The term was first used in Spain in 1930 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,[1] and to the hegemonic 70-year rule of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) in Mexico.
[citation needed] Analogously, the same pun is made in Portuguese as 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.
[3] In Spanish, the term 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.