Watered Milk

Generalissimo Francisco Franco was good & mad, according to reports seeping from his Madrid palace. Why, he angrily demanded of his advisers, had they kept him ignorant of the people's impatience over the soaring cost of living? The Barcelona protest strike (TIME, March 19) had come as a shock. The dictator's underlings lamely explained that they had not bothered him with details because they had hoped to clear the situation up before news of it reached his ears.

At daily meetings with his ministers, Franco labored to set things aright. The government decided to take over the rice crop and sell it at a fixed price; price ceilings were put on dried beans, peas, lentils (the four Spanish food staples); and price "supervision" was decreed for fish, vegetables, fruit and milk. The emergency outburst of economic controls had most Spaniards shaking their heads skeptically. If Franco looked at the record, they said, he would see that past attempts at price fixing shuttled scarce goods into the high-priced black market. And the black market reached into Franco's bureaucracy.

Madrid's Mayor Moreno Torres gave an example of the regime's difficulties. The capital's milk distributors, he said, were selling 40% more milk than was brought into the city each day. The mayor's theory: water had been added to the milk. Apparently, he had been unwilling, or unable, to do anything about it.

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