The great blackmarketeers. Images, deformations and silences in the propaganda, cinema and novels of the Francoist post-war

Abstract

The autarkic policy of the Franco regime led to the emergence of the black market, price inflation and food shortages that brought famine to the country after 1939. However, there were some beneficiaries: the big black marketers. They were people related to the regime or belonging to it, who enjoyed the tolerance of the authorities and had enough contacts to carry out their businesses with impunity. The regime propaganda depicted them in a distorted
way. This work aims to reflect on the narratives that the Franco regime built on the black
marketers. For this purpose, we analyse propaganda, cinema and novels of post-war years. In
all these sources, an image of the black marketers was built as bad patriots, linked with the
republican past and identified with the common population, completely confusing different
phenomena such as the small and the big black market. Those images were nothing more
than a deformation of reality, which hid palpable silences about who were responsible for these
succulent businesses and how close they were to the spheres of influence of the “New State”.