Category: Commodities

Twenty-six-year-old Marcela Rodrigues is showing me a photo of her father. In the picture Denilson Rodrigues boasts a youthful smile, but, in the east London hotel foyer where we meet, Marcela is fighting back tears. That smiling image of her father is how she tries to remember him. She tries not to think about the frontal part of his skull and right arm that were all that was recovered of him from the mud.

At 49, Rodrigues’ father was one of hundreds from her local community wiped out by 12 million cubic metres of toxic sludge when Brazilian miner Vale’s Brumadinho dam collapsed one year ago. RI wrote at the time that it was a litmus test for responsible investment. Just four years before, in the same region of Minas Gerais, the Fundão dam, owned by BHP-Vale joint venture Samarco, had collapsed killing 19. Back then, investors said they would engage. Fast forward to now, and Rodrigues carries a total of 272 photos of the dead and missin…