By a movement of the mothers, wives, and daughters of Brumadinho

In fifteen days, we will reach two months since the Brumadinho disaster, caused by the negligence of the mining company Vale regarding the safety procedures of its tailings dams, which resulted in the collapse of the Córrego do Feijão structure, killing approximately 300 people. To date, 191 bodies have been identified and 111 are missing, constituting the greatest tragedy in the entire Brazilian productive sector, not just mining. Never, after slavery, in any segment of our economy, has any problem resulted in the death of so many workers.

Meanwhile, the pace of rescues has decreased alarmingly (there were 160 at the beginning of February), making it urgent for a movement to demand that these people not be forgotten. What today's text intends to offer is a suggestion for a counter-hegemonic organization of the women involved in the disaster, using, it is worth noting, a hegemonic gender narrative, which, undertaken with due knowledge of the facts, was extremely effective in Argentina.

During this same period, much has happened in this sad Brazil that has diluted the Vale mining disaster, which should have occupied pages and pages of newspapers for the past two months, into various other shocks, outrages, and public commotions that do not allow Brazilians even a few days of respite during Carnival, when the President of the Republic went around tweeting pornography and defaming the country's main popular festival, attacking national culture despite claiming to be a nationalist.

Between one point and another in this short trajectory, two moments were particularly striking: the deaths of the boys who were training at Flamengo and were caught in the fire in the club's dormitories, and the equally terrifying death of Arthur Araújo Lula da Silva, grandson of the former president and current political prisoner Luís Inácio Lula da Silva, which generated the entire media spectacle of horror and repression against the Brazilian people through the figure who most symbolizes them, which at least half of Brazil watched, stunned, on TV.

Both problems touch upon the same theme, the family, which should receive the empathy of the men and women who currently hold power, given that they defend it so ardently, but which, by all indications, is merely another pretext for the new segregationist perspective of the Brazilian State: "not all families, my family" (that is, white, middle-class, Catholic or conservative Protestant, heterosexual, and not single-parent). If the family in question is poor and lives in the Brazilian peripheries, a way is found to forget about them here and there, with some compensation here and there, at most. Life goes on.

If the family, then, is that of the man who embodies the real and legitimate indignations and rights of the poorest people, then it must not only be forgotten, but hidden. The less they are seen as human beings with real feelings, thus arousing the empathy of Brazilians scattered throughout the country, the better. The real Lula can never cease to be the one from the edited and editorialized testimonies to the Justice system on TV: corrupt, cynical, or even cornered before the heroes in robes. By becoming an unjustly wronged grandfather who lost his grandson, in front of all the TV cameras, he becomes a middle-class white man, which is not in the interest of the elites.

All of this is a long, but didactic and necessary preamble to reiterate that, of the 300 people killed in Brumadinho, 111 remain missing and, without news coverage following the search process day by day, the number of bodies recovered daily from the Vale mud has plummeted. There were about 160 at the beginning of February, that is, in about ten days of searching. In one month, another 30 bodies were recovered and identified, leaving more than a third of the workers still buried.

Two days after International Women's Day, despite the struggle to deconstruct the obsolete idea of ​​women as the sole guardians of the family, perhaps it is up to these women affected by Vale to seek an organization to redress injustices and, first and foremost, recover all the bodies lying under the tailings of the Córrego do Feijão mine.

Just as was done against the Argentine dictatorship in the Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires, in a movement very well portrayed by the Oscar-winning Argentine film "The Official Story," it is possible that a women's movement involving mothers, wives, grandmothers, sisters, and daughters of those who disappeared in Brumadinho could be even more effective in generating empathy for the family values ​​of our patriarchal society, and thus ensure greater speed in the search for and reparations by Vale. Evoking the term and the symbolic values ​​of "family," in our current context, can be so decisive in any legitimate claim that, for example, it managed to get Lula out of jail and make him appear before the people, even if only for a few minutes.

This column acknowledges that it does not exert authority over the organization of those affected by the Mariana and Brumadinho fires, nor over women's movements. However, it recalls that the use of the hegemonic gender narrative (mommy takes care of her little children) for counter-hegemonic social demands (give us back the bodies of the children they took from us) was extremely effective in Argentina. It even laid the groundwork for punishing those responsible for the summary executions of the military regime (something that never happened here). Therefore, this space for discussion attempts to offer this suggestion for combating the negligence and the attempt to consign to oblivion the deaths of the people in Brumadinho.

Let there be no more missing bodies.

May mothers, daughters, and wives, above all, unite, but also grandmothers, sisters, granddaughters, cousins, aunts, and any women who lost loved ones in Brumadinho.

Let them organize a movement.

May they dare to fight and win like the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo.