Victims of Mariana’s tragedy rely on British justice: ‘It was a crime’

The trial against Australian mining company BHP for the breach of the Fundão dam in 2015 at the Bento Rodrigues sub-district in Mariana, Minas Gerais, ends on Thursday in London, and the victims are confident in British courts, which will give their verdict in a few months.

“I hope English justice will do for us what the Brazilian justice is not doing. I hope the responsible companies will be deemed guilty of everything that happened and is happening to us,” says Priscila Monteiro Izabel, who claims to have lost the baby she carried in the disaster.

On November 5, 2015, the disruption of the tailings dam of an iron mine in Bento Rodrigues, Sub -District of Mariana, Minas Gerais, took the life of 19 people, devastated several locations, including indigenous communities, and dumped 40 million cubic meters of toxic mud in Rio Doce and the Atlantic Ocean.