Afro-Brazilian Resistance to Extractivism in the Bay of Aratu

Abstract

This article analyzes environmental governance and black geographies to explore the connections between Brazil’s erstwhile populist government and President Michel Temer’s conservative administration. Although on the surface Temer’s austere approach appears to put him at fundamental odds with the Workers’ Party’s populist emphasis on social welfare and wealth redistribution, this article argues that Brazilian populism and conservatism contain striking similarities vis-à-vis the environment and racialized violence. I examine the ways in which natural resource extraction was a central component of governance under the Workers’ Party and persists under Temer. By analyzing the struggles of three black communities in the state of Bahia, I draw particular attention to the ways in which a reliance on extractivism contributes to racialized landscapes, because these communities’ autonomous territories remain grievously threatened. This article points out that the environmental tendencies of the new conservative government are not novel so much as they are a fulfillment of a trend propagated under the auspices of populism. This is not, however, the final word on the topic, because affected communities resist the environmental effects of extractive industry. Although extractive measures remain central to Brazilian governance, social movements like those in Bahia nonetheless enact a politics and counternotion of the environment that establish alternative ways of life. Key Words: black geographies, Brazil, environmental racism, Workers’ Party.

本文分析环境治理与黑色地理学来探讨巴西过往的民粹政府和总统米歇尔．特梅尔的保守政府之间的连结。尽管表面上特梅尔的撙节政策似乎使其与工党强调社会福利与财富重分配的民粹诉求呈现根本上的对立，但本文主张，巴西的民粹主义和保守主义在面对环境与种族暴力上，包含了惊人的相似性。我检视自然资源搾取的方式作为工党政府的核心构成要件，并在特梅尔执政下持续如此。我通过分析巴伊亚州内三大黑人社群的抗争，特别关注对搾取主义的依赖如何导致种族化的地景，因为这些社群的自治领土仍然悲惨地受到威胁。本文指出，新保守主义政府的环境倾向并不新颖，而是体现民粹主义兴盛下普及的趋势。但这并不是该议题的最终结论，因为受影响的社群正在反抗搾取产业的环境影响。尽管搾取措施仍然是巴西治理的核心，诸如在巴伊亚的社会运动，仍然启动了能够建立另类生活方式的政治及反抗的环境概念。关键词：黑色地理学，巴西，环境种族主义，工党。

Este artículo analiza la gobernanza ambiental y las geografías negras para explorar las conexiones entre el anterior gobierno populista y la nueva administración conservadora del presidente Michel Temer. Si bien en la superficie el austero enfoque de Temer pareciera colocarlo en desacuerdo fundamental con el énfasis populista del Partido de los Trabajadores, en bienestar social y redistribución de la riqueza, este artículo arguye que el populismo y el conservatismo brasileños muestran notables semejanzas, con respecto al medio ambiente y la violencia racializada. Examino los modos como la extracción de recursos naturales fue un componente central de la gobernanza bajo el Partido de los Trabajadores, lo cual persiste bajo Temer. Analizando las luchas de tres comunidades negras en el estado de Bahía, pongo particular atención a las maneras como una confianza en el extractivismo contribuye a los paisajes racializados, debido a que los territorios autónomos de estas comunidades siguen seriamente amenazados. Este artículo indica que las tendencias ambientales del nuevo gobierno conservador no son mayormente novedosas en cuanto que son la culminación de una tendencia propagada con los auspicios del populismo. No obstante, esta no es la última palabra sobre el tópico, porque las comunidades afectadas oponen resistencia a los efectos ambientales de la industria extractiva. Aunque las medidas extractivas siguen siendo centrales a la gobernanza brasileña, movimientos sociales como los que ocurren en Bahía promueven, sin embargo, una política y una contra-intención del medio ambiente que establecen medios de vida alternativos. Palabras clave: Brasil, geografías negras, racismo ambiental, Partido de los Trabajadores.

T he shift in Brazil from the “populist” administration of ex-President Dilma Rousseff to the government of the “conservative” Michel Temer is a useful case for studying how changes in government relate to environmental racism. Although Temer’s austere approach appears to put him at odds with the Workers’ Party’s populist emphasis on social welfare and wealth redistribution, an examination of Afro-Brazilian territorial struggles demonstrates how Brazilian populism and conservatism contain striking similarities vis-à-vis the environment and racialized violence. This article analyzes black geographies literature on anti-blackness (McKittrick and Woods 2007; McKittrick 2013; Eaves 2016) and political ecology literature on capitalist resource extraction (Sundberg 2008; Perreault 2013; Valdivia 2015; Pulido 2017) to evidence how extractivism is inherently tied to the spatial marginalization of Afro-descendant communities (Mollett 2011; Loperena 2017). Moreover, I show how this anti-black extractivism is perpetrated by seemingly distinct political parties.

The case of three Afro-Brazilian communities in the Bay of Aratu in the state of Bahia evidences how populist and conservative political forces have perpetuated capitalist accumulation and anti-black environmental practices through shipping and militarization. As processes underpinning natural resource extraction, shipping and militarization result in the spatial displacement and poisoning of the communities in the Bay of Aratu. Extractivism—as a component of global capital accumulation—thus depends on the denial of the spatial legitimacy of Afro-descendant communities (Loperena 2017). Extractivism also evidences how the coconstitution of race and the environment inform the spatial and social organization of the Bay of Aratu (Sundberg 2008). In this article, I draw on four years of participant observation and personal conversations with these communities to evidence how the extractive agenda of Brazil’s progressive and conservative governments is made possible via the spatial subordination of the Afro-Brazilian communities in the Bay of Aratu. Furthermore, I examine alternatives to this agenda by foregrounding the politics of the Afro-Brazilian communities in the Bay of Aratu. This article highlights how anti-blackness remains central to extractivism in Brazil, regardless of shifts in governance. It also evidences how the communities in the Bay of Aratu enact subjectivities and counternotions of the environment that establish alternative ways of life.

The Rise and Fall of “Progressivism”

Brazil’s Workers’ Party (PT) officially formed in the 1980s and gained national prominence with the 2002 presidential election of Luiz Inácio “Lula” da Silva (Branford and Rocha 2015). Neopopulist PT measures like minimum wage increases and cash transfer programs for needy families served to pull more than 20 million Brazilians out of poverty, thereby establishing a public image of state benevolence (Oliveira 2006; Anderson 2011). In August 2016, the Brazilian Senate removed president Dilma Rousseff of the PT from power for violation of federal budget protocol. Michel Temer of the center-right Brazilian Democratic Movement replaced Rousseff. Temer immediately implemented fiscally and socially conservative measures, dissolving, defunding, and merging different government agencies dedicated to serving indigenous and Afro-descendant communities. He also moved to facilitate natural resource extraction (Arsenault 2017).

To many onlookers, attempts at increasing resource extraction and defunding organs committed to helping racialized communities demonstrate Temer’s lack of concern for the environment and marginalized groups. Thus, Temer is often cast as a radical departure from the “progressive” agenda of the PT. An engagement with the Afro-Brazilian communities in the Bay of Aratu, however, reveals the centrality of extractivism and environmental racism to both progressive and conservative administrations.

The Bay of Aratu

The Bay of Aratu is a small bay in the state of Bahia, located around 25 km from the city-center of the state capital of Salvador. In this area reside the communities of Ilha de Maré, Tororó, and Rio dos Macacos. These communities exist within 7 km of one another. All three communities have more than 200 years of history in the region. Prior to the 1888 abolition of Brazilian slavery, the enslaved ancestors of all three communities worked on, and escaped from, plantations located in the region, establishing a measure of autonomy from dominant society. Thus, all three communities have demonstrated a generations-long commitment to remaining autonomous from the always shifting structural violence present in Bahia, effectively creating “the pillars of a parallel social order” in the Bay of Aratu (Woods 2017, 13).

These three communities are physically proximate to one another and maintain close political and personal connections with each other. Still, their histories are unique and deserve individual investigations.¹ Ilha de Maré is an island collectively composed of the communities of Santana, Bananeiras, Nevis, Botelho, Maracanã, Itamoabo, Porto dos Cavalos, Caquende, Martelo, Ponta Grossa, and Praia Grande. It is home to between 10,000 and 12,000 individuals. Ilha de Maré traces its history back to Africans who escaped slave ships and established maroon (fugitive slave) communities on the island. Tororó lays on the mainland shores of the Bay of Aratu and is home to around 130 families. Today’s inhabitants are the descendants of enslaved Afro-descendant populations from the plantations Pombau, Bela Vista, Muribêca, Gameleira, Ponto de Areia, and Sapoca; the indigenous Tupinambá people; and escaped Afro-descendant maroons who lived in the area prior to the establishment of the plantations. Rio dos Macacos exists roughly 5 km inland from Tororó and is currently home to just over twenty families. This community traces its history back to the plantations Fazenda Macaco, Fazenda Mereles, Fazenda Carne Verde, and Fazenda Martins. The ancestors of today’s community members worked on these plantations while also maintaining autonomous territories independent of the plantations (author’s field notes 2014).

Despite having unique histories, these communities share the common characteristic of subsistence production. All three communities have historically relied on fishing and the collection of crabs, shrimp, oysters, and mussels from the sea, mangroves, and rivers. In addition to fishing, residents are skilled cultivators of a variety of crops, such as beans, okra, mangoes, watermelons, corn, manioc, guava, and cucumbers. They also forage for wild crops like jackfruit, limes, and honey. The communities’ knowledge of, and commitment to, producing their own crops is best summarized by Rio dos Macacos’s oldest resident, who succinctly told me, “I know how to plant everything” (author’s field notes 2014). Drawing on the natural environment to provide for themselves has, for centuries, allowed the communities in the Bay of Aratu to maintain an autonomous way of life.

The communities’ autonomy is, in part, based on their relationship to the environment. While discussing their environmental practices at a 2014 community meeting, Ilha de Maré’s leaders insisted that the communities in the Bay of Aratu “have a different understanding of nature,” based on “dependence and respect.” This unique relationship leads to the communities seeing themselves as a part of the environment, instead of separated from it (author’s field notes 2014). Rather than dominating the environment, these communities interact with the environment in a mutually sustaining manner. This relation to the natural environment has made community autonomy possible. Autonomy is vital, given the history of Brazilian anti-blackness (Bledsoe 2015) and the fact that life in Bahia remains informed by premature black death (Gilmore 2002).

Afro-Brazilian practices of environmental sustainability are the results of sociospatial practices that supersede a commitment to securing means of subsistence (see Voeks 1990; Werneck 2010). Nonetheless, subsistence and material autonomy remain central to the environmental approach of the communities in the Bay of Aratu. By providing Ilha de Maré, Tororó, and Rio dos Macacos with means of subsistence, the ocean, rivers, and forests of the Bay have provided the communities with alternatives to the highly exploitative labor practices immanent to mainstream society, such as low-paid, informal, and domestic labor (Neto and Azzoni 2011; Harrington 2015). Instead of remaining beholden to the (often abusive) demands of bosses (Perry 2013), the communities’ subsistence practices allow members to spend time with each other and work in a manner befitting them and their communal needs (author’s field notes 2014). Moreover, the communities’ reliance on the environment means that they do not have to live near Salvador’s city core to work. Instead, as explained by leaders from Ilha de Maré during a public audience with municipal officials, the communities intentionally avoid urban Salvador because of “how blacks … are treated in the city” (author’s field notes 2014). Conditions in urban Brazil are, generally, rife with multiple forms of state and nonstate violence (Garmany 2011). In urban Salvador, police violence is particularly ubiquitous. Police murders of Afro-descendant residents of the city are an all-too-common phenomenon, having increased 212 percent between 1995 and 2005 (Smith 2013). Although no way of life is perfect, these communities have preserved autonomy for more than 200 years by constantly analyzing their life conditions and adjusting to the various permutations of Bahia’s anti-blackness.

Some of the most recent manifestations of anti-black violence in the Bay of Aratu are effects of extraction—specifically embodied in commercial shipping and militarization. These phenomena have taken place under both populist and conservative regimes, as both administrations have clearly committed themselves to participating in the global capitalist economy. This participation is made possible through logics of anti-blackness, which see black populations and their geographies as “unknowable and unseeable” (McKittrick and Woods 2007, 3). These logics lead to everyday, racialized events (Mollett 2011) like processes of pollution and routine violence, described later. By highlighting the ways in which Brazilian extractivism remains imbricated with anti-blackness, the case of the Bay of Aratu evidences that presumably distinct political administrations reify capitalism through structural, environmentally racist mechanisms (Pulido 2000; Pulido 2017).

Extraction and Shipping in the Bay of Aratu

The Bay of Aratu has been a site of development projects since the 1960s. Under Brazil’s military dictatorship (1964–1985), the state government embarked on a journey to “modernize” the state of Bahia. Baiano elites believed that, through government-led development, the state of Bahia—nationally perceived as underdeveloped, impoverished, backward, and black—could begin to compete with more economically prosperous, “whiter” southern cities like Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo (Viana Filho 1984). To combat Brazil’s apparent regional hierarchies (Weinstein 2015), elites in Bahia undertook a number of projects. In addition to the expansion of the military in the Bay of Aratu—discussed in more detail here—one of the largest projects undertaken during this time was the Port of Aratu, constructed in 1971 (Viana Filho 1984). Whereas Baiano politicians cast the port as a boon for the state’s economy, the communities in the Bay of Aratu critique the port’s construction. Tororó community leaders who lived through this land grab maintain that nobody consulted the communities in the Bay prior to the building of the port. These same leaders maintain that neither public nor private actors have displayed any interest in the effects this construction has subsequently had for the communities (author’s field notes 2017).

In the decades since its original construction, the port has expanded and currently represents a site of global commodity transport. Today, the Port of Aratu is home to three terminals in which freighters dispense and receive shipments of various goods made from extracted natural resources. In many ways, the port has lived up to elite aspirations of connecting Bahia to the wider national and global economy. Ships from all around the world come to the port to drop off and pick up commodities like aluminum, copper, ammonium, diesel, and ethanol. The present circulation of minerals and natural resources through the port is part of Brazil’s political economic commitment to extractivism. The “progressive” PT played a significant role in building Brazil’s current extractive capabilities, as it heavily financed extractive industries in the country. Under the PT, state-run corporations like BNDES, Previ, and Petros invested billions of dollars in extractive endeavors (Zibechi 2014). The subsequent extraction of natural resources, minerals, petroleum-based products, and agro-fuels made Brazil the largest extractive power in South America by 2011 (Gudynas 2013). This PT-led extraction of natural resources adversely affected the indigenous and Afro-descendant communities that depend on the environment.

Although the PT cast itself as a progressive, “populist” party, their commitment to “extractivism maintain[ed] a style of development based on the appropriation of Nature” and created “negative environmental and social impacts” (Gudynas 2010, 1). These impacts took various forms. Natural resource extraction physically changed the environment, as evidenced in the fact that more than 24 million hectares of land in Brazil were under commercial agricultural cultivation as of 2014. Such cultivation drastically altered the country’s ecological diversity (Gudynas 2013). This extractive agenda has led to irreversible environmental changes for the communities present in the Bay of Aratu.

In the Bay of Aratu, pollution from the shipping of copper, aluminum, propane, butane, gasoline, and coal, among other commodities, has led to the destruction of the communities’ means of subsistence. Increased freighter traffic to the Port of Aratu has led to the spillage of metals and toxic materials, which poisons marine life and reduces the number of fish and shellfish species on which the communities depend. In discussing the environmental changes her community has experienced, an experienced fisherwoman from Tororó explained to me that “in the past, we could get between ten and fifteen kilos of shrimp from the Bay. Today we only get one kilo or maybe eighty grams.” In addition to this, it is all too common for “the shellfish in the mangroves to come out of the mud dead and soft” from pollution (author’s field notes 2014). In addition to the long-term effects of shipping, singular events—occurring while the PT was in power—have had catastrophic results in Ilha de Maré.

In December 2013, a cargo of natural gas on the Singaporean vessel Golden Miller caught fire. To prevent the flames from spreading, the crew jettisoned the ship’s fuel directly into the Bay of Aratu. In the following months, fish and shellfish began disappearing at an alarming rate in and around Ilha de Maré. Environmental effects expanded beyond marine life, as well. At a meeting with state officials and environmental scientists, a member of Ilha de Maré tearfully discussed how, following the spill, mangrove mud, which “had always been a source of health” in the community was now leaving them with skin rashes (author’s field notes 2015). In subsequent years, things worsened. Residents of Ilha de Maré describe odd sicknesses like bone pains and vertigo. Perhaps even more troubling, cancers have begun setting in among the community’s youth, killing at least three people below the age of thirty in the past three years. “In the past,” exclaimed a leader from Ilha de Maré at an audience with a state attorney general, “people would live past one hundred. Today, people aren’t making it to thirty!” (author’s field notes 2017).

Community appeals to the “progressive” federal government immediately following the petrol spill elicited no response. Follow-up demands, presented to both the progressive and conservative governments over the past several years, have resulted in meetings with low-level government representatives unable to issue any kind of environmental or monetary relief. Leaders from Ilha de Maré unwaveringly maintain that government regimes—both progressive and conservative—have failed to respond to them because the administrations do not see Ilha de Maré as an area of production. As such, neither administration has had a problem sacrificing the community’s lived space to the capitalist agenda of economic progress. It is, in short, the cost of doing business (author’s field notes 2017). Despite the fact that the environment of the Bay of Aratu is a constitutive part of Ilha de Maré’s community, state actors resolve to perpetuate capital accumulation that erases the community’s territorial practices. “It’s as if we don’t exist!” remains a common refrain among the members of Ilha de Maré when describing their treatment at the hands of powerful actors in the Bay. The environmental approaches of the Brazilian government and international capital clash antagonistically with those of the more than 200-year-old community of Ilha de Maré. In this situation, capital accumulation, embodied in the physical transportation of extracted natural resources, is possible due to the structural denial of black spatial legitimacy.

Shipping in the Bay of Aratu results in the erasure of the autonomous ways of life practiced by Ilha de Maré. Whereas the community sees the environment as something they must maintain, state and capitalist interests present in the Bay of Aratu continue to poison and upset the environmental balance in the name of facilitating commodity distribution. Meanwhile, the Brazilian government—both the erstwhile populist PT and the current conservative administration—refuses to intervene on behalf of Ilha de Maré’s environment, thereby underwriting the disasters the community suffers. Unfortunately for the communities in the Bay of Aratu, shipping is not the only phenomenon supporting extractivism. Military potency walks hand in hand with extraction in Brazil.

Militarism in the Bay of Aratu

An intense focus on military buildup occurred during Lula’s presidency. Under the PT, military expansion was apparently necessary to protect the “national development” embodied in state-sponsored extractive industries and manufacturing (Zibechi 2014). Military buildup signals a second form of state intervention aimed at protecting and increasing extractive capabilities in Brazil. The Bay of Aratu is a major site of this military expansion.

In 1969, the Brazilian navy completed construction of a naval base near Tororó. As the navy built and expanded the base, the traditional territory of Tororó became smaller due to enclosures committed by the navy. In addition to the base, the navy built a dam in the mid-1960s and a villa in the late 1970s to provide energy for the base and house its officers, respectively. “[The navy] came to me and said, ‘We need this land to build a dam for energy.’ So, we moved,” a nonagenarian matriarch from Rio dos Macacos explained to me as she recounted how the navy forced her, her family, and the wider community to leave their original homes (author’s field notes 2014).

If the origins of the Brazilian navy in the Bay of Aratu truncated the respective territories of Rio dos Macacos and Tororó, the treatment of community members by the navy in the decades following the conclusion of the naval base has been nothing short of catastrophic. The navy has established state-sponsored spaces of “fear, intimidation, and spatial isolation” that spatially incapacitate and displace the communities (Shabazz 2015, 6). Enforced expulsions of members of Rio dos Macacos began to take place in the 1980s. During this time the navy continued its practices of enclosing the territory of Tororó. When, in the early 2000s, the navy decided that it needed more land to expand the villa and create military training zones, conditions worsened. The accounts of normalized, routine brutality suffered by Rio dos Macacos at the hands of the navy evidence the continuity of black geographic dispossession, inaugurated during slavery (McKittrick 2013). Members of Rio dos Macacos recognize this fact. While protesting the navy’s destruction of a community member’s house in Rio dos Macacos, one of the community’s leaders angrily described this violence, stating, “The navy only thinks of beating women, of beating poor people, and crushing black communities!” (author’s field notes 2014). Beatings, rapes, arson, the destruction of property, refusal of education, and daily intimidation comprise the treatment of both Tororó and Rio dos Macacos at the hands of the navy, including during the PT’s time in power. At a 2014 public audience with federal officials, an elder of Rio dos Macacos wept while insisting that the federal government recognize, “Life for us is rape! It’s gunshots! It’s shameful!” (author’s field notes 2014). When the brutal treatment of Tororó and Rio dos Macacos did not succeed in displacing the communities, the navy employed environmental destruction.

Members of Rio dos Macacos relate stories of discovering naval soldiers spreading poisonous liquids on their fruit trees, setting corn patches on fire, prematurely ripping up manioc, and crushing nascent bean plants, actively curtailing the community’s ability to draw on the natural environment for sustenance (author’s field notes 2014). In addition to interfering with Rio dos Macacos’s traditional polycultural way of life, the navy prevents community members from accessing water sources for fishing. Traditionally combining their foraging and farming activities with fishing, Rio dos Macacos relied heavily on the local rivers to provide access to this vital fauna. “[When I was young], my mother would make nets out of sacks, take two nets, leave for the night, and come back in the morning with a huge quantity of fish … we would spread the fish out on the ground and members of the community would fill their buckets [with the fish]” a middle-aged member of the community told me, reflecting on the historical importance of fishing in the community (author’s field notes 2014). In building the naval dam, the navy not only changed the trajectory of local rivers but also prohibited members of Rio dos Macacos from accessing the dam and its tributaries by beating them and taking them to the naval jail for fishing there (author’s field notes 2013). When questioned by state and federal officials about such behavior during public audiences, naval officials justify themselves by arguing that they cannot simply allow individuals to come and go to the dam as they please. They claim that the dam is a site of national security to which only they should have access (author’s field notes 2014). These phenomena show that the Brazilian navy sees the natural environment as something they can dominate and manipulate for the proliferation of their own existence and for the protection of fixed capital. Their actions also show that they view and treat the environmental practices of Tororó and Rio dos Macacos as illegitimate, as they actively hinder the communities’ abilities to reproduce themselves.

Persistent Anti-Blackness

Structural notions of black spaces as “emptied out of life” and “lands of no one” (McKittrick 2013, 7) underwrite the continued accumulation of capital via extractivism, specifically in the guise of shipping and militarism. For shipping interests and the navy, land in the Bay of Aratu is appropriate for the propagation of capital—in the guise of ports and commodity circulation—as well as the implementation of sovereign state power—in the guise of the navy’s built environment. Rio dos Macacos and Tororó’s engagement with the natural environment remains subordinated to this extractive agenda, as their environmentalist geographies elicit no recognition of legitimacy from the state or shipping interests. When I discussed the navy’s complete disregard for the community’s territory with one of Rio dos Macacos’s leaders, she cogently diagnosed the situation, stating, “We’re not seen as people [by the state]” (author’s field notes 2014). State and capitalist commitments to the domination of the natural environment qua extractivism remain legitimate precisely because the communities’ geographies receive no recognition in dominant renderings of space. Extractivism thus entails the “forcible removal and the elimination” of Afro-descendant communities like those in the Bay of Aratu (Loperena 2017, 806, italics in original). Both progressive and conservative administrations are responsible for this commitment to extractivism.

As mentioned earlier, the progressive PT had a central role in funding extractive industries, bolstering militarization to protect extractive endeavors, and supporting the circulation of extracted resources. According to members of each community, the conservative government has continued these trends. Temer’s administration has deepened the commitment to extractivism in the Bay of Aratu through attempts at displacing Rio dos Macacos via new rounds of arson, as well as the planned construction of a new pier for Brazilian petrochemical corporation Braskem in the Port of Aratu (author’s field notes 2017; personal communication 2018).

The navy, state actors running the Port of Aratu, and private shipping interests enact a politics that manipulates the environment at the same time that it erases the livelihoods of the communities in the Bay of Aratu. Because progressive and conservative administrations remain committed to a capitalist agenda of natural resource extraction, both reinforce anti-black violence, because shipping and militarization are dependent on the destruction of Afro-Brazilian communal life. Capitalist ideas of development and progress—to which both progressive and conservative regimes adhere—are possible via the erasure of Afro-Brazilian communities. In this way, the interworking of the Brazilian state and capital results in the death and degradation of Afro-descendant populations in the Bay of Aratu (Pulido 2017). Nonetheless, through cultivating black geographies rooted in “numerous layers of organizational, familial, and cultural activities” (Woods 2002), these communities have found ways to resist the extractive agenda of the progressive PT and the current conservative regime.

Resistance to Extractivism

The communities in the Bay of Aratu experience multifaceted forms of environmental racism. Nonetheless, they find ways to combat these deleterious phenomena. Through their struggles, the communities show themselves part of a wider tendency among Afro-Brazilians to refuse structural displacement and demand dignified material living conditions (Perry 2004). Like many Latin American social movements, the kinds of resistance put forward by the communities take form in actions like protests and spatial occupation (Zibechi 2012; Lopes de Souza 2016). More than resistance, however, the communities in the Bay of Aratu actively create alternative ways of life by relying on their environment to remain autonomous from the violent erasure inherent to the universalizing agenda of capitalism and its many purveyors (Escobar 2016). Resistance to the widespread effects of extraction and the ability to create alternative environmental praxes make the communities in the Bay of Aratu important examples of how oppressed populations enact distinct subjectivities.

Despite the devastating effects of Golden Miller’s oil spill in Ilha de Maré, neither the state government of Bahia nor the PT-led federal government made any effort to acknowledge the community’s plight. After reaching out to municipal-, state-, and federal-level officials regarding their quickly deteriorating situation, the members of Ilha de Maré decided to take matters into their own hands. On 20 February 2014, community members staged a blockade of the Port of Aratu, blocking the road used by trucks to pick up and drop off cargo at the port. “It is for our lives we are protesting. … Because of the neglect of the governing bodies and the irresponsibility of the business owners,” stated one of the community’s leaders, explaining the reasons for the protest (author’s field notes 2014). Ilha de Maré’s leadership insisted that the circulation of extracted natural resources would not continue until Ilha de Maré could parlay with the Docks Company of Bahia (CODEBA)—the government organ responsible for the port. After protestors obstructed the port from 5:00 a.m. until 2:00 p.m., the president of CODEBA agreed to meet with community leaders. Although this event did not lead to an immediate resolution for Ilha de Maré, it was the first step in forcing the Brazilian government to recognize the disaster that had befallen the community. It was also the initial moment of negotiations between Ilha de Maré and the government—a process that continues today.

Like Ilha de Maré, Rio dos Macacos and Tororó have also employed practices of obstruction and sabotage to protest their mistreatment by the navy. Perhaps even more noteworthy, however, are the ways in which both Rio dos Macacos and Tororó have succeeded in continuing subsistence practices despite the navy’s attempts to erase them from the landscape of the Bay of Aratu. Despite the navy’s environmental terrorism, Rio dos Macacos and Tororó have managed to overcome these violent measures, stubbornly continuing to plant, cultivate, and harvest subsistence crops like corn, beans, mangoes, jackfruit, guava, okra, watermelons, and squash. This perseverance is possible due to the collective efforts in the communities. “We share seeds with one another and help clear each other’s land” explained a member of Rio dos Macacos as she showed me around her planted fields. Members also share foodstuffs like African palm oil and fruit juice with one another (author’s field notes 2016). Members of Tororó, on the other hand, find locations in which the navy has not built walls around their community to plant crops and forage fruits, vegetables, and herbs (author’s field notes 2014). In pushing forward with their centuries-old practices of autonomy and subsistence, Rio dos Macacos and Tororó illustrate the ways in which alternative visions of the environment lead to concrete spatial practices that protect the lives of Afro-descendant communities. As evidenced in the communities’ subsistence practices, the environment can provide a long-term way of life. This way of life is not dependent on rampant extraction and degradation, however. Rather, it establishes a radical humanism and propagates geographies in which “liberation is evident, visible, and available to all” (McCutcheon 2016, 21).

Conclusion

Although many in Brazil and around the world rightly critique Temer’s austerity measures, the situation in the Bay of Aratu shows the parallels between the progressive and conservative governments. It is true that Temer’s relaxation of environmental laws and his defunding and dissolving of government organs dedicated to working with racialized groups have the potential to further the environmental and racialized violence already taking place in the country. These measures are not aberrations, however; they are a deepening of the capitalist tendency previously espoused by the PT.

Despite claims of progressive populism, in reality the PT implemented and enacted death-dealing arrangements that gravely affected racialized communities—particularly Afro-Brazilian communities, as evidenced in the case of the Bay of Aratu. A progressive devotion to capital accumulation qua extractivism meant an inherent commitment to anti-black violence in the Bay. Temer and his government have essentially inherited these practices and expanded them materially and discursively. Under Temer’s administration, the extractive agenda propagated by the PT continues. The Port of Aratu remains a vital location for the shipment of natural resources. As the environmental effects of shipping in the Bay continue to poison Ilha de Maré, Temer’s government seeks to expand the functional and physical capacities of the Port of Aratu. At the same time, Rio dos Macacos and Tororó continue to face the environmental outcomes of the Brazilian navy’s occupation of their territories and the naval insistence that their militarized landscape expand into the communities’ territories.

By examining the relational nature of space under both the PT and Temer’s administration and by taking seriously the geographical experiences and expressions of Afro-Brazilian communities, it becomes clear that what has occurred in Brazil vis-à-vis the environment and Afro-descendant peoples is not new governance. Rather, new actors are continuing established “concrete and epistemic actions and structural patterns [that] harm, kill, or coerce a particular grouping of people” (McKittrick 2011, 947). Analyzing the environmental experiences of Afro-Brazilian communities in this case offers a sense of the limitations of liberal state power, because two supposedly different approaches to governance actually have clear, macabre connections. Nonetheless, the spatial politics of the communities in the Bay of Aratu offer hope as the communities refuse to mask the structural, environmental racism they face (Eaves 2016). These communities acknowledge and seek to mediate the effects of structural racism and environmental domination and destruction. “Our struggle is a long, difficult one,” acknowledged a member of Rio dos Macacos, whose family constantly receives threats from naval soldiers. “[W]e’re not afraid to die,” she continued. “Those of us here have [hundreds] of years in this place,” and “all we want is our land and to be left alone” (author’s field notes 2014). This commitment to rejecting anti-blackness and creating a life-affirming environment in the Bay of Aratu typifies these communities’ politics and offers blueprints for global black struggle.

Acknowledgments

The author thanks attendee of Indiana University’s Workshop on Race, Ethnicity, and Migration who commented on this work when it was in its initial stages.

Note

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Adam Bledsoe

ADAM BLEDSOE is an Assistant Professor of Geography and African American Studies at Florida State University, Tallahassee, FL 32306. E-mail: [email protected]. His research interests include black geographies and black social movements in the context of the Americas.

Notes

1 The histories described here were told to me by leaders and elders from all three communities. These histories are passed down orally within the communities and I have chosen to privilege such communal knowledge in this article.