Come and visit the Brazilian Caribbean! proclaims Brazil’s tourism board, alongside images of the white sandy beaches and turquoise waters of Maceió, capital of the country’s northeastern state of Alagoas.
On the ground, however, the situation is quite different from the one shown in holiday brochures. Indeed, streets in some of Maceió’s most traditional neighborhoods look more like war zones than tourist attractions.
Walking around the city, one encounters entire blocks of dilapidated houses, without roofs, doors, or windows. Many homes have simply collapsed, as have large apartment buildings.
Families and business owners have had to leave their homes and stores, abandoned buildings which are showing severe signs of decay. In a cry for help, residents have scrawled messages on the city’s walls, demanding “justice” and lamenting that they “are drowning and dying.”
Almost 60,000 people have been forced from their homes, and around 4,500 businesses have been lost, leaving thousands out of work. More and more of the city’s buildings are expected to be condemned in the coming months.
But unlike a war zone, where destruction rains down from above, the threat in Maceió comes from underground.
And the antagonist, in this case, is not a foreign army, it is a major petrochemical firm, which researchers, environmentalists, and community leaders blame for the widespread destruction in a number of Maceió neighborhoods.
The city is home to salt mines owned by Braskem, the biggest petrochemical company in Latin America, controlled by the imperious Odebrecht Group construction conglomerate and has state-owned oil firm Petrobras among its shareholders.
These two companies were at the center of the largest corruption scandal in Brazil’s history, uncovered by Operation Car Wash. Former Braskem executives are facing criminal charges in Brazil and the U.S.
Over the last four decades, Braskem has dug 35 salt wells in Maceió, on the banks of the Mundaú lake, which was once a fishing hotspot and one of the city’s tourist attractions.
The mining activities consist of extracting rock salt from underground caves, which are then pumped full of water. The salt is transported to a Braskem facility outside the city, where it is transformed into chlorine-based products, such as PVC.
Tremors, cracks, and craters
Above the ground, the only visible indications of the salt mines are large metal tubes emerging from each well.
The subterraneous caves are located underneath densely populated neighborhoods, home to luxury mansions, low-income housing projects, and makeshift shacks built on the side of roads.
The first signs that something was not quite right came in February 2018. After heavy rain showers, cracks began appearing in houses and streets in the neighborhood of Pinheiro.
On March 3, the ground shook in Maceió.
Thousands of people heard a loud bang and felt buildings rattle. Cracks appeared in more buildings in Pinheiro after a tremor measuring 2.5 on the Richter scale. Fissures widened and became more and more common over the coming days, opening craters on the neighborhood’s streets.
In Pinheiro and the adjacent neighborhoods of Bebedouro and Mutange, streets began to sink. Holes reached up to 10 meters deep and 280 meters wide.
That month, many families decided to leave their homes. Those who stayed scrambled to get their hands on iron beams to keep their houses standing. Braskem decided to suspend its salt mining operations in the region.
In May 2019, over a year after the tremor, the Brazilian Geological Service — linked to the Mines and Energy Ministry — issued a report cosigned by over 50 researchers, affirming that inadequate salt mining destabilized the subterranean caves under neighborhoods in Maceió.
After thousands of families had already been displaced from the neighborhoods of Pinheiro, Bebedouro, and Mutange, Maceió’s municipal government decreed a state of emergency, including the neighborhood of Bom Parto in the affected area.
Multi-billion-dollar settlements
Officially, Braskem denies that it caused the problem. However, the company already reached a court settlement to pay over BRL 12 billion (USD 2.42 billion) in reparations to local residents and business owners. But these payments are far from redressing the full economic impact of the problems.
In June, the Financial Compensation and Relocation Support Program reached a total of 6,834 proposals submitted to property owners. So far, Braskem has paid out 4,704 settlements to families from the affected neighborhoods, totaling BRL 985 million.
According to Braskem’s most recent analysis, 14,319 properties are considered to be “at risk,” of which 13,188 have been vacated. This represents roughly 52,000 people in a city of 1 million. Indeed, Maceió has around 150,000 real estate properties, meaning that 5.5 percent of the population was displaced and 10 percent of the city’s buildings were vacated as a result of the structural emergency.
Reports of affected areas do not stop rising, nor do Braskem’s liabilities with redressing residents and paying socio-environmental and urbanistic compensation. An initial indemnification agreement, signed at the...