Petrolina (PE) através do tempo:

um estudo sobre a formação política da cidade até os dias atuais

Abstract

Petrolina (PE), on the banks of the São Francisco River is one of the most important cities in the Sertão and has one of the highest development rates in the Brazilian Northeast. However, few studies have focused on its political formation. Thus, the objective of this article is to analyze and debate the work “Capitalist Transition and the Dominant Class in the Northeast” by Ronald Chilcote (1991), to date the most complete work on the formation of political power in the city, employing four other academic works. two theses and two dissertations, which continue the debate promoted by the author on the political formation of the city in question. Additionally, official data on municipal elections for mayor since 1988 in the municipality are analyzed. In this way, the data and materials used allow us to verify whether Chilcote's arguments are still valid and explanatory in order to understand Petrolina's political formation and, of course, how the city is politically structured nowadays. The study's guiding question is: Does the historical political development described by Chilcote serve to understand Petrolina's current political formation? What changes and continuities are observed in the process of political constitution of the city after 1983?