A atuação do poder legislativo do Espírito Santo no caso do desastre do Rio Doce

Abstract

Socioenvironmental Disasters cause different demands to the Public Power, seeking to mitigate their effects on the affected social fabric. This study addresses the behavior of the Legislative Power of Espírito Santo based on the losses caused by the arrival of mining waste from the rupture of the Fundão dam, in the city of Mariana, in Minas Gerais. The disaster, caused by Vale do Rio Doce’s subsidiary company, Samarco, which occurred in November 2015, affected cities in two states and caused personal and material damage in thousands of kilometers. Problems that persist for a long post-disaster period and, increasingly, demand State initiatives. Thus, this research seeks to understand how post-disaster state deputies reacted about legislative production. Our bibliographic review runs through the studies on Disasters, in terms of their paradigms and attempts at conceptualization, and by the Legislative Studies, on the understanding of political behavior, voting geography and, because we have a private actor as the cause of the disaster, the relations between campaign financing and legislative production. In the empirical exposition, data of the proposals presented by the parliamentarians, values received by the parliamentarians as donations, from the company, and electoral information are presented. In order to continue the research, five guiding questions were formulated that seek interpretations of the data collected, namely: (1) if the deputies who have an electoral college in the areas most affected by the mud were more active in the face of the needs of the population; (2) whether the deputies elected with financing from Vale and its subsidiaries sought to protect the mining company; (3) if the Executive was predominant in the production before the parliamentary initiative; (4) whether, due to the electoral need, deputies were more attentive to the agendas related to the disaster in the last two years of their mandate; (5) whether the Brumadinho disaster in 2019 acted as a precipitating context for new proposals. In an initial survey, between the years 2015 and 2019, 25 proposals from the house were found, dealing with the theme of tragedy. A low number if we compare the total of proposals filed at the Assembly during the same period, which exceeds 20 thousand projects. Among the projects presented, those that sought to benefit the company have a majority, while the population has never been heard by parliamentarians, which suggests a pro-company reaction from the house, especially in the three years that followed the rupture.