Dictablanda

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Dictablanda is a dictatorship in which civil liberties are allegedly preserved rather than destroyed, and authoritarian and democratic features are combined. [1] [2] Dictablanda is a pun on dictadura ("dictatorship") replacing dura, which by itself is a Spanish word meaning "hard", with blanda, meaning "soft". [3]

The term was first used in 1930 during the second-last year of the Restoration (1874–1931) in Spain when Dámaso Berenguer replaced Miguel Primo de Rivera y Orbaneja as the head of the ruling dictatorial government, and attempted to reduce tensions in the country by repealing some of the harsher measures that Primo de Rivera had introduced. It was also used to refer to the later years of Francisco Franco's Spanish State, [4] and to the hegemonic 70-year rule of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) in Mexico. [5]

The same play on words can be seen in the example of the Portuguese ditabranda or ditamole. In February 2009, the Brazilian newspaper Folha de S.Paulo ran a controversial editorial classifying the military dictatorship in Brazil (1964–1985) as a ditabranda. [6] In Spanish, dictablanda is contrasted with democradura (a portmanteau of democracia and dictadura), meaning an illiberal democracy – a system in which the government and its leaders are elected, but which is relatively deficient in civil liberties. [7]

See also

References

  1. ↑ Gillingham, Paul; Smith, Benjamin T. (2014). Dictablanda: Politics, Work, and Culture in Mexico, 1938–1968. Duke University Press. ISBN   978-0-8223-7683-5.
  2. ↑ Cammett, Melani; Jones, Pauline (2022). The Oxford Handbook of Politics in Muslim Societies. Oxford University Press. ISBN   978-0-19-093105-6.
  3. ↑ Gillingham, Paul; Smith, Benjamin T. (2014). Dictablanda: Politics, Work, and Culture in Mexico, 1938–1968. Duke University Press. ISBN   978-0-8223-7683-5.
  4. ↑ Jackson, Gabriel (Spring 1976). "The Franco Era in Historical Perspective". The Centennial Review. 20 (2): 103–127. JSTOR   23738276.
  5. ↑ Vaughan, Mary Kay (2018). "Mexico, 1940–1968 and Beyond: Perfect Dictatorship? Dictablanda? or PRI State Hegemony?" (PDF). Latin American Research Review . 53 (1): 170. ISSN   0023-8791. JSTOR   26744297.
  6. ↑ Ribeiro, Igor (25 February 2009). "A 'ditabranda' da Folha". Portal Imprensa (in Portuguese). Archived from the original on 1 February 2012. Retrieved 24 October 2025.
  7. ↑ Bonet, Lluis; Zamorano, Mariano Martín (2021). "Cultural policies in illiberal democracies: A conceptual framework based on the Polish and Hungarian governing experiences" . International Journal of Cultural Policy. 27 (5): 559–573. doi:10.1080/10286632.2020.1806829.
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