Del Arco: Spain's postwar famine was Francoist economic policy

The postwar famine was a deliberate economic policy

Miguel Ángel del Arco Blanco, professor of Contemporary History at the University of Granada, argues that the hunger that devastated Spain after the Civil War was neither a weather calamity nor an inevitable legacy of the conflict, but the result of an economic policy adopted voluntarily by the Franco regime. His collective research, gathered in the book Los años del hambre. Historia y memoria de la posguerra franquista (Marcial Pons), reconstructs a decade of hardship that for decades remained outside the official narrative. Agricultural and industrial production did not recover prewar levels until 1953, fourteen years after the end of the war.

What the famine of the Francoist postwar years was

The cost of living soared while wages remained frozen. Del Arco describes a period in which the poorest, many of them identified with the political programme of the Republic, abandoned their dreams and their ideology to focus on getting food. Social protest, the historian recalls, was classified as a crime against the fatherland. The regime not only failed to correct the scarcity: it managed it.

The case of the poet Miguel Hernández stands as a paradigmatic portrait of those years. Imprisoned and sentenced by a military court for his political ideas, he died in prison amid overcrowding, appalling hygiene and meagre food. His punishment was not limited to the loss of freedom.

Hunger diseases in Extremadura and the south

Researchers Sergio Riesco and Francisco Rodríguez document the collapse of agricultural production in Extremadura. Secret reports by the British Foreign Office, based on medical commissions of the Dirección General de Sanidad (Spain's health authority), detailed high numbers of pellagra cases — vitamin B3 deficiency caused by malnutrition — and hunger oedema. In entire towns such as Castuera, cases of listeriosis were recorded among young people of both sens aged 18 to 25, causing paralysis of the lower limbs with no possibility of later cure, brought on by eating flour made from grass peas. In Extremadura, people ate herbs cooked with salt for months on end.

The diplomatic services of England, the United States and France pointed to the southern arc as the hardest-hit area: Murcia, all of Andalusia, Extremadura and the southernmost provinces of Castilla-La Mancha.

The black market and prostitution in Queipo's Seville

Rúben Leitão Serém describes how widespread poverty fuelled a black market controlled by the Seville oligarchy. The city, which had ceased to be the administrative capital of rebel Spain, became the country's prostitution hub, with more than a hundred brothels fed by a human trafficking network reaching as far as North Africa and preying on poor working-class women.

The propaganda that erased the regime's responsibility

Despite the hardship, Francoism scored a resounding success with its propaganda apparatus. Most of the testimonies collected embrace the regime's explanations and hide what peine, including the dictatorship's responsibility. That erasure explains why for decades only the images from films such as Los santos inocentes or novels such as Tiempo de silencio and Si te dicen que caí remained, along with figures invented by the regime itself.

The controversy is not limited to historiography. In the public arena, there has been debate over the commission given by the Secretary of State for Democratic Memory, Fernando Martínez López, to Del Arco himself to assess whether a Falange Española demonstration on 20 November abusa the Ley de Memoria Democrática (Spain's Democratic Memory Law), coinciding with the fact that his department had employed the daughter of that same Secretary of State. Some argue that the international isolation after 1945, promoted by the Republican government in exile, worsened the scarcity; against that thesis stands the fact that autarky and the control of prices and rationing were sovereign decisions of the regime, not external impositions.

On this basis, the likely course is for the academic debate to keep moving towards the study of the real mortality from malnutrition, although the politicisation of the issue and the lack of reliable statistical series suggest that definitive figures will take a long time to be settled.