ABSTRACT
The picture of Tuira brandishing her machete travelled the world, becoming a symbol of indigenous resistance and the fight against a notion of progress that, with colonial exploitation and extractivism at its center, has left centuries of destruction in its wake. Brazilian history is, of course, inextricably tied to the extraction of raw materials: the country’s name refers to a tree species that was the first commodity the Portuguese exploited in the Americas, and the gentilic brasileiro originally referred to the people involved in its trade. While images of the devastation surrounding the Belo Monte construction site could still be situated within a developmentalist sublime with predominantly positive connotations, a new iconographic regime was already in the offing. The Brumadinho disaster took place already under the presidency of Jair Bolsonaro, a far-right former army captain elected as a dark horse in 2018 after 2016 impeachment of Rousseff and the imprisonment of Lula, who until then had been leading the polls.
