Latin American perspectives on slow disasters

The temporality of disasters has long been discussed in disaster studies, stemming from historical and anthropological research (Bankoff, 2004; Oliver-Smith, 1999; Oliver-Smith and Hoffman, 2002). Scholars within this tradition have introduced the idea of disasters as “slow” events with layering, “formless” consequences that are geographically dispersed and stretch in time, both back into the past and forward into the future (Knowles, 2014). The “slow” qualifier signals a move away from the idea of disasters as “event[s] concentrated in time and space” (Fritz, 1961, p. 655), to a focus on their double role as events/processes (Oliver-Smith, 1999), where moments of “incubation” are as important as those of disruption. In this context, concepts such as “slow violence” (Nixon, 2011), “slow disasters” (Knowles, 2014), “slow emergencies” (Anderson et al., 2020), “slow-onset disasters” and “slow calamities” (Staupe-Delgado, 2019, 2021) usefully underscore that the causes and effects of environmental catastrophes are neither exceptional nor unexpected, but, rather, the outcome of specific modes of governance, economic development, urbanisation processes, among other endogenous and exogenous forces. These different concepts focus on particular phenomena and have diverse disciplinary backgrounds (e.g. environmental humanities, geography or history), but all stress the temporal dimension and recognise the quotidian and embodied character of so-called “critical” events.

This article utilises slow disasters because the concept captures the complex causation and myriad experiences surrounding disaster risks. However, while the notion of slow disasters highlights a critical temporal dimension of these events/processes, it remains very much anchored in the Anglophone scholarly literature. Responding to recent calls to investigate the plurality of experiences and conceptual entry points to what we call “disasters” (Gaillard, 2023), we aim to discuss the spatialities and temporalities of disasters, taking Latin America as an empirical and conceptual starting point. Tironi et al. (2022), for example, develop an explicit disaster perspective from and for the Global South to capture the slowness quality of disasters in Chile. Furthermore, scholars writing in Spanish, Portuguese and other languages work closely with the concept of slow violence to stress environmental damage, environmental suffering and waste subjects (Auyero and Swistun, 2007; Ureta et al., 2018). This reframing of disasters as slow processes, long in the making, closely aligns with prior work on Latin American political ecologies, primarily published in Spanish and Portuguese (Alimonda, 2011; Gudynas, 2012; Merlinsky, 2021; Svampa, 2011). While not always focused on disasters, this scholarship has consistently highlighted the causal links between the region’s environmental problems and its broader colonial history, its dependency on global capital networks, and the dominance of extractive industries in national economies (Galeano, 1996; Gudynas, 2012; Mondardo, 2019).

Drawing on this rich scholarly tradition, the article is collectively written by a group of authors from Latin America, or who have worked in the region, and who engage with the slow temporalities of disasters in their research. The article is informed by the pilot project “Latinx perspectives: Reframing urban inequality as slow disaster” ^[1] which brought together scholars across the social sciences and humanities to examine the multiple and intersecting conditions that accumulate to produce disasters in cities of Latin America. The project started with a focus on contamination as an entry point to conceptualise disaster temporalities given its centrality to both Latin American experience and scholarship, and its inherently slow nature as contaminants build up, accumulate and seep in.

This initial review led to a panel held at the 2023 Northern European Emergency and Disaster Studies (NEEDS) Conference in Enschede, The Netherlands. The session aimed to stimulate a dialogue across languages, academic disciplines, and geographies around the idea of “slow disasters” in and from Latin America. The participants of the panel engaged with two questions: (1) How is “slowness” used and/or could re-orient their work? (2) How helpful is the concept of slow disasters in understanding disasters and their effects in Latin America and other regions? Based on their transcribed answers, this article presents different perspectives and reflects on ways of interpreting the temporalities of disasters in the region and beyond. The paper is thus a result of a collaborative process, co-authored by the participants of the pilot project and the participants of the panel.

Importantly, the article not only engages with the temporally distant root causes of disasters (Oliver-Smith et al., 2017; Wisner et al., 2004) but also builds upon recent discussions questioning the epistemological roots and Western heritage of our terms (Gaillard, 2022, 2023). It centres on the notion of disasters and other inherited categories of the field, reflecting on their contours, limits, usages and re-appropriations by scholars from other geographies and knowledges. As such, the article represents a collective theory-building effort from Latin America, aiming to develop a more nuanced and historically grounded perspective on disasters in a time of rapidly exacerbating socio-environmental and climate change.

Up next, we frame the discussion based on previous literature on the notion of “slowness” in Latin American disaster research. Then, we proceed with the transcribed forum, as presented by four researchers covering different Latin American sites and cases. We conclude the article with a discussion reflecting on linkages and departures across the individual contributions.

Using contamination as an entry point, this section presents an exploratory review of current scholarly work engaging with the slowness of disasters from and about Latin America. The search comprised the keywords “slow”, “contamination”, “disaster” and synonyms, including corresponding translations in Portuguese and Spanish. In English, the keywords “Latin America” and “Brazil” were added. After excluding works exclusively about coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) and on contamination after a disaster, 21 pieces were reviewed in detail. Using “slow disasters” as a conceptual lens, we identify three key insights in this literature, from the global scale to individual bodies. First, researchers address the geopolitical dimension of disasters, considering new forms of colonialism and coloniality wherein disasters are continuously exported from the Global North to the Global South. Second, researchers describe how embodied experiences translate into cumulative effects of disasters on human and non-human bodies, making visible the impacts which slowly build up on bodies but that remain largely invisible. Third, disaster normalisation through confusion and dependency appears as a recurrent feature in affected populations, deriving from narratives of uncertainty about sources, and the extent and effects of contamination. We explain each insight in detail below.

By focusing on global flows of risk and extraction, scholars explore the slowness of disasters regarding how these are produced through contemporary forms of colonialism and coloniality that become manifest as health and ecological burdens transferred from the North to the South. In doing so, these contributions demonstrate how contamination risks are brought to the South through flexibilisation of regulations, including permissive standards which allow, for example, the export of contaminated food to Latin America. de Souza Porto and de Souza Porto (2015) explain how Chernobyl-contaminated meat and milk that were forbidden for consumption in Europe were allowed to be exported to countries like Brazil.

Focusing on regulatory landscapes, Ouellet-Simard and Teles (2019) propose the notion of “silent environmental death” to describe how flexible regulations obscure environmental degradation caused by irresponsible mining. They focus on the Canadian regulatory landscape, where 80% of mining companies worldwide are registered, despite often operating outside of the country. Since Canadian law prevents prosecution of crimes committed abroad and the right to reputation takes precedence over freedom of expression, Canadian regulation creates a barrier for denouncing environmental destruction perpetrated by mining companies elsewhere. These two examples highlight how Latin America continues to be the stage of multiple slowly unfolding disasters because of risks exported from the North through extractive industries, with this slow violence extending far back to colonial times.

Moving from global flows of contaminants to their situated effects, several studies expose how slowly unfolding disasters become visible through embodied experiences of contamination. Although embodiment is mostly approached from an anthropocentric perspective (Bertanha, 2021; Ureta et al., 2018; Sarlingo, 2013), non-human embodiment is also present, with Palermo Buti (2020) accounting for the effects of oil contamination on local mangrove crustaceans, called “guaiamum”. These crustaceans are black, have an oily texture and a strong smell due to oil contamination, with locals renaming them “petroleum guaiamum”. Connecting non-human and human experience, Vieira Filho (2021) traces the biological trajectory of mercury when denouncing what he calls “ethnocide by mercury”: from mining, to river ecosystems, the fish that eat sediments and algae, and finally humans who eat contaminated fish. In tracing these interconnected biological cycles, the author makes visible how human and non-human bodies become entangled in toxic environments.

Central to this work are sensory registers, as what is seen, felt or smelled becomes a tangible way to be informed about contamination, especially when impacted populations do not have access to or do not trust state-sponsored campaigns on risks, if and when such information becomes available. For instance, dust accumulating near cement industries (Bertanha, 2021) and respiratory diseases experienced in the vicinity of toxic waste disposal areas (Ureta et al., 2018) become evidence of the unfolding disasters for impacted communities. Despite embodied experiences, residents sometimes are unsure if they were indeed contaminated, confounded by experts with access to scientific knowledge who either deny the disaster because of their own agendas (i.e. when employed by polluting companies), or who identify the issue without being fully trusted by communities, often because of their links to a state that has historically overlooked or oppressed affected communities (Burgos Cisneros, 2015). Due to this politics of information, it is often difficult to link experiential knowledge with sources of contamination, suggesting that slow disasters are “harder to know” (Auyero and Swistun, 2007).

This uncertainty connects with the third and last insight from our exploratory review, related to confusion and dependency. Auyero and Swistun (2007, 2008b) articulate the concept of “toxic confusion”, to capture instances where doubts over sources, extent, and effects of pollution create a state of bewilderment for affected populations, with perceptions ranging between denial and conviction. Contributions from Swistun and Auyero have been foundational in the field, influencing other work on toxic confusion as well as slow-motion disasters, or “desastres en cámara lenta” (Swistun, 2015), and of environmental suffering (Auyero and Swistun, 2007). For example, Burgos Cisneros (2015) proposes the notion of invisible contamination, where communities deny their environmental suffering as a strategy to safeguard their livelihoods which depend on the extractive industries responsible for it. Similarly, Iturralde (2015) demonstrates that communities in Argentina accepted the presence of a multinational company supplying pesticides for agribusinesses in their city centre, after protesting about concerns with contamination and the development of respiratory diseases, cancer and other illnesses, because it secured jobs and, ultimately, their livelihoods.

Importantly, the literature review also highlights the context of multiple disasters and how priority is given to fast disasters, or the ones that disrupt life suddenly, while addressing slowly unfolding disasters is deprioritised. Hernández (2022) describes this condition as “putting out fires”, using as an example the city of Esmeraldas in Ecuador where residents prioritised immediate threats (i.e. fire caused by oil leakage, destructive floods, landslides and earthquakes) over slower ones (i.e. skin conditions and respiratory illnesses from industrial pollution). Connected to these different dynamics are the slow disasters’ subjects. Ureta and colleagues (2018) propose the figure of the waste subject, or in Spanish “sujeto de desechos”, which appears in the absence of a “sujeto de derechos”, or a subject of rights. While these subjects don’t have faith in the authorities and refrain from organised forms of political mobilisation, they find ways to cope by creating care practices in their everyday lives.

Ultimately, the contributions reviewed point to how confusion, dependency and historical legacies create spaces for the invisibilisation and normalisation of slow disasters that are in many ways paradoxically sustained through resilient practices developed by affected actors. They also point to the notion of slow disasters as a syndemic process (Vélez-Torres and Méndez, 2022) where contamination becomes intertwined with other forms of slow violence such as poverty, exclusion and discrimination of historically marginalised groups.

These insights demonstrate the importance of reflecting on the temporality of disasters. The term “slow disaster” provides a useful starting point, and one that is likely to be immediately understood by scholars across the world, working as a shorthand for a perspective that foregrounds the historical and socio-economic roots of disasters. However, we wonder whether the slowness quality of disasters varies in theoretical and empirical usages from different disciplines and perspectives; and whether this notion helps to illuminate the myriad disaster processes particular to Latin American risk (re)creation. With that aim, the two questions posed in the panel, mentioned in the introduction, served to allow four panellists to reflect on their work. First, Enrique Arias develops a political science approach to the usage and interpretation of disaster politics by different actors in his native Peru. Then, Marcelo González Gálvez approaches a wildfire in Chile from an anthropological standpoint, focused on the perceptions and velocities of such a phenomenon. Third, Débora Swistun reflects on her longstanding native ethnographic work in Villa Inflamable in Argentina, discussing myriad dimensions of industrial pollution as disaster. Finally, researching the Peruvian Andes, Tomás Usón shows how seismic disasters can work as temporal arrangements, questioning both the fast and slow quality of disasters. We turn now to their respective presentations.

Thank you for inviting me to present on this panel. I will talk about my doctoral dissertation, which focuses on the role of politicians in creating and perpetuating disasters. We usually say that disasters are not natural, that they are political. However, in many cases, what politicians think, believe or even how they create disasters is not well considered. My research on disaster and politics in Peru in the 21st century aims to understand how politicians’ beliefs can result in the designation of an event as a disaster.

This graph (see Figure 1) shows the statistics that every country reports about emergencies. First, I want you to think about normality and how politicians define it. I can take the official record of emergencies in Peru over the last 20 years as an example. Emergencies followed a steadily rising trend for almost 2 decades, but nearly doubled by the end of 2019. In Peru, the technical definition of emergency is a state of damage to life, property, and the environment caused by a natural or human-induced phenomenon that alters the normal course of activities. What changed in 2019? The national government forced local governments to report emergencies to obtain humanitarian aid.

With this change, thousands of emergencies become visible almost immediately. So, what defines disaster changes over time and goes beyond a technical definition? Sometimes, it depends on the political context, who the victims are, what bureaucratic procedures are, and politicians’ decisions. In this presentation, I will try to understand how governments define abnormalities. Using the idea of slow disasters, I will discuss how different actors created disasters over time and how politicians accepted this abnormality. So, I will state that the acceptance process, averted gaze or forbearance of states is crucial in understanding disasters (Sandset, 2011; Swistun, 2015, p. 207; Holland, 2017). How do some emergencies become normal and accepted while others do not?

Now, what can I tell you about the role of politicians in disasters? Firstly, whether slow-onset or sudden, disasters are often not a priority for politicians. This situation is evident from a survey conducted last April, which showed that only 10% of respondents considered disasters – such as pollution, landslides and floods – one of Peru’s primary problems. Only 2% of respondents say they are affected by disasters ^[2]. Of course, there are discrepancies in varying perceptions of what constitutes a disaster. Based on my interviews, politicians support the idea of disasters as exceptional events that they can manage. Suppose they use the concept of slow disaster. In that case, they refer to a vast process beyond their control and use it as an excuse to avoid their responsibility in reducing current vulnerabilities or implementing prevention measures for future disasters. However, gaining further insight into government actions through sources other than interviews with politicians is possible.

Regarding the idea of slow disaster, it is impressive how official documents display the acceptance of the future impact of disasters. In the national public policy of Disaster Risk Management (DRM) to 2050, the government recognises and accepts that vulnerability is a crucial factor in why people could die because of disasters and how poor people with precarious public utilities are more affected by disasters ^[3]. They make explicit that people dying during disasters result from vulnerability. They do not hide it.

I also want to distinguish the difference between slow and sudden disasters. Many academics focus predominantly on disasters’ impact, not on their construction or their acceptance through time. When a disaster impact occurs, acting is a priority and usually becomes an emergency. However, with the slow creation and reproduction of vulnerabilities, haste does not exist. Reducing vulnerability is not a priority, it is an underlying process accepted by decision-makers. For example, in the same public policy of DRM of 2050, the State plans to reduce the number of people living in high-risk places vulnerable to earthquakes by less than ten percent, from 51 to 43, during the next 25 years. Even though several scenarios estimate that if an earthquake of 8.8 magnitude impacts the country’s coast, it will cause more than one hundred thousand deaths, 2 million injuries, and 1 million uninhabitable homes. So, I think the category of slow disaster also helps to understand the process of politicians’ acceptance of how certain people in the country have been affected and will continue to be affected when disasters occur. Also, I think the concept of slow disasters is relevant in Latin America in two ways. First, it could help to understand how the vulnerability to disasters was created and perpetuated. In my interviews with politicians in Peru, they said that vulnerability is not their responsibility because it depends on numerous variables, and the local authority or Minister only has four years or less to act. They stated that there is not much they can do. However, evaluating the vulnerability production process reveals that it results from political decisions. Political decisions are, of course, beyond the scope of a government, but with a focus on extensive periods, it is possible to track how these unequal patterns of vulnerability have been constituted. In the 50s, for example, the policy about housing was to allow people to live in pro-hazard areas. Since then, different governments have had two kinds of policies, one for the middle class and another for the poor. In this case, policy plays a role in perpetuating the mechanisms of disaster reproduction that contribute to the reproduction of inequality.

The second point is how to explain the acceptance of disasters across time. For example, applying the category of colonialism to understand the construction of disasters over time may overlook the dynamics of people’s vulnerabilities and how vulnerabilities have been created, changed, and perpetuated. Take, for example, La Oroya, a case of endemic toxic pollution. It is a mining complex constructed during the 1920s and was listed as the second-most polluted city on Earth in 2011. At the beginning of the 2000s, people from La Oroya were fighting to reopen the refinery that had been closed for failing to comply with their environmental commitments. However, 90 years ago, farmers and people of the area protested and opposed the refinery’s opening: they were conscious that it would create an environmental problem. The case of La Oroya may provide insight into the evolution of disaster recognition. Initially, residents protested against the mining project, but over time, their focus shifted to preserving jobs rather than a safe environment. Even though for decades the State did not recognise the pollution, two weeks ago, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights claimed that the Peruvian State is responsible for violating the rights to a life of dignity, personal integrity, a fair trial and access to information on environmental issues for sixty families ^[4]. It took a long time to hold the Peruvian State responsible and recognise its complicity in the harm. In conclusion, understanding slow-onset disasters can elucidate complex continuities and the political mechanisms that create and sustain them.

I would like to thank the organisers of this fascinating panel. First of all, it is important to state that many of my reflections on this matter have been developed in collaboration with Valentina Turén and Fernanda Gallegos (González Gálvez et al., 2021). So, I would like to start there, regarding the first question posed by the panellists. My research on disasters focuses on the growing number of wildfires affecting the centre and South of Chile during the last decades. We perceive this as a side effect of the ecological transformation produced by the vast presence of logging interest since the 1960s, particularly after the timber industries’ promotion policies carried out during Pinochet’s dictatorship in the 1970s. I have carried out ethnographic fieldwork in the timber village of Santa Olga, a small town virtually obliterated by the massive wildfires that affected Chile six years ago.

Attempting to understand the catastrophe from the perspective of santolguinos themselves, it was crystal clear to me that it was impossible to take it only as an isolated, sudden event, as an emergency that took place due to mere unfortunate coincidences. Indeed, people in Santa Olga thought of the events they lived through almost unanimously as a progression of concatenated actions that ended up sacrificing their lives and town. This was explicitly elaborated through the phrase “nos quemaron” (“we got burned”), every time they were asked about their experience. Even more, many stated the tragedy they had to live through had revealed the real nature of their existence, and it was also what allowed them to become the symbol of wildfire devastation.

Trying to understand ethnographically such a sentence, on how santolguinos state they got burned, I started to think about the temporality of disasters, or more probably, the velocities of disasters, inspired by the notion of slow disasters as formulated by Scott Knowles. However, Santa Olga was not a canonical example of this formulation, because even though there are certain historical conditions that explain the wildfire, the disaster itself seems circumscribed to the wildfire itself. Thus, it would be dishonest to state that santolguinos lived a disaster before the actual wildfire. Nobody in the town would think so. Analogously, nobody thought of Santa Olga or any other timber production area in Chile, through the notion of “zone of sacrifice”. On the contrary, timber industries, although heavily based on the plantation of exogenous monocrops, are considered to be environmentally sustainable and carbon-free. Nevertheless, most people agree that it was impossible to explain the disaster by coincidence or mere bad luck.

Being in that dilemma, I established a collaboration with Chilean playwright and theatre director Manuela Infante, who is now based in Europe. And she made me think through her exceptional play “Vegetative State” (or “Estado Vegetal”), a possible way out of my dilemma. Reflecting about human incapacity to perceive vegetal movement, one character of that play points out that it is not the case that vegetal beings do not move, but they move so slowly that you cannot see them. That reflection made a perfect match between the revelation implied by the catastrophe and the visibility it gave to the town, according to santolguinos. Thus, employing the slow disaster notion, I reformulated it in order to understand how disasters might not only have stable velocities, but variable ones. And those same velocities may be related to the capacity we have to perceive them. This is how I ended up thinking about the disaster of Santa Olga through the notion of rhythm, which eventually might help us to extend the temporality of any disaster without the need to focus mainly on the event more evidently perceived. In the last year, I have been involved in an interdisciplinary collaboration with artists related to these issues, and musician Jose Miguel Candela has led me to realise we could actually literally think about how every disaster has a rhythm, as a relational existence, that allows us to perceive them.

And the second question was how helpful is the notion of slow disaster in understanding disasters in Latin America and elsewhere. In my view, the introduction of the notion of slow disasters is critical to broaden the scope through which we understand disasters, to include the many facets that make them humanly created or unnatural. Furthermore, it invites us to rethink the boundaries that define what a disaster is or where and when it begins, by acknowledging its multiple causes and implications as integral parts of it.

Reflecting particularly on the case I have studied, the analytical nuance granted by this initial multiplication of the disaster, that is, its denial as a mere emergency, gives me space to think with people what a disaster is beyond what seems obvious. I am not sure that there’s something particularly Latin America in this realisation or way of thinking, beyond the political economic relations implied in extractivism, which usually tend to have a unidirectional North–South configuration. Put in another way, if there is a difference, that difference is much more political than cultural.

To answer this question, then, I began to think otherwise: would it be helpful to think about disasters in Euro-American societies as slow disasters? What is more, would it be helpful to think about disasters as slow disasters in general? And my answer consistently will be yes, it is. I think there is something related to our own link to the world and its geophysical forces, more than to our geopolitical position and the epistemologies implied by it. There is probably something related to our fragile humanity and the way it gets in both with humans and non-human beings. Thank you.

This is a picture (see Figure 2) just to help you have an idea of the place I have been working for more than a decade, Flammable shantytown (Villa Inflamable in Spanish), which is my hometown as well. I would like to share some reflections coming from Flammable, some of the concepts we named in a piece of native ethnography, and specifically to focus on the issue of time, because time is extremely related to slow violence and slow disasters. This ethnographic work then echoes the later works of Knowles and Nixon.

More than a decade ago, with Javier Auyero, we wrote “Flammable: Environmental Suffering in an Argentine Shantytown”. It was first published in 2008 in Spanish and then in 2009 in English (Auyero and Swistun, 2008a, 2009). In that ethnography, we focused on the public dimensions of what we called “toxic experiences” of my neighbours and myself. Flammable is the community adjacent to the biggest petrochemical compound in Buenos Aires. And it was renamed that way, Villa Inflamable was not selected by the residents, but by the local government after an oil ship explosion in 1984. So the ethnography analyses how some meanings about pollution, toxicity, harm to health and environmental risk, that were given to Flammable by several powerful actors, performed as a labour of confusion linked to “the social production of toxic uncertainty”.

We started to understand the multiple effects of industrial pollution on urban poverty, and I mentioned this because such topics were marginally studied by academia at that time. We brought to the front the importance of the environmental dimension in the everyday life of the urban poor in the Global South to understand how social domination works in places like my hometown, where petrochemical companies are like “monsters”, and at the same time, are like fathers and mothers providing health care, potable water and jobs. So we went deeply into that kind of tensions in the quotidian and everyday life of my neighbours, myself and my family.

What we found is that what doctors, media, companies, teachers and scientists say, or do not say, about pollution, has a different impact on how residents perceive their own health and their own surroundings. In 2003, an epidemiological study showed that more than 50% of children had lead in their blood. At that moment, the tolerated dose was 10 micrograms per decilitre of lead in blood, but now it’s half, so most children in Flammable are contaminated or intoxicated by lead and other toxins. Becoming aware of the toxic and risky surroundings is a difficult process, including sadness, anguish, sorrow, anger and uncertainty. Taking inspiration from the work of medical anthropology, sociology of risk and cognitive psychology, we named this process “environmental suffering”. In this process, the not knowing and doubting about the pollution effects on the bodies and the environment claimed an explanation as part of the way in which social domination works in places like Flammable. In that piece of ethnography, we proposed to understand “the pollution as a disaster in slow motion”, and how it’s deeply imbricated with the materialities over which symbolic violence is based.

As I mentioned at the beginning, time and “pollution incubation” were keys to comprehend and understand the many ways that Flammable residents doubted, denied and explained to themselves the effects of pollution in their everyday life. Scholars and practitioners working in risk management know that the historical legacy and interpretative contexts are central in giving form to the perception of risk and in digesting an overabundance of information in conditions of uncertainty. But mainly, the bibliography we worked with at that time (between 2004 and 2009), about similar cases of contaminated communities, especially in the South of the United States and Europe, focused on cases in which everyday life was abruptly dislocated by the uncovering of nearby hazards. There are many famous ethnographies and other works with fenceline communities, nuclear plants, and so on, from which we took some inspiration to understand Flammable.

The risk frames in the typical sequence, from that literature, emerge in interaction with other agreed parties, some of which quickly surface as unexpected leaders and in confrontation with the state and other expert systems like physicians, engineers, the employees in the petrochemical plants, who typically either deny, cover up or minimise the actual or potential damage. With the exception of the oil ship explosion in 1984, when I was seven years old, and the installation of a coke plant in 1995, there weren’t any other daily interruptions. So the interactive routines worked as smoothly as blinders to increase the environmental hazards.

During the long period of slow incubation of pollution, the actions of the state and authorities towards contamination in the neighbourhood were less consistent and more contradictory than either denial or underestimation that has been documented in the existing literature. Those multiple incongruous actions gave shape to what we term – extending the insights of scholars of ideology and symbolic power – a labour of confusion that has a decisive effect on shared misunderstandings. Due to toxic contamination is inherently uncertain – the body’s past exposure, the dose–response relationships, synergistic effects and etiological ambiguity – all contribute to the problem of uncertainty in both toxicology and epidemiology. But in Flammable, this intrinsic uncertainty was amplified by both practical and discursive interventions of the compound personnel, doctors, state officials, media and lawyers. So we sought to unravel the social logic and the outcome of a poisonous place that, together with toxic assault, afflicted my neighbours and myself.

That ethnography has taken a life of its own, and it has inspired different scholars, artists, activists, lawyers and state officials intervening in Flammable, but also in other places in Latin America, even other colleagues working with indigenous communities, working with exposed communities to different environmental hazards and the effects of extractive economies. That, for me, is maybe the contribution and link with the concept of slow disaster and slow violence regarding the first question you asked us to answer. But regarding the second question, if we think it’s useful the concept for us, in a sense, at that time when we were conducting this ethnography, of course, it was important to think about the issue of time. As you see in this (see Figure 3), a kind of summary of the thesis of environmental suffering, the dimensions of time and incubation were key to understanding environmental suffering.

We were not working specifically with disaster literature, but we also took inspiration from that, as it is useful. But I think what we bring from Latin America is the importance of thinking about these long-term processes, from colonial times. In 2019, I co-organised the first Anthropocene School from Latin American perspectives in Buenos Aires, Argentina. And most of the researchers that participated, as well as artists, activists, state officials, practitioners, students and so on, concluded that we cannot explain anything in Latin America or in the Global South if we don’t introduce and we don’t think about the North–South relationships going back to colonial times. And specifically in these new, or Neo-extractivist economies that we are suffering from. So the concept of the Anthropocene is very helpful to understand the non-human dimensions of disasters, and not only to think about the roles of humans in this. This is something I explored much more in my PhD dissertation (Swistun, 2020), linked to the concept of necropolitics, and also pragmatic sociology that I think could bring us more interesting insights to understand some of the processes we are passing through nowadays in Latin America. Thanks a lot for inviting me to this panel.

I would like to reflect on the two proposed questions by sharing some parts of my ethnographic work in the Peruvian Andes. Regarding the first question, my research deals with the complex and sometimes unintuitive relationships and entanglements between disasters and time. The central thesis of my work is that, rather than being events or processes that occur within time, disasters are temporising arrangements that help us make sense of and articulate the notion of time itself. Throughout my research, I explore how, as temporising arrangements, disasters produce different forms of time: times of destruction, systemic failure and collapse; suspended times of loss and grievance together with times of preparedness, planning, response, recovery and mitigation. Disasters are temporal transformations that can be fast and explosive but also slow and gradual, as the notion of a slow disaster suggests. In my work, I explore the diverse forms of temporality that disasters produce to analyse the transformations they elicit in urban environments and the types of conflicts and disputes these reconfigurations produce.

My work takes place in the Ancash region of Peru, specifically in the Callejón de Huaylas, a long and narrow valley in the Peruvian Andes. This region has experienced various extreme events in recent decades, including a 1970 earthquake that left virtually every city in the region in ruins, and several flash floods, such as the 1941 flood in Huaraz, Ancash’s capital, which destroyed a significant part of the city. This latter type of event, known to the scientific community as a glacial lake outburst flood or GLOF, is a direct consequence of climate change that continues to threaten cities in this part of Peru.

Answering the second question, I would like to reflect further on the temporising capacity that disasters have and problematise the implicit idea of time, commonly attributed not only to fast disasters but also to slow ones. Additionally, I will explore how we can conceive the slowness of catastrophes differently. To do so, I would like to introduce the case of El Señor de Los Milagros neighbourhood, a district of Huaraz highly exposed to an imminent GLOF coming from the mountains through the Quillcay River that could destroy the settlement in a matter of minutes.

While visiting El Señor de Los Milagros in 2022, I had the chance to talk with Ana, a resident of the neighbourhood and president of the junta de vecinos (neighbourhood committee). During an interview, Ana shared with me the painstaking situation in which she and her neighbours are subsumed while waiting for relocation. People in El Señor de Los Milagros are very aware of the risk of living in such an exposed area, but they do not have the means to move elsewhere. They live in a temporal state while hoping for a housing solution that may never come. “We know it’s dangerous, but unfortunately, we have nowhere to go”, Ana tells me. “If we had a house, we’d be somewhere else. Why take the risk here?” Authorities have discussed with them a possible relocation to avoid El Señor de Los Milagros being struck by an imminent flood – even threatening to evict them if they do not move elsewhere. However, these are plans and threats that, in the more than 30 years that families have been living in this settlement, have never materialised.

“The last time the river rose, it was so strong that the houses were shaking”, Ana affirms, referring to the constant sound and vibration of the Quillcay River, located only a few metres from her house. “When the river grows […] you can feel the boulders hitting the concrete walls behind the houses”, she explains, illustrating how corporally embedded the sense of risk is among her and her neighbours. The concrete wall she mentions is a protective barrier the government built in the 1990s to prevent the water from eroding the soil. It is the only infrastructure on which the neighbourhood currently counts to cope with the river’s force, as it reduces the chances of the ground beneath their feet collapsing (see Figure 4). A major flood, however, would erase the entire settlement in a matter of minutes.

The ongoing uncertainty and anxiety that the risk of an imminent flood produces among people like Ana is what I would like to emphasise to reflect upon the idea of a slow disaster, especially in the Latin American context. The concept of disaster as both a material reality and a political device shapes many aspects of Ana’s life – e.g. whether she should spend her scarce income to improve her house or save it in case a relocation indeed takes place. The imminent flood makes neighbours from El Señor de Los Milagros view their settlement as a temporary housing solution, even though families have been living there for decades. This reality reflects many other stories and experiences in the Latin American context, revealing common problems such as limited access to housing, exclusion from the real estate market due to monetary insolvency, and an absent state that lacks the capacity to address housing needs fully. El Señor de Los Milagros’ case shows that risk and exposure are not inherently tied to the territories where extreme events occur. They result from slow processes of land settling, poor housing policies, and precarious living conditions. Moreover, it exemplifies how the concept of disaster in Latin America never operates as a single event. Losing the only housing alternative that families have can be as devastating as a flood taking their houses away. It is a trade-off that neighbours need to navigate, creating different temporal rhythms in their lives: a time of waiting that can subsume people in fear and anxiety while simultaneously pushing them to prepare and respond to the situation in the best possible way.

The disaster, I want to conclude, is already there. It is happening, not necessarily as an event but as an entity that conditions the lives of Ana and her neighbours. This temporal influence is precisely what the notion of a slow disaster conceptualises. When disasters lose their explosive nature, they turn into heterogeneous arrangements that can affect lives manifold. By defining them as something other than fast, we can see disasters as phenomena that produce forms of time and rhythm in multiple ways. They produce these forms of time because they operate as entities that we need to cope with and adapt to. These adaptation processes are never immediate: they lead to the articulation of strategies that exposed populations must adopt to manage situations that are already occurring. Cohabiting with disasters produces a painstaking waiting that turns the imminent flood into an actual experience that influences people’s lives and rhythms. The disaster is slow because it is gradually yet steadily affecting reality, shaping it in diverse forms. Time, under this view, is a direct result of these influences and not merely the container in which the disaster, whether fast or slow, takes place.

The review presented earlier, as well as the contributions from the four panellists, make visible the many parallels between the English-language literature on slow disasters and slow emergencies (Anderson et al., 2020; Knowles, 2014; Nixon, 2011), and Latin American literature on the temporality of disasters and, more specifically, environmental contamination (e.g. Cruz, 2022; Ferreira de Souza & Lopes do Nascimento, 2017; Swistun, 2015). Yet, the latter, mainly published in Spanish and Portuguese, remains largely unknown to English-speaking audiences. As we delved deeper into this literature, and also reflecting on the interventions above, we came to view these parallels as the result of academic conversations within the uneven structures of academia, which reward researchers who publish in English and are based at institutions in the Global North. While uneven, this exchange is undeniably productive, illuminating different dynamics and facets of disasters and their effects. The aim of this discussion is to tease some of these out.

We find it most helpful to understand slowness as a mode of narrating disasters that emphasises their embeddedness in the broader historical and political context. In this account, slowness does not refer to a separate category of disasters, say droughts as opposed to earthquakes. Instead, it reframes disasters as long-term processes and captures the uneven rhythm at which they unfold. As Marcelo González Gálvez’s intervention stressed, at times these processes are so slow that become invisible, similarly to the growth of trees or the erasure of rocks. Importantly, slowness and invisibility are not necessarily about low-intensity: as Débora Swistun’s research demonstrates, even conditions that fundamentally undermine human life can become routine, in ways that dull recognition. There is a politics to the temporality of disasters, in that some actors, say an employer, or a state agency, have the power to make people wait, slowing down disasters to make them harder to see and contest. Sudden changes and accelerations can direct public attention to what is happening, even if, more often than not, the consequences of disasters vastly outlast the duration of such attention.

Slowness, then, is a mode of narration that helps to decentre and contextualise events that stand out as exceptional. Relatedly, slowness also reframes how we understand community responses to disasters. Most accounts – in news media as well as in the Anglophone academic literature – foresee two possible roles for affected residents. The first is that of the disempowered victim, without a voice and without agency; the second role is that of the activist, who bravely fights against powerful enemies (e.g. the state, polluting corporations, etc.) until the truth prevails. By broadening the scope of disaster research, slowness allows for a much broader range of responses, which include indecisiveness, ambiguity towards power, wilful ignorance and inaction, or resignation after political or legal initiatives fail. Indeed, as Enrique Arias’ research shows, community responses also have a varied rhythm, as the same group of residents can move from opposition, to acceptance and protest. Tomás Usón also shows a similar account, as urban relocation policies, the materiality of housing and flood infrastructures are connected to particular uncertainties in people’s lives. Actions that push for legislative changes, public mitigation or health programmes, or financial compensation, tend to be extremely slow – if not in their forms, then in achieving results. This slowness frustrates residents, who develop coping mechanisms that allow them to survive, and arguably lead them to accept barely liveable conditions.

The “slow disaster” framing helps to capture these empirical nuances, but also foreground a crucial conceptual argument, namely the importance of placing disasters in historical and political context. The “rhythm of disasters” is modulated by politics, and, in the case of Latin America, understanding this politics invariably involves reckoning with the continent’s colonial past and its legacies. On the one hand, the current socio-economic structures that drive vulnerability have been shaped by centuries of extractivism and dispossession. On the other hand, the neocolonial power relations continue to shape the geographies and geopolitics of disasters, as hazards are exported or offshored from the Global North to the Global South (e.g. see Oullet-Simard and Teles, 2019). It is these characteristics that, we think, represent an intrinsically Latin American slow disaster perspective, one that can enter into conversation with slow disasters in other geographies, always transcending dominant Western approaches. This forum article, therefore, extends an invitation to research that is attentive to the many temporalities in which disasters are produced and unfold, at multiple scales and through relational geographies. We call for a closer dialogue between the Latin American and Anglophonic scholarly literature to enrich this debate.

This article builds on the project “Latinx perspectives on slow disasters: Rethinking the relationship between urban inequality and environmental change” made possible by a Seed Grant from the Centre for Urban Studies (CUS) at the University of Amsterdam. The co-authors contributed to the article in the following manner: Ricardo: Compiled, edited and managed the article; conceptualisation and draft (introduction); revised manuscript. Paula: Conceptualisation and drafted literature review; revised manuscript. Valentina: Conceptualisation, draft (conclusions and introduction); revised manuscript. Enrique: Conceptualised and drafted his section. Marcelo: Conceptualised and drafted his section. Débora: Conceptualised and drafted her section. Tomás: Conceptualised and drafted his section. Karen: Conceptualisation and draft (introduction); revised manuscript. Fabio: Conceptualisation and draft (introduction); revised manuscript.