In the 1940s, in the midst of the post-war period, hunger became a major concern for important sections of the population in the face of poverty, rising prices and the omnipresence of the black market. The Franco regime attributed the bad situation to the weather, since in a country that was still eminently rural and mostly dry, rain was extremely important and the scarcity of water was decisive. These were the times of the “persistent drought,” a term coined by the regime that referred to the unusual and prolonged lack of rainfall that was causing serious subsistence problems for a large part of the population. The story resonated so much that it is still remembered today, although, in reality, that exceptional dry period never occurred or at least not with the severity that the regime proclaimed.
Paleoclimatologist Mariano Barriendos has assembled an exhaustive database corresponding to centuries of rainfall and droughts. “When we analyze the figures for the 1940s, there is no evidence that an exceptional phenomenon occurred,” he points out, adding that in that decade “there were times of less rain than normal, but it is also true that there were phases and places where data above the average was recorded.”
The historian Miguel Ángel del Arco, coordinator of the book The Years of Hunger: History and Memory of the Post-Franco War (Marcial Pons), expresses himself in the same sense, recalling that “the scientific journals of the time do not refer to a phenomenon of that guy at that time.” Simply because, although there were dry periods, there was no shortage of rain as extreme and prolonged as the regime reported.
However, “Francoism – he continues – was very effective in creating myths that have lasted over time, and one of them was this one.” Del Arco has studied the hunger 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 there was the destruction caused by the conflict, later the international isolation and, when, at the end of the decade, these arguments were no longer enough, the “persistent drought” recurred. The regime, in short, used external factors to explain the hunger suffered by a large part of the population and chose not to assume any responsibility.
Del Arco maintains that after the war there was not simply a situation of hunger due to circumstances against which little could be done, but rather a true generalized famine in large areas of Spain. “And the famine was first of all political; “It affected the lower classes the most, who were the ones who had supported the Republic the most, while where food was available was on the black market, the prices of which not everyone could pay.”
The second cause of hunger was the combination of autarky, poor economic management and the disastrous distribution of agricultural production, which in the first years of the decade, when Spain still openly supported the Axis, prioritized the export of food to the Third Reich. . Some estimates put the excess mortality during the harshest years of hardship at 200,000 people.
The historian Nicolás Sesma, who has just published Ni una, ni grande, ni libre (Crítica), agrees on the existence of poor management and the importance of this factor, and adds that after the war there was a kind of agrarian counter-reform that It left farm 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 the owners to not see it necessary to invest in technologies to improve productivity, since there were abundant workers available and at low cost.
This error caused the field’s production to be lower than the needs of the population. One more consequence of autarky, a strategy whose ultimate motives were both economic and ideological.
Why has the idea of ??“persistent drought” persisted to this day? “Each country has its obsessions – explains Sesma – and that is what happens with water policy in Spain, with a large part of its dryland surface.” In his opinion, first the Franco regime managed to convey to the population the existence of an exceptionally long and serious drought whose consequences conditioned the life of the country. And after artificially creating this collective anxiety, the regime presented itself as the architect of its 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 designed by the Republic, which in its short history had not had time to finish them. The same Republic against which the dictator had risen
