Water allows life. However, it can also bring death in the form of floods and dams. The Movement of People Affected by Dams challenges the dominance of transnational corporations by exposing how water is used as a tool of imperial violence. Moreover, as Caitlin Schroering argues in her contribution to the “Pluriverse of Peace” series, their struggles are guided by a liberatory politics that fosters solidarity practices providing the basis for a better world.
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Representing over 200,000,000 people, La Viá Campesina (The Peasant’s Way) is considered the largest transnational social movement in the world, with work on five continents. It is also a climate justice movement, on the frontlines of fighting climate catastrophe. One of its 180 member organizations is Brazil’s Movimento dos Atingidos por Barragens (Movement of People Affected by Dams or MAB), an autonomous, national, popular social movement formally founded in 1991.
The MAB is linked to the struggles around dams in the Americas and around the world. It fights for those affected by dams and against the privatization of water. It is connected as well to struggles against extractivism and the current energy model, and for climate justice. In response to the question of why a movement focused on the impacts of dams is part of a food sovereignty movement, the short answer is: When dams are built, they displace peasant and Indigenous communities.
‘We are all affected’
At a MAB gathering in Rio de Janeiro about climate change in June 2024, participants noted that climate change “does not mean the end of the world for everyone.” The rich can escape it. The poor cannot. Towards the end of the meeting someone said that “we are all affected by the model of society”. In this sense, ‘todos somos atingidos’ (‘We are all affected’). A point made here (and in other MAB spaces) is that ‘atingidos’ aren’t only those affected by dams – it’s everyone affected by extractivism, mining, climate change, water and energy policies. The violence of the capitalist system is evident across sectors and regions.
Yet, even as we are all affected, not everyone is affected equally. Only those with the necessary resources can escape; most cannot. The most vulnerable and marginalized people have died; the dominant economic system has rendered their lives ‘disposable.’ As someone noted at this gathering, MAB helps us work together to understand what it means to be human beings and construct the society we want.
A circle, not a line
In July 2024, shortly after the above noted gathering in Rio, I found myself, for the first time, in Rio Grande do Sul, a state in the south of the country. MAB invited me there after catastrophic floods hit the region in May 2024. While MAB does not typically engage in charitable work, the situation required the formation of formalized solidarity (what in the US tends to be called ‘mutual aid’) work.
Working with others to create (under trying circumstances with limited resources) solidarity kitchens to feed people represented a new sort of work for the movement. Between May-October 2024, MAB and its partners distributed 100,000 meals to those affected, displaced, and unhoused by the floods. During my nearly three weeks there, we produced around 1000 meals every single day, with volunteers (from MAB and local unions) delivering those to the hands of people in the most forgotten neighborhoods of the region.
Additionally, the solidarity kitchen also served as a storage facility for basic food and cleaning supplies, which were also delivered to people who needed help cleaning their devastated homes or who had an oven to cook their own food. The solidarity kitchens were a part of a larger, longer-term struggle. Organizing and building organization takes time; as someone stated during a meeting in the solidarity kitchen, MAB doesn’t want a line (of people getting meals or food basics) but “MAB wants a circle” which sums up ‘charity vs. solidarity.’ MAB organizes people to fight for their rights. I wrote one day in my fieldnotes, “This is climate change. It’s also building the world we want.”
Translocal resistance
While the solidarity kitchen relied on the love and labor of residents – including those themselves displaced and affected from the floods – it also could not have continued without the solidarity of people from various regions of Brazil. In particular, individuals from regions of Brazil such as Minas Gerais, who had themselves been affected by socio-environmental crimes related to dam breeches and corporate negligence, played a key role. They shared their own struggles with residents and also offered hope that by organizing and working together, things could change.
While such organizing represented more of a challenge – as people were in a crisis situation – this is one way that MAB builds popular education into its efforts. I argue that MAB’s work in general, including the solidarity kitchen, is an example of “translocal resistance” – a term that captures the importance of people engaging in counterhegemonic resistance at the local level, but connected to national and global networks.
Dams and floods
In July 2025, I returned to Rio Grande do Sul. A year later, the water had receded, but the flood had not gone away. Many houses still have damp walls, ceilings and floors, with inhumane living conditions. People are afraid the floods will be recurring. Sadly, people face similar struggles throughout the country (and indeed, world), with those affected by the crimes of transnational corporations in Brumadinho and Mariana (and many other examples too numerous to list here) still waiting for justice.
This is a part of the other side of dams. They are not “clean and sustainable ” energy. The MAB phrase that I have heard and chatted many times since 2018 – including every day in 2024 at the solidarity kitchen where we were preparing the food – “water for life, not for death”, means more and more to me every day. Water allows life. But water can also bring death. We need an energy model, a model of living where profit is not worth more than life. However, we are challenged to confront the racial capitalist, imperialist, and patriarchal system that is upheld by the United States military-industrial complex.
This system fuels deforestation, mines the land and constructs dams in the name of ‘progress.’ It also drains aquifers to power large AI data centers, builds Israeli bombs to commit genocide in Palestine, demands the gold that fuels atrocities in Sudan, and arms police forces that kill Black people in the United States, Brazil, and many other places. As is well known, this very system is also a significant contributor to greenhouse gases. And every time I am in a space with MAB, I learn more and am better able to see and articulate the interconnectedness of these realities.
Organizing education
MAB’s struggle is local, national, and global, and is also both an urban and rural fight; as such, popular education in MAB takes many forms, including many different types of trainings. From hours-long seminars, to days long and even multi-year long state, regional, national, and international training; educational lectures and discussions in person and on line; an annual print newspaper; a website that is maintained and updated; social media accounts at the state and national levels; and many activists of the movement writing and publishing work in various forums, to list a few ways.
Popular education also takes the form of art, such as the Arpilleras project (see here for a film about this), which has been displayed internationally, including a recent display at the MASP in São Paulo. Music serves a critical role in the movement (including MAB’s own Mistura Popular, whose music can be found on multiple streaming platforms) with lyrics that send countless educational and inspirational messages.
For example, during a statewide training in 2024 in Bahia, the lyrics of “Samba da Utopia” by the artist Ceumar were handed out. For me, the lyrics sum up both the profound heaviness and fierce hope that I feel in MAB spaces: “If the world goes backwards/I’ll write on a sign/The word rebellion/If we get discouraged/I’ll pick from the orchard/The word stubbornness/If it finally happens/To enter our backyard/The word tyranny/Grab the drum and the ganzá/Let’s go out to the streets to shout/The word utopia.”
Building something new
Edward Said (1993) argues that a key part of cultural hegemony is to make invisible imperial violence. The work that MAB does brings this violence to light and shows it… and it also shows the possibility of what could be. People learn, debate, grow, hope, act – and in turn organize – together. MAB is comprised of many committed, loving people who believe in their core that this world could not only be different but that we are building that new path in the present.
And despite the heaviness and horrors – including the acceleration of the climate crisis, the brutality of imperialism, the rapacious greed of this global economic system, and the death that it brings every second to almost every corner of the world – MAB’s work is built on love and hope. It drives my own hope and conviction that together, we can build a better world. We shout. We imagine. We organize. We build something new.