'Ditablanda'

I have heard about the power of internet community since the nineties, when I first connected. However, last month I testified a demonstration of maturity from its users. On February 17th, Folha de São Paulo, the most important and biggest Brazilian newspaper, published editorial criticizing Venezuela popular verdict which gave to their governesses indeterminate reelection time. To the newspaper, this change on Venezuelan constitution is a way of dictatorship performance, although a democratic process was used to get to it.
At that context, the author tried to make a counterpoint with Brazilian ‘dark-year’ period, covered by the interval between 1964 to 1985, using a polemic and controversial term: ‘ditabranda’, a Portuguese relative to Spanish ‘ditablanda’, something like a ‘soft dictatorship’, originally coined in popular form in 1930, when General Damaso Berenguer replaced General Primo de Rivera on Spanish government. He governed by decrees and tried to calm down social spirits after crack of 1929 stock-market. Paradoxically, denominated ‘ditablanda’ executed more death sentences then the dictatorship it replaced.
A day after publication, the newspaper received thousands of e-mails protesting against mention, detaching the letters from jurist Fábio Konder Comparato and professor Maria Victória Benevides, well-known intellectuals raped and tortured by Brazilian dictatorship, published and ridiculed by Folha de São Paulo, its second mistake. These slips produced a reaction certainly not predicted. A petition was organized, catching more than ten thousand signatures; about two thousand readers canceled their subscriptions; famous bloggers, writers, journalists and intellectuals repudiated the declaration; about four hundred people protested in front of the journal office, in São Paulo, on march 7th, some of them coming from cities fourteen hours far from that capital. And all these actions were organized by web.
Without a choice, Otavio Frias Filho, the journal CEO, wrote a note recognizing its mistake. “It was an unhappy quotation”, he declared.
I have already saw some demonstrations of internet power of social mobilization, wether the claiming about bad services and expensive products, but for the first time I testified an act of protest occurring in Brazil, where society do not have this culture.