Among the added evils that the tragedy of the DANA the proliferation of hoaxes is found. And one of them has to do with the work of the Franco regime in the construction of hydraulic works, thanks to which the river channels flowed where God commanded, no one died and Spain prospered. The historical reality is a little different.
To begin with, the Caudillo’s swamps did not come out of nowhere nor were they a brilliant idea from his brilliant mind. The first dam program in Spain, in fact, dates back to 1902: the General Plan for Irrigation Canals and Swamps. In the following years, new projects were drawn up, of which only a few were executed. Decisive changes did not come until the dictatorship of Rivera’s cousin: In 1926 the famous Hydrographic Confederations were created.
In 1933, already with the Second Republic, the National Plan for Hydraulic Works was designed, focusing on the Mediterranean basin, which is the most immediate precedent of Franco’s projects. Some of its most famous programs, such as Plan Badajoz, have their embryo precisely in the Republican era. The General Public Works Plan of 1940 largely developed the previous proposals regarding hydraulic infrastructure.
The objective of all these programs was, mainly, to increase agricultural production, which was, during the first half of the 20th century, one of the pillars of the economy in an eminently agrarian country. The preamble of the 1940 Plan makes it clear: “It has always been the concern of the Public Powers to establish an irrigation system or plan to intensify, as far as possible, national agricultural production.” No ambiguity regarding purpose. Nor with respect to the precedents.
The swamps of Franco’s regime, therefore, were never conceived to regulate channels or mitigate the consequences of natural disasters, but rather with exclusively economic criteria: primarily to promote highly productive, export-oriented agriculture, on whose foreign exchange the coffers of the government depended. State. Secondly, to produce electrical energy.
The hydraulic programs of the dictatorship have several negative sides that the public tends to forget about. fandom Franco’s regime: the first, the flooded towns, which were about 500. This meant the displacement of tens of thousands of people, expelled from places where their ancestors had lived for generations. The trauma it caused was intense and long-lasting.
Nor can we forget that a good part of the works were built thanks to practically free labor: political prisoners who redeemed their punishment in the construction of infrastructure. They almost always did so in terrible conditions, both working and living, which were extended to their families, often condemned to survive in miserable huts around the construction sites.
There is also another factor that is rarely taken into account. Franco’s reason for building dams is often taken as good: to end misery in the countryside and provide a solution to the “persistent drought.” However, improving the lives of the poor peasantry never represented the regime’s main goal. The historian Antonio Cazorla shows this with irrefutable documentation in his recent book Franco’s Towns.
Irrigation, fed by colossal hydraulic works, was the priority concern in Franco’s agrarian policy for the reasons indicated above. And who did they benefit? To lifelong landowners. The large landowners, mostly absentee, saw their assets increase exponentially without any expense on their part: either because the State expropriated their land, paying them well above the market price, or because the dryland farms became irrigated. and therefore much more productive and valuable.
Who did not benefit the hydraulic works? To the peasantry. Despite Franco’s propaganda, the colonization programs only impacted a small percentage of the rural population, who also had to pay the State for new houses and land – in installments that lasted for decades. The rest emigrated en masse. Neither irrigation nor colonization prevented the rural exodus from emptying the countryside.
A perfect plan, then: reservoirs built at the expense of the State with semi-slave labor to irrigate the lands of the lords cultivated by agricultural workers with poverty wages. Neofeudalism. That was the Spain of the 1950s and, if the same people who spread hoaxes about Franco’s swamps win, it could be the Spain of the future.
#truth #Francos #reservoirs
