Brazil’s mining leviathan – muscle, money and a body count. This is what corporate scale looks like when ethics are optional.

They dug into the earth with an appetite that never closed. They moved mountains – literally – and with each haul they rewrote what “externality” means for the rest of us. Vale is not a quiet steelmaker in the background. It is the machine that eats landscapes, communities and, occasionally, people. This is an account of the worst of that machine – the collapses, the settlements, the outraged communities, and the strange modern theatre where apology and profit play their brass instruments together.

Brumadinho – the river of mud that kept coming

On 25 January 2019, a tailings dam at Vale’s Córrego do Feijão mine ruptured and sent a choking, toxic wave into a town. Two hundred and seventy people died. Homes, rivers and livelihoods were erased in a single, gory instant. The world watched a company’s byproduct turn into a murder weapon. It was not an accident in the romantic sense – it was the result of engineering decisions, cost calculus and risk-management that put productivity ahead of people. The legal and financial fallout is ongoing – fines, prosecutions, and a landmark US enforcement action that accused Vale of misleading investors about dam safety.

Mariana – not a one-off, but a pattern

Four years before Brumadinho, the Fundão dam failure at Samarco – the Vale-BHP joint venture – smashed through villages and dumped toxic slurry into rivers and ultimately the Atlantic. Nineteen people died. Hundreds of thousands of people’s lives were damaged. The responses since then read like a brutal ledger – multi-billion reais settlements, a foundation set up to deliver remedies and years of community anger at the pace and fairness of remediation. When disaster repeats on that scale, “failure” turns into “system”.

Money, settlements and the theatre of accountability

Vale has written large cheques – and yet the cheques do not always buy closure. There have been multi-billion settlements and lengthy remediation funds – but survivors and affected communities frequently call the process slow, bureaucratic and distant from their needs. Regulators, courts and international panels have kept Vale under the microscope – and yet headlines keep coming. Meanwhile, Vale has faced enforcement actions abroad too – notably a sizeable settlement with the US Securities and Exchange Commission over disclosures linked to dam safety. Money changes the chart of consequences – but it rarely rebuilds a life or a river.

Who pays – and who walks?

Executives have been charged, criminal cases filed, and then stalled or paused in courts. Engineers and certification bodies have been dragged into hearings accusing them of shirking responsibility. Corporate boards have shuffled. Vale has been fined – sometimes raggedly small compared with the human cost. This is the ugly arithmetic of corporate disaster: legal exposure is convertible into negotiated sums, and time blunts outrage.

Workers, communities and the slow violence of mining

Beyond the headline catastrophes, Vale’s operations have left bruises across continents – resettlements that feel like dispossession, protests from Indigenous and traditional communities whose lands were reallocated, and repeated reports of worker safety incidents. These are not just industrial accidents – they are the lived consequence of choices about where and how to operate, what to disclose, and how urgently to fix known dangers.

The global footprint – New Caledonia, Mozambique and the rest

Vale is not only Brazil. Its nickel mines in New Caledonia and coal operations in Mozambique have their own lists of environmental complaints, local unrest and messy resettlement histories. The pattern is recognisable: big project, big impact, small sympathy, long remediation. When a company’s footprint is truly global, accountability must be too – but that rarely fits within a quarterly result.

So why is Cummins in this picture?

Short answer – partnership. Vale announced a joint program with Komatsu and Cummins to develop and test large, dual-fuel haul trucks that can run on a mix of ethanol and diesel – pitched as a decarbonisation move for surface mining. In plain terms: Cummins supplies the engines and engineering; Vale supplies the scale, the mine sites and the demand. That means Cummins is not merely a distant bystander – it is a technology partner in operations run by a company with a serious history of environmental disaster and litigation. If you are a buyer, investor or an employee of a firm that partners with suppliers and customers like Vale, you should know what those partnerships buy you beyond emissions credits.

Why this matters for all of us

You do not need to know what a tailings dam looks like to understand the calculus here. When companies choose partners with recent records of catastrophic environmental harm, it changes the moral ledger of every product built, every engine shipped and every contract signed. Ethics here are not PR copy but supply-chain reality. The question you should ask is simple – do you want your firm associated with partners whose history includes mass death, long-term river poisoning and slow-moving, incomplete reparations? Because partnerships are endorsements in everything but name.

Final note – this is not nuance theatre, it is a demand

This is not a call for punitive bloodlust. It is a call for something simpler: honesty, reckoning and genuine change. If Cummins and other global suppliers want to credibly claim climate and social leadership, they must reckon with who they work with and why. A joint project to cut emissions is an important technical step – but it does not erase the geological and human cracks left by earlier choices. Fixing the future demands more than greener engines – it demands rigorous accountability for the past and relentless insistence on community-led, transparent remediation. Anything less is window-dressing.

Lee Thompson – Founder, The Cummins Accountability Project

Customer Corner : Vale’s Trail of Wreckage