ABSTRACT
This chapter explores two facts: the first is that, despite the systematic historical occurrence of events that typically could be considered as being “disasters”, subsisted in the collective imagination of mainstream society, throughout the 20th century and in the early years of the 21st, the idea that “there are no disasters” in the country. The second is that this fact seems to be undergoing transformation, due to “natural” and “technological” disasters that hit the political and economic centers of the country in the last two decades. Droughts occupy a special and peculiar place in the collective imagination of disasters in Brazil: of all phenomena that are typically classified as disasters, none is more documented and studied in the country than droughts. The participation of Brazilian citizens in international disaster events, a fact that has been widely exploited by the national media, is a second front in the transformation of perspectives on the national imagination of disasters.
