In the 1940s, in the midst of the post-war period, hunger became a major concern for large sections of the population in the face of scarcity, rising prices and the omnipresence of the black market. The Franco regime attributed the bad situation to climatology, since in a country still eminently rural and mostly dry, the rain was extremely important, and the shortage of water, decisive. These were the times of the persistent drought, a term coined by the regime that referred to the unusual and prolonged lack of precipitation that was causing serious subsistence problems for a large part of the population. The story was so silent that it is still remembered today, although, in reality, that exceptional dry period was never experienced or at least not with the severity that the regime proclaimed.
The paleoclimatologist Mariano Barriendos has assembled an exhaustive database corresponding to centuries of precipitation and droughts. “When we analyze the figures of the 1940s, there is no evidence that an exceptional phenomenon occurred”, he points out, adding that in that decade “there were moments of less rain than normal, but also phases and places in which record data above the average”. The historian Miguel Ángel del Arco, coordinator of the book Los años del hambre: historia y memoria de la posguerra franquista (Marcial Pons), expresses himself in the same way, when he recalls that “the scientific journals of the time do not refer to a phenomenon of this type at that time”. Simply because, despite the fact that there were dry periods, there was not as extreme and prolonged a lack of rain as the regime propagated.
Despite this, “Francoism – he continues – was very effective in creating myths that have lasted over time, and this was one of them”. Del Arco has studied the famine that occurred after the Civil War – with peaks between 1939 and 1942 and another in 1946 -, a situation for which the regime offered various explanations. First it was the destruction caused by the dispute, later the international isolation and when at the end of the decade those arguments were no longer sufficient, he resorted to the stubborn drought. The regime, in short, used external factors to explain the hunger suffered by a large part of the population and chose not to take any responsibility.
Del Arco states that after the war there was not simply a situation of starvation due to circumstances against which little could be done, but a real widespread famine in large areas of Spain. “And the hunger was first of all political; it affected more the lower classes, who had given the most support to the Republic, while where food was available it was on the black market, the prices of which not everyone could afford”.
The second cause of the famine was the combination of autarky, poor economic management and the disastrous distribution of agricultural production, which in the early years of the decade, when Spain still openly supported the Axis, prioritized the export of food to the III Reich. Some estimates put the excess mortality during the hardest years of scarcity at 200,000 people.
The historian Nicolás Sesma, who has just published Ni una, ni grande, ni libre (Criticism), agrees on the existence of bad management and the importance of this factor, and adds that after the war to have a kind of agrarian counter-reform that left rural workers unprotected. This, together with the increase in labor as a result of the return of many people from the cities and the military demobilization, caused that the owners did not see the need to invest in technologies to improve productivity, since there were abundant workers available and at low cost. The error caused the production of the field to be lower than the population’s needs. Another consequence of autarchy, a strategy whose ultimate motives were less economic than ideological.
Why has the idea of ??persistent drought persisted to this day? “Each country has its obsessions – explains Sesma – and this is what happens with water policy in Spain, with a large part of its surface being rainfed”. In his opinion, first Francoism was able to convey to the population the existence of an exceptionally prolonged and severe drought whose consequences conditioned the life of the country. And after creating that collective anxiety, the regime presented itself as the architect of the solution in the form of dozens of swamps.
But both premises were false, because the lack of rain was not as important as advertised, and because many of the swamps inaugurated by Franco had actually been projected by the Republic, which in its short history had not had time to finish them The same Republic against which the dictator had risen.
