One hundred years of denialism: : banishing asbestos to other’s lungs

Abstract

Despite being “virtually” banned by the Brazilian Supreme Court in 2017, asbestos – a mineral fibre already banned from more than 60 countries in the world because of the diseases it can cause to the ones exposed to its dust - is still mined and exported to other global South countries. From the field of the crimes of the powerful, informed by feminist and decolonial epistemologies, I propose in this article a debate over the more recent judicial and political decisions that allowed Brazil to keep its position as the third major asbestos exporter in the world, in the interest of the mining company SAMA. In the first part of the article, I discuss how scientific discourse about asbestos produced in the last one hundred years mostly in the global North has contributed, even when unconsciously, to denialism. In the second part I analyze specific cases in which biased scientific research circulated from global North straight to the pen of the Justices of the Brazilian Supreme Federal Court. By dialoguing with aspects of the novel One Hundred Years of Solitude, by Gabriel García Marquez, I argue that the magical realism behind these decisions, instead of being explained by some kind of backwardness or irrationality, is actually a didactical fulfillment of the values of modern/colonial science: the war against nature, the hierarchy of knowledge, the insistence of keeping the profits of the industry despite the harms it causes. I argue that the virtual ban has actually performed as an asbestos banishment to other’s lungs with the approval of a state law for exporting all asbestos extracted. In the losing votes that in this magic reality are actually performing as winner, the white male businessmen who know for a long time about asbestos harms are thought to be victims of treachery, the current mining workers and the local economy are shields against the accusations of harms and the people affected by asbestos are only narrated as side effects, with the bless of technique in the 100º anniversary of denialism.