The Reverse Side of Franco's New Villages: Misery and Debts for Farmers

Julia Alfranca recalls that her home had neither electricity nor water in the mid-1960s. She lived in Cantalobas (Huesca), a village created by Franco's dictatorship to increase agricultural productivity. They were so poor that they used carbide lamps for lighting and went to bed early. Laundry was done in the irrigation ditch, from where they carried water for daily use. The house was so damp that some of her children fell ill.

Julia and her family were settlers in a newly created village by the National Institute of Colonisation, an organisation that aimed to lift thousands of farmers out of poverty. The project was well-intentioned: to create new settlements and irrigation areas, but soon the initiative revealed its true purpose, to finance large landowners with huge transfers of public capital, who sold part of their lands to the state at a very lucrative price. Historian Antonio Cazorla, a professor of History at Trent University in Ontario (Canada), has just published an exhaustive study on the regime's endeavour to build nearly three hundred villages and neighbourhoods, a propaganda-laden enterprise that sought to make people believe that the dictatorship was serious about the secular problems of the countryside. 'Franco's Villages' (Galaxia Gutenberg) shows how the project served to protect large landowners, without providing better living conditions for the peasantry. "At the end of the war, people working in the countryside were starving. It is estimated that each family needed to earn three or four times the 1939 salary to survive," notes Antonio Cazorla.

The book dismantles with a wealth of data the myth of the virtues of agrarian colonisation in Spain between 1939 and 1975 and reveals that the initiative strengthened the power of large landowners, already enriched during the immediate post-war years. "Until the early 1960s, more than half of Spain's wheat and oil harvest was sold on the black market, leading to huge profits. The post-war period was a great time for agrarian capital due to high product prices, low wages, and immense opportunities for corruption."

The regime settled more than 30,000 settlers, while millions of farmers continued to live in abject conditions. Neither the new population centres carried out by the National Institute of Colonisation nor the timid land redistribution measures were enough to change the social and economic structure of the Spanish countryside. To make matters worse, many settlers acquired land ownership through loans at an interest rate of 5% per annum, leaving them indebted for decades. The benefit obtained by the large landowners was very different, as they enriched themselves with these massive capital injections that favoured the expansion of irrigation. "In reality, less than 30% of the total land was expropriated. The rest, which was usually of better quality, was retained by the landowner, but now irrigated with state money, so it appreciated between 400% and 1,000% without assuming any risk."

The agrarian colonisation project failed as a means to retain population. The new owners, generally large families, managed to take root in the place with just one plot, but the second generations did not enjoy that modest privilege. "The land could not be divided because then the exploitation was unviable. In many villages, members of the second generation chose to leave, and the children no longer wanted to return to those remote places, without services, without work, and without a future. In other villages, the population was maintained due to high rural unemployment: young people stayed living in their parents' homes and survived by doing odd jobs."

The World Bank published a damning report that raised eyebrows, concluding that the implementation of irrigation was done indiscriminately and expensively. Reading the book dispels the myth of Franco as an efficient manager, concerned about the welfare of the underprivileged. "The dictator benefited from a consequence of the Civil War: the country wanted peace. And when his Minister of Economy convinced him to adopt a stabilisation plan, the economy contracted and unemployment rose, but it rebounded strongly in 1961 and growth was maintained until 1974. It was something that was not planned. In fact, the famous campaign of the 25 years of peace was not planned, there was nothing to celebrate."