Franco's Famine

Malnutrition, Disease and Starvation in Post-Civil War Spain

Miguel Ángel del Arco Blanco, Peter Anderson, Miguel Ángel del Arco Blanco, Peter Anderson

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781350174665
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire de l'Europe

At least 200, 000 people died from hunger or malnutrition-related diseases in Spain during the 1940s. This book provides a political explanation for the famine and brings together a broad range of academics based in Spain, the United Kingdom, the United States and Australia to achieve this. Topics include the political causes of the famine, the physical and social consequences, the ways Spaniards tried to survive, the regime's reluctance to accept international relief, the politics of cooking at a time of famine, and the memory of the famine. The volume challenges the silence and misrepresentation that still surround the famine. It reveals the reality of how people perished in Spain because the Francoist authorities instituted a policy of food self-sufficiency (or autarky ): a system of price regulation which placed restrictions on transport as well as food sales. The contributors trace the massive decline in food production which followed, the hoarding which took place on an enormous scale and the vast and deeply iniquitous black market that subsequently flourished at a time when salaries plunged to 50% below their levels in 1936: all contributing factors in the large-scale atrocity explored fully here for the first time.

Part I

Famine and malnutrition in Spain

Political and socio-economic conditions

1

The famine that ‘never’ existed

Causes of the Spanish famine

Miguel Ángel del Arco Blanco

In 2011, Spain’s Royal Academy of History (Real Academia de la Historia) published the Spanish Biographical Dictionary. The project was funded by the national government, which at the time was headed by the conservative José María Aznar. The entry for Francisco Franco flowed from the pen of Luis Suárez, a medievalist linked to the Francisco Franco National Foundation. The text failed to describe Franco as a dictator, stating, instead, that he built ‘an authoritarian regime, albeit not a totalitarian one’. It did not mention either the savage crackdown ordered by Franco against Republicans or opposition parties and even referred to some of the essential legislation enacted by the dictatorship as a ‘constitution’. A scandal erupted.¹ Many well-known historians and intellectuals voiced their objections, called for explanations and demanded a correction to these and many other fallacies contained in the book.²

Suárez served up a series of long-standing Francoist myths to legitimize Franco and his regime. Lurking among the myths stood a narrative overlooked by many of the historians and intellectuals who had denounced Suárez’s tactics: the explanation given for the ‘Years of Hunger’ (1939–52) – the post-war period marked by economic stagnation, food scarcity and poverty.³ Suárez tiptoed over this terrible period and the adoption of autarkic policies, which resulted in an economic decline followed by a very slow recovery after the end of the war. In turn, he explained this period by alluding to the destruction that took place during the Civil War (1936–9), low rainfall with poor harvests and the international isolation caused by the Second World War.

The controversy surrounding the biographical dictionary provides a vivid example of the long-raging battles over the history and the remembrance of the events in Spain during and after the Civil War. Despite the dictatorship’s one-sided narrative, research carried out since Franco’s death in 1975 has brought into question the many myths and silences perpetuated by the general’s regime. One of these silences, which until now has remained mostly ignored, surrounds the post-war famine concealed by the Franco regime which for too long has remained unchallenged. Accordingly, this chapter questions the Francoist interpretation of the Spanish post-war period that continues to shape public opinion today.⁴ The chapter first discusses the way Francoists endeavoured to explain away post-war misery and scarcity as mere hunger. It rejects the central Francoist explanations of wartime destruction, drought and international isolation. Instead, it shows that the post-war years witnessed a famine caused by the regime’s economic policy which promoted autarky in line with its ultranationalist aspirations.

Francoist explanations: War destruction, drought and international solation

Francoists manufactured a myth whereby the terrible 1940s became the aftermath of three factors for which the regime could not be held accountable: the socio-economic consequences of the Spanish Civil War; the ‘persistent drought’ over the post-war period, which resulted in a dramatic fall in production and the ensuing hunger; and the international isolation stemming from the Second World War (1939–45) and the later blockade imposed on Spain for its close relation to fascism – something which would have prevented the import of foreign goods and foodstuffs.⁵

The initial justification for the hunger and misery was the havoc caused by the Civil War. On 31 October 1939, Ramón Serrano Suñer, minister of Governance and head of the Political Council of the Falange (Franco’s political ‘movement’), delivered a speech in which he addressed the difficulties of supplying the nation. The explanation given at the time placed the blame for the destruction of the Spanish economy on ‘the criminal protraction of the war by the Reds’. The conflict had curtailed production and arable land (with a reduction of ‘more than 12 per cent in cereals and legumes’ harvested), ‘a 40 per cent reduction in rolling stock’ and road transport. This, he claimed, had generate d foreign market losses and hastened ‘industry’s collapse’. The strains of war in the enemy camp also meant that consumer needs rose ‘in recently liberated areas, with no means of supply whatsoever’.⁶ Francoists maintained similar arguments through the 1940s and into the 1950s. In 1950 the minister of Industry and Commerce, Juan Antonio Suanzes, declared unequivocally that the overall shortage and difficulties were ‘basically the outcome of the last war’.⁷

At the war’s conclusion on 1 April 1939, the victors certainly discovered a country ravaged by war and with its economy in tatters. The conflict depleted significant resources, such as the metallic reserves of the Bank of Spain and a large portion of private savings, already destroyed by the war or eaten up by inflation. The war had also caused great material damage. Nevertheless, we cannot argue that this damage ‘reached catastrophic levels’. The fishing sector remained relatively unaffected, as shown by the fact that the poorest regularly resorted to it as a source of food in place of unobtainable beef.⁸ In the agrarian sector, the impact was limited and crops harvested from trees such as olives and citrus fruits were little affected. Cattle losses (8 per cent of the national livestock population) were easy to recover, particularly because the cattle-breeding areas of the country remained largely free of fighting.⁹ Mining and industry, especially in the important Basque Country (captured by the summer of 1937) had recovered and, indeed, had increased production by the end of the war. In this the Francoists had much to thank their enemies as the Republican authorities had opted not to dismantle or sabotage industrial facilities during their retreat.¹⁰ It has been widely argued that the transport sector was the hardest hit. But some studies have questioned the figures released by the regime after the war and point out that, even if substantial losses were sustained, these could not have been large enough to prevent a recovery in the short term.¹¹

The loss of human lives, something which the regime always failed to acknowledge, significantly and badly affected the economy. Directly or indirectly, 346,000 people lost their lives because of the war. After the rebel victory in April 1939 and amid a ruthless repression by Francoist forces, 50,000 Republicans were executed.¹² Most of the war’s victims were men (76.3 per cent), and their loss led to a reduction in productivity in an economy where women had been displaced from the labour market. We should also include the purge of qualified personnel or their exile abroad, replaced by a less skilled labour force marked by extreme allegiance to the regime.¹³ The loss of human resources plays a major role in explaining the fall in production: experience and skills were all destroyed by the war and the implacable Francoist crackdown.¹⁴ The fall in production is also explained by the regime’s economic policies which, as we shall see, proved decisive in producing the deterioration in living conditions.

The dictatorship presented the notion of the persistent drought (‘pertinaz sequía’) as one of its prime explanations for the decrease in both agricultural and electricity production (in a country that made great use of hydro-electricity). The claim appeared first in the official press and especially in the mid-1940s. In both newspapers and in General Franco’s speeches the allusions to drought appear again and again through the 1940s, although the droughts that did occur took place only in 1945–6 and in 1948–9.¹⁵

How convincing is drought as an explanation? A drought can be defined as ‘a range of abnormally dry weather conditions, which result in serious hydrological resource deficits and crop losses’. The World Meteorological Organization relates the onset of droughts to the development of rainfall 60 per cent lower than normal over more than two consecutive years.¹⁶ It is difficult to determine the periods of drought during the 1940s: first, because it is characteristic of the Mediterranean climate and prevalent in m ost of the Iberian Peninsula; second, we are unable to call on overall national data, since the network of meteorological observatories became established only through the 1940s; third, droughts were not evenly distributed throughout the peninsula, despite commonly affecting large swathes of that territory.

Nevertheless, several studies demonstrate that it is not possible to speak of a sustained drought in the 1940s. A number of scholars close to the Franco regime published research in which they drew attention particularly to 1945, when rainfall decreased, affecting the following year’s crops.¹⁷ Another study even assessed humidity, appraising the tentative evapotranspiration for different agricultural regions and years, and confirming that the worst years were 1944–5 and 1948–9, when the peninsular south and centre endured an arid and semi-arid climate, respectively.¹⁸ More recent studies reveal that there could have, indeed, been some years of drought during the post-war period (particularly in 1944–5 and, to a lesser extent, in the period between 1948 and 1950), but whose consequences were greatly exaggerated.¹⁹

These ideas are confirmed when interpreting the data related to the entire twentieth century (Figure 1.1). We can observe a variability in precipitation and the inherent dryness of the Mediterranean climate. If we compare the 1940s with other decades, we notice that the simple moving average (SMA) is greater than in the 1920s or 1930s. In fact, it is in the 1950s when rainfall decreases. In the post-war period, there were years that equalled or surpassed the mean rainfall of a given decade (1939–43, 1947 and 1951), and there were periods in which precipitation was particularly low (1944–5, and, to a lesser degree, 1949–50).²⁰ Therefore, the characteristic dryness of the Mediterranean climate and the specific drought of some years are not enough to justify whatsoever the fall in production and the food crisis of the 1940s (and neither the initial phase of the famine, from 1939 to 1942, nor the scarcity experienced throughout the entire decade). However, the drought that occurred in the middle of the decade, along with the policies implemented by the regime, would, indeed, contribute to the retu...