six men couldn’t carry together. “They were very strong, but did they do it because they wanted to or because they were afraid of not doing it?”, asks the elder.

From the quilombo Santa Rosa dos Pretos, Libânio reports that the men removed with hands and shovels the earth that would be used in the base of what would become the BR.

The soil compaction was also done by hand, with an improvised instrument called soquete: a disc made of a thick log and a handle in the middle of the disc, used to lift the instrument and punch the earth.

In the watercolor named “Calçadores”, from 1824, the french painter Jean-Baptiste Debret shows exaclty the same work being performed by two black men in the compaction of a sidewalk in the enslaved Rio de Janeiro – formal abolition would only happen in 1888.

For the hard work on the opening of the path of BR 135, Libânio tells us the black people of Santa Rosa received tokens, to be exchanged for money. It was necessary to gather a lot of tokens to get some “tutaméia”, the way older people referred to scraps.

Libânio Pires assures us that there were no white people in the construction of the first

path of the BR. Only blacks, caboclos and reds. The white people were there “to oder”.

Photo: Andressa Zumpano

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with or without lawIn 1942, no consultation regarding the opening of the path of the BR was made to the quilombolas, neither was any restitution paid. At the time, there were no laws that assured the quilombolas’ right to the land and territory.

Currently, there are State, Federal and International laws that rule specifically over the rights of quilombola and indigenous people, but DNIT ignored all of them in 2017 to start the duplication ofthe BR 135.

Again, the quilombolas were not heard about the start of the enterprise that can take even bigger parts of their lands; the federal authorities didn’t account for restitution for the people and also did not recognize their right to the land and territory.

Iron tramplingIn 1982 the path that would give way to the Carajás Railroad (EFC) in the Portuguese acronym) from the then state owned company Vale do Rio Doce, now the privatized multinational Vale S.A. Such as in the path of the BR, there was no consultation to the quilombolas nor restitution.

Opened in February 1985, the EFC extends itself over 972km and goes from Parauapebas, in Pará, to the state capital of Maranhão, where the iron ore extracted by the company from the Carajás mine, as well as fuel and grains, is unloaded.

In total, 23 cities in Maranhão and 4 in Pará are cut by the railroad, among which there are more than 100 quilombola and indigenous communities, including Santa Rosa dos Pretos.

Such as the BR, the EFC also evicts, deforests, pollutes the air and water clogs and sands the igarapés. In 2011, the Federal Prosecutor’s Office (MPF) installeda Public Civil Action (ACP) agains Vale and IBAMA (Brazilian Institute for the Environment) to force the multinational company to pay for the damages caused to the quilombola territories of Santa Rosa dos Pretos and Monge Belo by the EFC and it’s duplication.

The action resulted in a settlement in which Vale committed to recovering the water courses it polluted and clogged. Six years after the settlement (2018) it was still not completely fulfilled, despite the legal obligations contracted by the company and approved by a judge.

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All the blood was spilledAs the BR, the EFC also kills. Animals as much as people.

Maria Raimunda, 70 years old, resident of the Santa Rosa dos Pretos, lost her older son, José Benedito Vieira dos Santos, ran over by a train owned by Vale in July 22nd 2009.

He was working with two brothers and a friend on a shipment of wood to São Luís. It was night when the four men waited for the truck that carried the wood to pick them up and take them home. They were close to the rails of the EFC, which they needed to cross to go home.José Benedito was tired from the long and hard journey and was hungry. He and his fellow workers spent the day with two fishes and a handful of flour. They didn’t have any more water.

Zé Biné, as he was known, sat on the rails and fell asleep, with his head resting on his arms, crossed over the knees.

“The train hit him nine o’clock in the evening. They took him to Santa Rita, from Santa Rita he went to São Luís, in São Luís they cleaned him up, filled him with cloth and cotton in a way that I don’t even know how it was. I never expected to see him in this situation… my first son. It was a piece of me that left. I don’t even like to talk about it. The was never a solution. He would be 28 now, he was young. I remember to this day the state he got here in. Right now I was lying down remembering when I would go there and look at him in the coffin, with his hands on his chest, the nails full

Image of progress: igarapé piped and sanded for the construction

of the Carajás Railroad. Photo: Andressa Zumpano

of dirt and blood. His mouth like this… Only his brothers saw the way he was there, I think there were only pieces left. All the blood was spilled. And nothing else was done. I am the one who stays with the pain and a void that is never filled.”

Maria Raimunda says she cried her son’s death every day for more than one year, not skipping one. To this day she expects him to talk to her in dreams, but Zé Biné does not show up. “Sometimes it is like that. There is a saying in prayer: those who stay behind close the doors and those who leave want quiet. They forget everything, only remember God. Than it’s done.”

According to Vale records, between January 2006 and May 3rd 2018 in the EFC stretch between Pará and Maranhão, 41 people were killed by their trains.

Maria Raimunda says she never received any assistance from the company or restitution for the death of her son. In the accident spreadsheet sent by Vale to us, Zé Biné does not show up even as a number. His death was not accounted for by the multinational.

We sent to the mining company a series of questions regarding the pedestrian safety infrastructure, demands from the communities for security on the tracks, assistance offered by the company to victims and their families, the absence of Zé Biné from the statistics of deaths caused by company trains, restitutions to quilombolas affected by the construction of the EFC in the 1980s among other subjects.

Vale did not answer any of the questions. They only inform, in a generic way, that the company is committed to the reduction of the number of occurrences in their railroad operations. “In 2017, the Vale railroads (Ferro Vitória and Carajás railroads) occupied the two best positions in the comparative ranking of safety indices in Brazilian railroads”, says the official reply.

The multinational also informed they maintain a series of initiatives to mitigate the eventual impacts of it’s operation and that acts in a permanent way to ensure the signaling and safe crossings of the EFC are always in working conditions.

The company also affirms they promote awareness through campaigns and partnerships with the communities and highlights the fact that they are under the supervision of the National Agency for Land Transports (ANTT) regarding safety factors on rails and other operational structures, signaling in railroad crossings, railroad maintenance, and other matters.

Economic tramplingOther than the BR 135 and the EFC, also eat quilombo land and trample over black lives the Transnordestina railroad and five big power lines, two from CEMAR (Maranhão Power Company), a private company, and three from Eletronorte, mixed capital company attached to the Ministry of Mines and Energy.

Libânio Pires, such as most of the quilombolas of Santa Rosa dos Pretos, supported his family with the farming of the land inherited from his ancestors kidnapped in Guiné-Bissau in the 18th century and brought to Itapecuru-Mirin.

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He tells us he could farm three stretches of land, almost 6 thousand square meters of crop, were he could farm rice, corn, manioc, cucumber, tomatoes, potatoes, junça, watermelon, pumpkins, wheat, cotton and other varieties.

The work was a joint effort, “beautiful collective work with 60 people, men and women, gathered.” Money was almost never seen. Everything worked on the basis of the exchange of surplus for what wsa needed, be it coffee, sugar, fish or a bar of soap. “It was more important to have friends around than money in the pocket”, remembers him.

The quilombola Josicléa Pires da Silva visits her lands, inheritance from the ancestors from Guiné-

Bissau, now invaded by Vale S.A.Photo: Andressa Zumpano

In the 1970s, however, white progress, of which speaks Dos Anjos, ran over Libânio and hundreds of quilombolas that lived in the land. “They got thar and said they would build an aviation field, they told us we could not farm there anymore. I asked ‘who is going to pay for my work?’ They said they would pay later, but we never received restitution. I left the farming. That affected me too much”, says the Elder, refering to the construction of power lines from CEMAR in the productive lands of the quilombolas.

empty tableSuch as in the construction of the BR 135, the Carajás and Transnordestina railroads, there was no consultation to the quilombolas, nor restitution or impact mitigation in the construction of the power lines.

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The immediate and long turn consequences of the expropriations of ancestor land by the government and companies was, and still is, the emptying of the tables of the black men and women of Santa Rosa by the lack of farming land.

In 2008, Incra (National Institute for Colonization and Agrarian Reform), responsible for the naming of quilombola lands, registered 326 families and delimited the Santa Rosa dos Pretos territory with 7.469,9184 ha, almost 75 million square meters of land – around 11 thousand Maracanã football fields.

With all the expropriation, including the invasion of land by landowners, the quilombola life existis, nowadays, in only 2.178 ha, a little over 21 million square meters – or almost 3 thousand Maracanã fields – divided between the current 700 families, or over four thousand people that use this space for living, farming, animal breeding, small trade, common areas such as social clubs, churches, terreiros, flour hoses, schools and football fields, and areas for the preservation of the forest and igarapés.

Nowadays, all that is farmed in what is left from the productive lands of the quilombo is not enough for the sustenance of the families that farm, much less to exchange or sell the surplus.

What was available in abundance, fresh and for free, now is bought at the high price of the city markets with very little quality: fruits and vegetables that grow outside the season and ripe before the time are not the work of nature, but of the industry poison, this additive whose role is to keep the capitalist wheel spinning faster and faster, despite the real rhythm of life.

In the 1980s it was Eletronorte’s turn to install three power lines in the territory and repeat in the black land and bodies of Santa Rosa the same colonial violence the, according to Dos Anjos, is the pattern in racial relations in Brasil.

“Santa Rosa, up until a few decades ago, was a space where black people cultivated their lives the way it was historically inherited, generation after generation. At a certain moment, the State needs to construct power lines that will allow for a certain electricity economy to pass through a certain space. If it was a space of white property, installing a power line would imply amonumental restitution to the owner of the land, whose right to property is recognized. But in the case of Santa Rosa, the owners are black people, and because they are black, it is much easier to pass through with the power lines, because it is as if those people were not there, as if they didn’t have the same prerogatives as a white owner. In the whole of Brasil the relations fit this pattern, which is structural, and this is how a the relationship with black people, the black bodies and the black space is though about, as being pervaded by a relationship of institutional standardized blindness.”

From the kidnapping in Guiné-Bissau to the systematic expropriation of their lands and bodies in Maranhão, the black life in Santa Rosa still resists, despite the white whole that devours everything and is never satisfied.

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Highways, railways, ports, power lines. The mega-enterprises of logistical

and energy infrastructure implemented to transport raw material extracted

from brazilian soil represent, for the quilombolas of Santa Rosa dos Pretos, a

permanent form of expropriation of their lands and bodies. As 500 years ago,

white people appetites continue to generate black people hunger.

DRAININGTHE PRODUCTS FROM THE

LOOT• Rosa Oxä

Owner of the worlds, guardian of the past-present

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As at the time of the first European invasions of the lands of the original people, the raw material exploited today in the Brazilian Amazon region - ore, grains and meat - continues to be drained, in large part, outside the country’s borders, meeting the needs of consumption in countries like the United States, England, Holland and the buyer of the time, China.

The needs for food and energy consumption in mostly white large cities in the south and southeast of the country, such as São Paulo, are also supplied with what is extracted from the lands of traditional, mostly black people.

Power lines, railways, highways and ports update the colonial routes for the disposal of these products, exported in large quantities and at low prices - just like 500 years ago.

the lootFor more than eight decades, Santa Rosa dos Pretos has served as a base - against the will of the majority of its inhabitants - for large enterprises in logistics and energy infrastructure

Train carrying iron ore passes over Igarapé Grande (Big Stream), that Vale have silted. Dona Dalva used to fish in that stream, which was

famous for never drying. Photo: Andressa Zumpano

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There are three railroads, five power lines and a federal highway that tear and cause negative impacts to the territory, such as the destruction of productive areas where family farms were placed, silting and clogging of streams and the suppression of fruit trees.

Increased impactsIn the last five years, the impacts have been increasing in Santa Rosa, with the expansion and creation of new infrastructures.

In 2013, the mining company Vale S.A. begun the duplication of the Carajás Railroad (EFC), that goes from Parauapebas, in Pará, to the capital city of Maranhão state: São Luis, passing through the quilombola territory. The conclusion of the project is scheduled to the end of 2018, according to the company.

In 2017, the DNIT (National Department of Transport Infrastructure), federal government agency, started the duplication works of BR 135. In the early 1940s, BR 135 tore the territory in half, still as an open peak in the middle of the forest.

In 2018, the company EDP Energias do Brasil S.A. initiated a public consultation to implement new lines and an energy substation that will impact several quilombos in the municipalities of Itapecuru-Mirim and Miranda do Norte.

Duplication of the Vale S.A. Carajás Railroad was marked by

irregularities in the licensing process and violations of quilombola rights.

Photo: Sabrina Felipe

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why do the impacts

increase?The need to dispose the ore mined by Vale explains, in part, the expansion of the logistics and energy infrastructure that affects Santa Rosa and other quilombos in the region.

The duplication of the EFC aims to transport a greater volume of ore from the S11D project, which started operating in 2016. Through the exploration of a new mine on the south side of Serra dos Carajás, in the municipality of Canaã dos Carajás, state of Para, the transnational company intends to almost double its extraction - and consequent export - of iron ore: from the current 120 million tons per year to 210 million tons per year.

In China, Vale has one of the largest buyers of the iron ore extracted from Pará. The Asian country is the largest consumer of iron ore in the world.

In order to account the greater production and flow, the mining company also invested in the expansion of the Ponta da Madeira Marine Terminal (TMPM), which it operates in the capital São Luís.

Shrimp farm and steel millThe increased impact on Santa Rosa dos Pretos is also explained by the plans of the Maranhão government, in partnership with the municipalities of Santa Rita and Bacabeira - neighbors of Itapecuru-Mirim, where Santa Rosa is - to set up a shrimp farm and a steel company.

According to news1 published by the government of Maranhão in July 2017, the Ceará company Bomar Maricultura intends to invest R $ 220 million in the construction of a shrimp farm of about 4,100 hectares along the Mearim River, in the Campos da Baixada region. “Once built, it will be the largest shrimp farm in the country and will have a production capacity of between 500 and 600 tons of shrimp per month, when in full activity,” says the official note.

1 https://www.ma.gov.br/bomar-se-prepara-para-investir-r220-milhoes-no-estado/

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Also according to the government, the company’s focus is on the foreign market, with exports planned for Europe and American countries where it already sells shrimp and tilapia fish.

“Since 2002, 2003, the infrastructure for transporting raw materials has been strengthened. There are hydroelectric plants, railways, roads and ports. All of this with great impacts on the populations. This has to do with the countries’ economic project. I can say that the great place for increasing raw material exports is the Amazon, which is where the expansion of the capitalist economic frontier is”, explains Tádzio Peters Coelho, visiting professor at the Graduate Program in Social Sciences at the Federal University of Maranhão (UFMA) and member of the National Committee for the Defense of Territories Against Mining (CNDTM).

Truck serving DNIT in duplication works.

Photo: Andressa Zumpano

During a public hearing2 held in May 2018, residents of Santa Rita expressed their disagreement with the project. The citizens present at the hearing stated that they had not been previously heard about the implementation of the project, and said that the shrimp farms, if installed in natural fields, will harm families that live off fishing not only in Santa Rita, but also in Bacabeira, Itapecuru-Mirim and Anajatuba.

In Bacabeira, a steel plant by the Chinese company CBSteel is planned, according to information3 from the Maranhão government. The steelmaker, according to act 394/20174, which ratifies the contracts signed in 2015, 2016 and 2017 between the city hall, the state government and the company, should implement in that municipality “an industrial complex for the manufacture of steel products, (...) materials for transformers and electrical equipment, steel slag cement, silicon steel and electricity, all for CBSTEEL’s own use and / or for sale to the market.”

2 http://www.al.ma.leg.br/noticias/362383 http://www.ma.gov.br/agenciadenoticias/desenvolvimento/siderurgica-chinesa-vai-gerar-10-milpostos-de-trabalho-em-primeira-fase-de-atuacao-no-maranhao4 https://diario.famem.org.br/14681/

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Act 394/2017 informs that the municipality and the state government have granted tax incentives for CBSteel to set up its steel plant in the municipality.

The report requested interviews with the mayor of Bacabeira, Fernanda Gonçalo (PMN party), with her husband, the mayor of Santa Rita, Hilton Gonçalo (PCdoB party), and with the mayor of Itapecuru-Mirim, Miguel Lauand (PRB party), but didn’t receive feedback from none of them.

The report also requested SEMA, through the State Government’s Transparency Portal, based on the Access to Information Law (LAI), the project, environmental impact studies and licenses for the Bomar Maricultura project in Santa Rita, and CBSTeel in Bacabeira.

In order to grant access to the documents, SEMA made demands that violate the LAI, such as presenting documents that prove the “qualification and legitimacy” of the applicant to have view of the process. The report appealed. The State Secretariat for Transparency and Control, through Secretary Rodrigo Lago, denied appeal at the second instance and did not grant access to the documents, which are public.

More exploration, more energy consumptionThe increase in ore exploitation by Vale, as well as the implementation of new large-scale projects - such as the shrimp farm and the steel mill -, and the flow of grains and other raw materials extracted from the Amazon region into and out of the country, increases port activity in the capital of Maranhão.

Increasing the consumption of energy necessary for the operation of the São Luís port complex also grows, and this growth requires the expansion of the energy infrastructure.

This expansion will create greater impacts on the traditional peoples of Maranhão, and among them, once again, are the quilombolas of Santa Rosa dos Pretos.

In early November 2018, the company EDP Energias do Brasil SA, together with the Maranhão State Secretariat for the Environment (SEMA), held a public hearing in the municipality of Miranda do Norte to discuss the installation of transmission lines and a substation of energy, object of lot 7 of auction number 005/2016 of ANEEL (National Electric Energy Agency), auctioned by EDP for R$ 66.2 million (about $ 15 million), according to information5 from ANEEL.

The 258 towers that the company intends to install over 116 km in length will impact the municipalities of São Luís, Bacabeira, Santa Rita, Itapecuru-Mirim, Anajatuba and Miranda do Norte, and within these municipalities several quilombola territories.

Questioned during the public hearing to whom the energy generated by the new lines would benefit, an EDP technician stated that it is not possible to say precisely, but he guaranteed that the infrastructure would, in general, strengthen Maranhão’s energy

5 http://www.aneel.gov.br/seguranca-de-barragens/-/asset_publisher/hdISBQAbtk6A/content/edp-leva-lote-7/656877?inheritRedirect=false

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system, benefiting all municipalities in the State, including those impacted by the works.However, in the newsletter distributed by EDP at the hearing, the beneficiary is, yes, identifiable - and it is not the quilombola communities impacted: the venture will serve “to expand the Basic Network of the island of São Luís, in order to meet the loads in the metropolitan region , especially the port and industrial region ”, says the newsletter.

Again Vale and China Some of the port developments that will use the energy produced will be the Ponta da Madeira Maritime Terminal, operated by Vale, the Porto do Itaqui, which is public and also undergoes expansions to increase the flow capacity of grains, such as soybeans and corn; and São Luís Port, a private enterprise that is being built by the CCCC (China Communications Construction Company) South America Regional Company, a Chinese infrastructure company, and by WPR, a subsidiary of the São Paulo contractor WTorre.

The port of CCCC and WPR has been implemented, with the support of re-elected governor Flávio Dino (PCdoB), in an extractive reserve area of Cajueiro, a fishing community located in the countryside of the capital of Maranhão.

The installation of the infrastructure has been characterised, since 2014, by a series of irregularities6 in the environmental licensing, in the buying of houses

6 http://ag.jor.br/blog/2017/08/18/subsidiaria-da-wtorre-no-maranhao-derruba-casas-e-ameaca-moradores-para-construir-porto-em-area-de-reserva/

Vegetation suppressed by DNIT to duplicate BR 135. Photo: Andressa Zumpano

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and land of residents and, mainly, by the violation of rights of the traditional population of Cajueiro. Dozens of people lost their homes, demolished by the construction company, and have suffered threats from armed security hired by the companies and installed in bases inside the community.

The municipality of Itapecuru-Mirim, which concentrates more than 70 quilombola communities, including the 20 that make up the Santa Rosa dos Pretos territory, was left out of the agenda of three public hearings held by EDP and SEMA.

The justification, according to the company, was the lower incidence of impacts on the municipality compared to the other five that will be affected by the project. The section of the EDP lines that passes through Itapecuru-Mirim will affect the Monge Belo quilombola territory, which borders Santa Rosa dos Pretos.

and why is Santa Rosa always “chosen” to suffer

the impacts?Two structural facts explain how and why governments and companies keep mouthing huge ancestral land pieces from the residents of Santa Rosa dos Pretos for the enlargement of those infrastructures, even against their will and rights.

The first factor is in the very functioning of the capitalist mode of production. To guarantee high profit rates and remain competitive against competitors in the market for raw materials of plant, mineral and animal origin, there are employers who, with the help of the State, overexploit workers and take over public lands and traditional peoples.

This strategy is used by entrepreneurs even when they are already consolidated and operating their businesses with high technology, thus guaranteeing a constant plunder of natural wealth and human beings.

This is the case of Vale and DNIT, which in the duplication works of the EFC and BR 135, respectively, have appropriated and try to appropriate, in the case of DNIT, quilombola lands through institutional pressure and legal maneuvers - collusion of the State is central to these processes.

“This system [capitalist mode of production] only survives if people and territories on this planet are available in a way that they cannot be legally, that is: the system only survives if it has a dimension of systematic illegality, in which people [and their lands] are likely to be expropriated ”, says the black movement activist, professor and doctor in Social Anthropology at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS) José Carlos Gomes dos Anjos.

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This explains, in part, why both the duplication of the EFC and the attempt to duplicate the BR 135 were and have been marked by violations of the rights of quilombolas in Santa Rosa dos Pretos, such as the lack of prior consultation, the lack of socio-environmental impact and the absence of compensation for caused damage.

“Producing goods at an extremely competitive price means passing railroads over territories, such as Santa Rosa, without having to pay the proper price for this passage, without due compensation,” says Dos Anjos. He says that if the mining company decided to pay what it owes for the installation of the EFC tracks over the lands of Santa Rosa, eventually the price of the undertaking would become so expensive that it could be more interesting for the internacional company to bypass the quilombola territory.

But it is not what happens - it is not what happened. “Most of the people on this planet who are deprived of the possibility of protecting themselves and seeing themselves protected by a state structure are non-white populations, this is the dimension of coloniality”, says the anthropologist.

today’s colonialThe “dimension of coloniality” mentioned by Dos Anjos, is the second structural factor that explains why, for almost a century, Santa Rosa dos Pretos continues to be the target of governments and companies that forcefully push their enterprises on the people of that place.

Pequi tree gets a metal plate from DNIT indicating its fall.

Photo: Sabrina Felipe

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According to Tádzio Peters Coelho, the installation of all the infrastructure related to the mining activity, for example, like transporting minerals, is politically located.

When mining companies locate a dam or a railroad, he says, they consider the resilience and questioning capacity of populations, and seek to install these infrastructures close to low-income populations and traditional communities.

“Generally are black and indigenous population. This we notice not only on the Carajás Railroad, but in other mining infrastructures”, says Coelho, who is also an advisor to the National Movement for Popular Sovereignty in Mining (MAM). These are the territories “deprived of the possibility of protecting themselves and seeing themselves protected by a state structure” indicated by Dos Anjos

The BR 135 duplication strategy is also consistent with Coelho’s analysis. The markings with metal plates and ink made by DNIT on trees and houses that would be knocked down for the passage of the second lane of the BR did not contemplate the communication, much less the prior consultation with any affected quilombola.

During at least 2 years, employees from the agency came in and out from Santa Rosa dos Pretos land - and from the backyards of the residents - without asking for permission and without telling the reason of the visit or measurements and marks made. They were pretty sure that they wouldn’t be interpellated or questioned by that population.

Loot resistanceThe violations committed by DNIT in Santa Rosa dos Pretos in the duplication of BR 135 were reported by leaders of the territory to the Federal Public Ministry (MPF) and the Public Federal Defender’s Office (DPU).

The complaints led SEMA to decide in February 2018 to suspend works on quilombo lands in the municipalities of Santa Rita and Itapecuru-Mirim. In May 2018, the MPF followed the decision of the secretariat, and recommended maintaining the interruption until new socio-environmental impact studies were carried out and the quilombolas were consulted.

In an interview with the public prosecutor Hilton Araújo de Melo, responsible for the civil investigation that investigates the illegalities committed by DNIT, the report found that in August 2018 the MPF extended the suspension recommendation to the quilombo lands of the municipality of Miranda do Norte.

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Worker in the middle of dense dust caused by duplication works.

Photo: Andressa Zumpano

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Just as colonial strategies of theft of body and land of the inhabitants of Santa Rosa dos Pretos are still perpetuated by the hands of Vale and DNIT, the quilombolas’ strategies of resistance also hold and resurface their ancestors’ fights. In the following essay, the black cosmology appears incarnated in ancestry, in collectiveness and in the everyday relationship from the quilombolas with the Enchanted. Thanks to this cosmology, the blacks of Santa Rosa are not just surviving: they are the living.

QUILOMBOLA COSMOLOGY

DOES THE

BLACK

WORLD HAVE MORE

LIFE?• Zandia Ayala

Lord of the woods, the one who feeds us and gives us health

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“The idea of modernity is an idea of death. But the white death is bad, the black death is different. In the black death we can understand other relationships, we can understand the contact with other worlds. But the white death is just death. There’s no life in death. And there’s no use for us. If this is a modern that only kills and has no life, it’s worthless. Because in the black death, even so, there’s still life.”

Josicléa Pires da Silva, 24 years old, is one of the many voices of the Santa Rosa dos Pretos quilombo that opposes to the duplication of the BR 135 by DNIT (National Department of Transport Infrastructure) and also to the Carajás Railroad (EFC) duplication by the mining company Vale.

She understands these undertakings are “the death in life”, they are the white modernity that under-develops, that sections live bodies -trees, streams, animals and nuclear family households - to lay down hundreds of inert kilometers of asphalt and iron.

To Josicléa, the white modernity is incapable of producing good fruits because it’s progress projects are like a dead and empty trunk, without the tree top that kisses and reaches for strength in the sun, and without the roots that nurture it with water and attach it to the earth.

In the case of the BR 135 duplication, the death in life pointed by the quilombola means the extinction of the quilombo Santa Rosa dos Pretos itself, once that DNIT intends to eliminate 345 houses in an eight kilometer stretch that corresponds to the quilombo - practically the entire real estate that are bordered by the BR, including churches, a terreiro de Mina, a flour house, a community club, family businesses and fruitful tree stands.

The death in life still means the eviction of the blacks of Santa Rosa from the lands that they occupy for over three centuries and the eviction of the Enchanted, spiritual entities that are the first and timeless owners of the quilombo.

Maria Dalva (left) and Josicléa: two generations of women that

nurture and protect the house of the Enchanted of Santa Rosa dos Pretos.

Photo: Andressa Zumpano

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If the colonial strategies of expropriation of the land and the black body are still perpetuated today in the quilombo, the strategies of resistance of the quilombolas also emerge and resurface the experience of their enslaved ancestry.

Simaumeira of the quilombo Old Ranch, in the Santa Rosa dos

Pretos territory: the holy tree is a bond with the enslaved ancestors.

Photo: Andressa Zumpano

The relation of involvement with the nature in opposition to the capitalist “development”; the personal relation with the forest and streams, in opposition to the extermination of these lives to make room for progress; the practical and everyday relation of the visible living beings with the Invisible (or Voduns, or Enchanted, or Light Guides) in opposition to the white view over these entities as folk elements: all of this is black cosmology, a force that the white modernity does not understand or reach.

the invisible crosses us“The quilombo has a lot of strength because of the Invisible of light. Those are who bring the strength into the quilombo. They have the same strength as the saints. May they bring us strength so that we keep living inside the quilombo and fight these people who have been tormenting our lives”, states Severina Silva, 64 years old, Mãe de Santo from the Terreiro de Mina “Our Lady of the Navigators Tent”.

She and her Santo children feed the Enchanted with candle light, prayer and respect everyday.

The Enchanted live in the quilombo, in the forest and in the streams. That’s why the overthrowing of a tree or the silting of a stream can cause an immeasurable imbalance to the quilombo and it’s inhabitants: it eliminates the house of the Enchanted, they leave the quilombo and with them goes the strength that used to support the black people of Santa Rosa.

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“They like to be in the forest, in the bushes. Then the people come and deforest and we are left without strength, because they go somewhere else. And the streams also have a lot of Guides that live on streams, which is the Water Mother. This is why we don’t want them to take away the water, dig in the in the seacoast of the streams, because there are Guides, There are Enchanted, Spirits of Light that live inside the streams. So we want to preserve it.”, says Mother Severina

Severina Silva, Mãe de Santo of the Terreiro de Mina, is a spiritual force

of the quilombo. Behind her the centennial pequizeiro that nurtures

the body and spirit. Photo: Andressa Zumpano

Questioned about what is the relation of the Enchanted with the fight for the defense of the territory, she returns the question in the form of a proposition. “Come over here during an Enchanted celebration and ask them directly.”

The Enchanted have been responding to Libânio Pires, 84 years old. “If you don’t do something to the streams that are dying, we will leave this place”, they told him during a dream. “But if I can’t see, what can I do?” Asked the elder, almost blind by the glaucoma. “It is us who are showing you the streams.”

Everyday EnchantryThe relationship between the Enchanted and quilombolas for the defense of the territory is ingrained. It is in the inspirations, in the intuitions, in the doctrines of the Mina, which are the chants inspired by the spiritual entities in their children of flesh and blood.

It is in the care and respect of the forest, in the courses of water and the animals of the bushes. Respect and care that are not found in the relations of exploitation that companies and governments establish when they impose great constructions in the land of the blacks and the original people. Anacleta Pires da Silva, 52 years old, daughter of Libânio, tells that when she was a child, in the morning, her grandfather and later also her father used to come home soaked from the rounds that they did inside the bushes, even in rainy periods, to check the nature’s condition.

“My father was the guardian of all those bushes, he used to walk a lot through the entire territory, he knew all the borders”, she tells.

Josicléa, daughter of Anacleta and granddaughter of Libânio, coordinates today a group of over 30 youngsters named Quilombola Agroforestry Agents (AAQ). The group dedicates to replanting the native forest in the seacoast of the silted streams and to preserve natural locations and elements that are sacred to the quilombo, such as a juçaral, pequizeiros, streams, water springs, water wells, simaumeiras and gameleiras1.

“They let us live in their house and it is their house that we preserve”, explains Josicléa, referring to the Enchanted owners of Santa Rosa dos Pretos

The relationship between the quilombolas and the Enchanted is also in the celebrations and payment of promises; it is in the planting and harvesting, in the fishing, in the preparing of the food, it is in the singing and the sleeping - the dream is the place of frequent encounters between the ones from here and the ones from beyond; it is in the obligation of the children of the spiritual entities to them.

Mother Severina says that she won’t go to the fight herself, but she does work to protect the ones who do. “To be honest, depending on me this people wouldn’t pass over here. Through me, this road won’t pass.”, determines, referring to the duplication of the BR 135, that threatens the terreiro de Mina of the quilombo and the centennial pequizeiro embedded in front of it.

“Because the Mother of Water likes it”No demand is unanswered to those who have faith and respect, because the Nature, mother and house of the Enchanted, won’t let themselves be toped in generosity.

Maria Dalva Pires Belfort, 55 years old, filha de Santo, built an artesian well in her house to serve as a water fountain to those in need. When summer comes and dries up the water tanks of the quilombo, it is in her house that they go for water to drink and cook; it is there that they bathe and wash their clothes.

The well has over 30 meters of depth and it was herself who indicated the driller where to dig. “Dona Dalva, no water is coming out from there”, said Manoel das Chagas Aires da Silva, well driller, while he advanced into the floor with the drill and found dry land. “Yes it does, son, you can continue”, she assured.

— In the evening I bought some wine and poured it into the well.— And why wine, Mrs. Dalva?— Because Mother of Water likes it.

In the following day, the water sprouted.

1 Translator’s Note: The juçara (Euterpe oleracea), pequizeiros (Caryocar brasiliense), simaumeiras (Ceiba pentandra) and gameleiras (Ficus gomelleira) are important and sacred plant trees.

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The collectivity agglutinates usSauce recipe, chibel or môi: get a dish, a pot or a bowl - whatever is bigger - and put plenty of chopped tomato, coriander, onion, pepper, salt, lime juice and water on it. Add water flour to thicken it a little, just a little, because the môi is made be drank, not eaten.

Then place the recipient of the môi in the center of the table, place the spoons for the meal and invite everyone who is in the house and occasionally outside of it, to drink the food together - screaming in the yard is recommended to warn that the môi is ready. “A Môi is only good when shared with a lot of people”, says Maria Dalva.

If the preparing of the food and the act of eating are collective in the quilombo, the act of drinking the môi – a sort of salty and energetic refreshment -, expresses this collectivity in a graphic manner: everyone around the bowl with the spiced drink simultaneously dive their spoons in search of pieces of tomato, onion and flour portions.

Benedito Pires Belfort savors a jackfruit grown in the quilombo. The relationship with

the earth and with it’s fruits is of belonging and precision, not of profit or accumulation.

Photo: Andressa Zumpano

It is important that there are no leftovers from the môi; it’s important that much of it is drunk; it’s important that everyone has it at the same time.

In the quilombo, the collectivity appears as a structuring axis of micro and macro relationships: from the collective planting and harvesting in the roças to the community meetings to establish the common demands together with the public authority; from the group trips to present the Caixa do Divino and the Tambor de Crioula in the villages and nearby cities to the understanding of the Quilombola territory as a collective property; from the collective effort to build houses to the efforts of tearing down the fences of the landowners that trespass the land of the black people.

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The fight against the violations committed by DNIT have been marked by the collectivity of actions and the fellowship between the neighbor quilombos: the territories from Santa Rosa dos Pretos and Santa Maria dos Pinheiros, in Itapecuru-Mirim and the Joaquim Maria territory located in Miranda do Norte do political formation activities together to confront the institutional racism of the federal authorities.

“The quilombolas are contrary to this development ideology, because to them the involving (unifying) is the most dignifying form of resisting and confronting the destructive logic of the capitalist system in which they are damaged, violated and forcefully ‘included’ as bargaining chip of the Brazilian State. The traditional people are not bargaining chips or Brazil’s subordinates”, writes Josicléa in the conclusion of her degree in Earth Pedagogics defended in 2017 in the Federal University of Maranhão.

“Quilombola territory means the union of people with similar history and a whole shared and developed identity; (…) the development is only possible when there is involvement between the beings.”

the ancestry maintains our existenceThe ancestry that crosses and conforms the relationships in the quilombo goes beyond blood ties. It is a historic memory, live and incarnated that updates itself whenever the Tambor de Crioula is danced to, whenever a vow to the Divino is fulfilled, whenever an ox or pig is put down to feed the people in a celebration, whenever an Enchanted swirls in a Terreiro de Mina over their Horse.

“My relatives”, “our relatives”, “those who came before us”, “the black people that came before us”. The ancestry that connects the quilombolas of today to the enslaved quilombolas brought from Guinea-Bissau to Maranhão in the 18 and 19 centuries is the witness of the past and the guarantee of the present, it is a bond that provides cohesion and continuity to the quilombo.

It is not by chance that the mining company Vale S.A. at the time that it initiated the duplication of the EFC road, and most recently the DNIT in it’s effort of duplicating the BR 135 road going over the quilombos, have put into doubt the ancestry identity of the quilombolas from Santa Rosa and other quilombos before and now again to weaken the fight of these people.

In 2009, Vale filed an administrative appeal in Justice contesting the land regularization process of the quilombola territory of Santa Rosa dos Pretos.

In 2018, DNIT sent to the Union’s Public Defense (DPU) a letter of appeal in which alleges to have “special attention to the wishes of the communities that were possibly affected by the enterprise [the duplication of the BR 135]; however this DNIT cannot abide by pleas of people who ‘self proclaim‘ as quilombolas to paralise the construction work in areas that they proclaim themselves as quilombolas (…)”.

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Beyond ignoring that quilombola is not a title but an identity, the federal authorities also demonstrate lack of knowledge towards the criterium of self-identification which is what allows the definition of the quilombola identity by a social group and hence the definition of a community as quilombola.

Josicléa says that time has stopped in this house. The couple that used to live in it “came home” and took

the time with them. Photo: Andressa Zumpano

The strength of telling

your own story Because of this, in a context of oppression and violence, the words and narratives have the power of a gun and the protection of a trench.

In the speech of many quilombolas of Santa Rosa dos Pretos, Vale and DNIT are the true invaders and not owners of the land where they lay down the tracks of EFC and BR 135; the black people of Santa Rosa were never slaves, they were enslaved and those enslaved people were not illiterate, they just didn’t speak the language of their oppressor.

The quilombola communities are not “at the margin” of the railroad or the BR highway: it is the railroad and the BR highway that cross the quilombola communities in a violent manner.

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When they close highways and railroads in protest, the people of Santa Rosa are not occupying those spaces, they’re camping in lands that are their own - “to occupy means to dwell in the other’s space, camping is dwelling in our own.”, says Josicléa.

And more: “quilombo is not a place of fleeing black people. If we were seeking freedom, how could we be fleeing? The Portuguese were the ones who were fleeing when they came here”, she states.

In the quilombo Santa Rosa dos Pretos the history of the “supposed” baron - exactly like this, “baron” in between quotation marks - is told in such way that the protagonism belongs to the oppressed and not the oppressor.

“They say that he donated the lands to my relatives, but since when was he the owner of those lands?”, asks Josicléa when talking about Joaquim Raimundo Nunes Belfort (1820-1898), the “supposed” baron of Santa Rosa, “owner” of the Santa Rosa Ranch, which is today the territory of Santa Rosa dos Pretos.

The lands that shelter Josicléa today, her parents, sisters and brother and other 750 families never belonged to Joaquim or his Irish ancestors. Because to the quilombolas the land belongs to those who nurture, plant and live on it, it belongs to who is involved with it, in the most ingrained meaning of the word.

Therefore the lands always belonged to the relatives of Josicléa, the black people who were kidnapped in Guinea-Bissau that watered the floor of Santa Rosa with blood and sweat.

Visible or invisible, the black people go on and will go on in the quilombo

in this time and beyond. Because they are the living ones.

Photo: Andressa Zumpano

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And this story who tells are them, the direct descendants of enslaved people who remained in the quilombos, resisting the material annihilation of their lives and the silencing of their subjectivities.

“They know that I’m alive. They know we are alive. They seek to bring their ideology that the enterprise is good at all costs because they want to kill the last remnants of life that there still is here, because they too are already dead”, says Josicléa referring to the DNIT, to Vale and their enterprises.

“They have been trying this for 518 years, but they are not going to kill us. We will continue resisting. If not in this flesh, rotten matter, we will resist in other spaces, in other non-visible worlds. But we will be here, we will be here.”

◆

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Caixa do Divino: musical instrument made of wood or zinc, covered at both ends, and played in quilombola festivities.

Horse [Cavalo]: Mother of Saint or Daughter/Son of Saint [Mãe de Santo or Filha/Filho de Santo], who has their body used by Voduns and Enchanted people when they visit the material world of humans.

Enchanted [Encantados]: the same as Voduns.

Filha/Filho de Santo [Daughter/Son of Saint]: people who are taught by the Mãe de Santo and who also communicate with Voduns.

Mãe de Santo [Mother of Saint]: Priestess who communicates with Voduns and coordinates spiritual rites in the Terreiro de Mina.

Water Mother [Mãe D’Água]: Spiritual being of African

origin who lives in watercourses.

Quilombo: place of freedom where the descendants of the enslaved live.

Quilombola: people who recognize themselves from their African origins.

Roças: place of growing food, collectively.

Terreiro de Mina: place to worship African ancestry.

Tambor de Crioula: dance of Afro-indigenous origin performed by quilombolas.

Tambor de Mina: Dance of African origin, performed to worship the Enchanted and Voduns.

Voduns: name given to spirit beings of African origin.

TRANSLATOR’S

NOTES[ ]

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