In the capital of Mozambique, Erika Mendes grew up aware of the urgency of fighting against local political elites and transnational corporations. Photo: Marcelo Aguilar / MAB

Her childhood was marked by a smell that spans decades: the chemical odor of pesticides piled up in a cement factory in the city of Matola. These were toxic residues brought from Denmark to be incinerated in African territory, a common destination for poisons from the Global North. Erika, still a child, walked with her grandmother, Anabela Lemos, knocking on doors; she handed out leaflets, explained the danger. It was the beginning of the largest environmental mobilization in Mozambique in the 1990s. They won. The pesticides went back to where they came from. “That’s where I learned that when we come together, things change,” she recalls.

It was from this victory that LIVANINGO, the country’s first environmental organization, was born. But the initial joy soon clashed with bigger dilemmas: there were those who wanted to follow a path understood as neutral, without confronting the powerful; and there were those, like Erika’s family, who wanted to denounce the model behind the destruction – the pact between local political elites and transnational corporations. The division was inevitable. Thus was born Justiça Ambiental (Environmental Justice), an organization of which Erika is still a part today.

Mozambique was rehearsing its newly won freedom. Independence from Portugal was only two decades old. The civil war had recently ended. The country was emerging from a socialist project only to plunge into a neoliberal economy. The rivers ceased to be just rivers; they became energy sources, sources of profit, export corridors. Mining companies, gas companies, and monoculture plantations for export arrived. Promises of development, roads, schools, and hospitals also came – almost always only on paper.

Among the flags planted in Mozambican territory was one well-known to Brazilians: that of Vale. The mining company established itself in the province of Tete to exploit coal. In exchange, it left dust, cracked houses, and polluted rivers. “After they took everything that mattered, they left saying it was because of climate change. But we know: it was because it was no longer profitable,” says Erika.

She speaks of Vale with the naturalness of someone who lived with the noise of dynamite. And it is at this point that her story crosses the Atlantic. “Brazil and Mozambique have similar wounds,” she says. She mentions the Rio Doce covered in mud, and the Zambezi River dammed by reservoirs. “The map changes, but the logic is the same: wealth goes away, destruction remains.”

Erika is a member of the Mozambican NGO Justiça Ambiental (Environmental Justice) and denounces how Mozambique is experiencing the intensity of the unfolding climate crisis. Photo:  Juan Carlos Gallego

The first time Erika heard about the Movement of People Affected by Dams (MAB), she was still a teenager. Years later, she would be sharing plenary sessions with Brazilian farmers, exchanging organizational methodologies, chants of struggle, and maps of flooded rivers.

“The Portuguese language, which often isolates us in Africa, has become a bridge to Brazil,” she says. Today, Mozambique and MAB share more than just language: they share resistance strategies, youth exchanges, and political training for affected women.

But Erika doesn’t romanticize the struggle. She speaks of international treaties that bind governments in the Global South. She explains that companies can sue entire states if public policies threaten their future profits. The mechanism has a name: Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS). “It’s colonialism with a signature and a lawyer,” she summarizes. “A country can decide to protect its river, but if that affects the projected profits of a mining company, it’s taken to international courts and ordered to pay billions.”

While rights crumble into legal formulas, the climate collapses. Mozambique is one of the countries most affected by cyclones in the world. Cyclone Idai, in 2019, killed more than a thousand people. Cyclone Kenneth arrived a month later. Rains that sweep everything away, droughts that last for months, coastal communities swallowed by erosion. “We live in the eye of the storm of the climate crisis and we are the ones who contributed the least to it happening,” she says.

The Mozambican woman closely follows the situation in Brazil. She heard about the floods in Rio Grande do Sul; the drought in the Amazon, which left boats stranded in the middle of the rivers. “Extreme weather events are no longer exceptional news, they are routine,” she states. And it is in this scenario, between dammed rivers and burning forests, that she advocates for an international alliance of the affected peoples. Not out of internationalist romanticism, but as a concrete strategy. “Capital is global. If resistance isn’t, we lose.”

In November, Erika traveled to Brazil to participate in a collaboration with popular movements in the Amazon. From the plane, she saw the rivers cutting through the forest, winding like veins. When she landed, she learned that they wanted to dredge one of them to transport soy and ore. “The rivers are also becoming roads for profit,” she observes. In Pará, she spoke with quilombola communities, fishermen, indigenous people, and MAB activists. The feeling was like a mirror. “The accent changes, the biome changes, but the question is the same: who controls the territory?”

At the end of our conversation, she states: “There’s one thing we learned early on: nobody fights a dam alone. Either the whole community rises up or the water covers everything.” She pauses. “I think that applies to the world as well.”