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By war's end, Franco had assumed command of the country's political forces as well as its army. He took over the program and rhetoric of the Falange, a fascist party dedicated to violence and armed revolution, and vowed to build "a totalitarian instrument" that would "reinforce the hierarchic principle, exalt love of country, practice social justice and foster the well-being of the middle and working classes." Franco integrated the Falange into his Movimiento Nacional, made a secular saint of the Falange's executed leader, José Antonio Primo de Rivera, and used it to control rival political movements as well as the Falangists themselves. The Movimiento became Spain's sole legal political party and a personal instrument for carrying out Franco's policies. Franco ruthlessly set his secret police on all dissenters. The press was severely censored and intellectuals were harried. Businesses were tightly controlled, and only friends of the dictator seemed able to get the proper government licenses or escape ruinous taxes.
For nearly a quarter-century, Spaniards suffered along with the Portuguese as the most oppressed people in Western Europe. So abhorrent to Western democracies was Franco's regime that both the United Nations in 1945 and the Common Market later refused to let Spain join. A desire by the U.S. for air and submarine bases led to a military pact in 1953 that boosted Spain's standing in the international community. It did little, however, to reform Franco's cruel and backward rule.
Oppression began to ease in the early 1960s when Franco, aware that his country was missing out on Western Europe's mushrooming prosperity, gave a young group of pragmatic technocrats a chance to guide Spain's economic policies. Private industries were offered a five-year tax holiday, duty-free equipment imports, easy credit terms and attractive plant sites as incentives to set up shop in Spain's capital-starved provinces. Some 70 companies moved into the city of Valladolid within four years, bringing $75 million in investments and 8,200 new jobs. Similar boom towns sprang up throughout Spain. Tourism flourished beyond the technocrats' wildest imaginings when Spam's stern moral codes were relaxed to permit bikinis on beaches where 15 years before men had been arrested for not wearing tops. Sleepy fishing hamlets on Spain's southern coast were suddenly flanked by burgeoning glassy skylines of luxury apartments, and there was standing room only on once desolate beaches. The result for Spain was its own economic miracle—a swift switch from decaying feudal empire to industrial state. The gross national product rose from $29.3 billion in 1963 to an estimated $65 billion in 1974, and there was a corresponding increase in per capita income, from $934 in 1963 to $2,100 today.