"Railroad and mine projects stir up anxiety in rural Brazil communities", 17 September 2021
...A sense of unease has returned among residents in recent months. In April, the multinational mining company BAMIN won a federal bid to build the 537-kilometer (334-mile) stretch of the FIOL line between Caetité and Ilhéus by 2025...

The transformations that could occur in the southwest of Bahia due to increased mining activity in Caetité and faster-paced construction of the railroad are apparent from the numbers...

BAMIN is a subsidiary of the Eurasian Resources Group (ERG), headquartered in Luxembourg, and which has been developing the Pedra de Ferro mine in Caetité since 2007...

Residents’ concerns over the Pedra de Ferro mine stem not only from the impacts of the railway, but also from the tailings dam that will be built to hold back the slurry of mining waste.

BAMIN’s environmental impact report says the dam will hold 128 million cubic meters (33.8 billion gallons) of sludge. That’s more than double the capacity of the Fundão tailings dam in Mariana municipality, Minas Gerais, that collapsed in 2015; and 10 times that of the Córrego do Feijão dam...

The dam’s planned location is also under question: since 2017 the Bahia State Prosecutor’s Office (MP-BA) has recommended that it be relocated to preserve protected environmental areas in the water supply system. Aside from environmental implications, the MP-BA also warned that the dam could damage traditional communal pastureland, common in Bahia.

The Federal Prosecutor’s Office, which is responsible for defending the rights of traditional communities, has been following the dispute between Valec and the quilombo communities in the region...