Não somos "nordestinados”: colonialismo, colonialidade interna e a ocultação do processo de desigualdade regional no Brasil

Abstract

The purpose of this work is to reveal aspects of the coloniality process within Brazil that historically hampered the development of the Brazilian Northeast. We initially deal with how the State was constituted on the material and symbolic structures developed from colonization, and then we approach internal colonialism ‒ replication of colonizing action in various social spaces within the country. Afterwards, we discuss the four mechanisms indicated by Herrera Flores that allow us to identify the colonial process, with the aim of understanding how this process can also be reproduced within the internal scope of colonized countries. Despite Flores indicating four elements, we chose to give centrality to the mechanism for hiding the origins of the colonial process. At the end, we verified that the aforementioned mechanism of hiding the origins of the colonial process made the economic and political power disputes between states of the Brazilian federation invisible and was one of the factors responsible for the inter-regional inequality and for the deepening of underdevelopment in the Northeast of the country.