* I don’t have answers for these questions, but I do have some speculations. The newspaper probably obtained the information from General Milans del Bosch, who the next day would rebel against the government in Valencia, or from one of Milans del Bosch’s direct collaborators, or, more likely, from Juan García Carrés, former head of the vertical trade unions of the Franco era who in the months leading up to the coup acted as liaison between Milans del Bosch and Tejero: Milans del Bosch and García Carrés both maintained close links with El Alcázar. José Antonio Girón de Velasco, leader of a sector of the far right, president of the Confederation of Combatants and close friend of García Carrés, would probably likewise have known; also, generals in the reserves linked to Cabeza Calahorra and Fernando de Santiago and former Francoist ministers linked to Girón de Velasco, but not the far-right parliamentarian who had a seat in the Cortes: the leader of Fuerza Nueva, Blas Pi
ar. Undoubtedly more people knew, but not many more. In any case, this is especially fertile ground for fantasy or, indeed, for hallucination: on 5 February Manuel Fraga, leader of the right-wing party Alianza Popular, writes in his diary: ‘Rumours everywhere [. .]. A clairvoyant mentions a coup for the 24th’; on the 13th the police receive a report from an informer who is about to be fired for his lack of credibility that announces a coup for the 23rd; Spic, a monthly commercial aviation journal devoted to leisure and tourism, goes on sale on the 18th; one of the articles, signed by its editor, says: ‘It is not true that I intend to launch a coup on Monday 23 February. . besides, I don’t know (además no sé)’ (further hallucination: the word además contains 6 letters; the word no 2; the word sé another 2; result: 6.22, almost exactly the time Lieutenant Colonel Tejero bursts into the Cortes). It is important to say that on the 5th, on the 13th and even on the 18th the date and time of the coup had still not been fixed.
Chapter 4
Bankers and businessmen are also plotting against Suárez (or Suárez feels they’re plotting against him) as well as the right-wing party that the bankers and businessmen back: Alianza Popular. It has not always been like this: businessmen and bankers have not always backed the party of the right, or they haven’t always done so with as much enthusiasm. Although it is likely that deep down they despised Suárez since he came to power (and not only because they considered him ignorant of economic matters), the fact is that at the beginning of his mandate bankers and businessmen supported the new Prime Minister unreservedly because they understood that supporting him was supporting the monarchy and because the monarchy convinced them that this likeable nonentity, who had started out as an errand boy in the Movimiento edifice and knew it like the back of his hand after having swept every last corner of the place, was the ideal foreman to direct the demolition job of an obsolete architecture that for forty years had been of great use to them but now was hindering their business and embarrassing them before their European colleagues. Suárez came through: he carried out the task successfully; once completed, however, he should go: this was the opinion of the majority of bankers and businessmen. But Suárez didn’t go; on the contrary: what happened was that the errand boy promoted to foreman fancied himself an architect and began to erect the brand-new edifice of democracy on the razed site of the edifice of the dictatorship. That’s where the problem started: after years of seeking their approval, emboldened by the repeated endorsement of votes Suárez began to give them the brush-off, to refuse their advice and pats on the back, avoid them or ignore them or snub them or make gestures that they interpreted as snubs, and ended up not receiving them at Moncloa or taking their calls and not even acknowledging the warning and lessons with which they tried to return him to the fold. That’s how they discovered to their cost something they’d suspected from the start, which was that the formerly obliging errand boy was concealing one of those cocky provincial upstarts who nurse like a grudge the dream of facing up to the strongest men in the capital. That was also how they discovered, as they noticed anxiously that business was getting worse and worse, the belated or improvised social democratic vocation afflicting Suárez and to which they indistinctly attributed his incapacity to rid himself of his upbringing as a young Falangist with the revolution pending, his eagerness to emulate Felipe González, the brilliant young Socialist leader, and his obsession with acquiring the credentials of democratic purity the approval of the newspaper El País could bestow. And that was how, over the course of 1980, they decided Suárez’s policies were definitely doing nothing but making the economic crisis worse and tearing the state to pieces; they likewise decided that this plebeian was practising the premiership fraudulently, because his power came from the right, who had voted for him and who had supported him for four years, but he was governing for the left. The conclusion came swiftly: the erroneous premiership of this illicit, insolent upstart must be ended by whatever means necessary. From there in the autumn and winter before the coup bankers and businessmen boosted the nightmare of a country rushing towards catastrophe, they backed any and every political operation against Suárez’s government that the right came up with and injected daily doses of disquiet into the disquiet of the most conservative sectors of the party that propped up government, with the aim of dismembering it, uniting the deserters with the minority Alianza Popular and forming with them a new government led by a politician or an independent technocrat or a high-ranking military officer, a coalition or interim or unity government, in any case a strong government underpinned by a new parliamentary majority. Because they must re-establish the natural order of things shattered by Suárez, and they called this majority the natural majority; since the natural leader of this natural majority could only be the leader of the Alianza Popular, the businessmen and bankers turned Manuel Fraga into their leader.
In the autumn and winter of 1980 that Fraga should be plotting against Suárez (or that Suárez should feel that Fraga was plotting against him) was an almost unavoidable fact, obeying not just political logic: after all, almost no one had more powerful reasons than Fraga to consider Suárez a usurper. Fraga had been the dictatorship’s wunderkind, for years he had sat in Franco’s Cabinet meetings and at the beginning of the 1970s, with a superficial liberal plating, he seemed to be the man chosen by history to lead post-Francoism, understanding such a thing to be a reformed Francoism that stretched the limits of Francoism without breaking it, which was what Fraga understood. No one had ever denied he had the intellectual capacity to carry out this labour. The anecdote is very famous: trying to flatter the leader of Alianza Popular and humiliate Suárez, during the debate of the no-confidence motion tabled against him in May 1980, Felipe González declared from the speakers’ rostrum in the Cortes that Fraga could fit the state inside his head; if the metaphor is valid, then it’s also incomplete: if it’s true that Fraga could fit the state inside his head, then it’s also true that there was absolutely no room for anything else in there. In this sense, as in almost all of them, Fraga was the antithesis of Suárez: honours student, exam ace, prolific writer, during the years of the regime change Fraga was a politician who gave the impression of knowing everything and not understanding anything, or at least not understanding what needed to be understood, and that is that the limits of Francoism could not be stretched without breaking because Francoism was unreformable, or was only reformable if the reform consisted precisely in breaking it; this dramatic intellectual weakness — added to his genetic authoritarianism, his lack of cunning, the distrust he’d inspired for no reason in powerful sectors of the Franco regime since the late 1960s, and his lack of personal harmony with the monarch — explains why the Prime Minister chosen by the King to direct the regime change was not the predicted Fraga but the unexpected Suárez, and in later years Fraga’s intimidating manner and political roughness as well as the strategic intelligence of Suárez (who at that time gave the impression of understanding everything or at least understanding what needed to be understood, even if he didn’t know anything) diminished his space until the theoretical liberal of the early 1970s ended up confined in the corner of the reactionaries and condemned to give vent to his frustrated ambitions by dragging a string of Francoist diplodocuses across a desolate stony wasteland. In the months before the coup, however, the tables have turned: while Suárez sinks down understanding nothing, Fraga seems to be on top of the world, as if he knows and understands everything; although his power in the Cortes continues to be scant, because the laboriously moderate coalition with which he’d stood in the last elections has barely a handful of seats, his public image is no longer that of someone incurably nostalgic for Francoism: they miss him in the Royal Household, where for years he had a loyal ally in General Alfonso Armada; his relations with the Army and the Church couldn’t be better; the same businessmen and bankers who used to exclude him flatter him and prominent figures from Suárez’s party pursue him, as they’ve now chosen him as their true leader and plan with him the best way to bring down the government and put in its place a coalition or interim or caretaker or national unity government, anything except letting Suárez remain in power and completely ruin the country. Anything includes a coalition or interim or caretaker or unity government led by a soldier; if that soldier is his friend Alfonso Armada, so much the better. Like so many people in those days, perhaps more than anybody in those days, Fraga, who is aware that he is a political reference point for many in the military with golpista instincts, weighs up the possibility: his diaries of the time abound in notes about dinners with politicians and officers where it’s considered; many outstanding members of Alianza Popular, such as Juan de Arespacochaga, former Mayor of Madrid, approve unreservedly; according to Arespacochaga, many members of the Party executive do as well. While he’s meeting every second day with leading figures of Suárez’s party, including his parliamentary spokesman, Fraga doubts, but he does not doubt that they have to somehow get rid of the subordinate who four years earlier, owing to the King’s error or whim, got in the way of his prime ministerial destiny: before the summer he’d worried the country with the warning that ‘if steps are not taken, the coup will be inevitable’; on 19 February, four days before the coup, he warned in the Cortes: ‘If a touch on the rudder is wanted, the change of direction we all know necessary, we’ll be found ready to collaborate. And if not, not [. .] The boat must be brought into dry dock and the hull and engine thoroughly revised.’ Suárez has not done the political transition well, and the moment has come to trim it or rectify it: that was exactly the objective of 23 February. Touch on the rudder, surgical coup, change of direction: that was exactly the terminology of the placenta of the coup. Otherwise, during the evening and night of 23 February the businessmen and bankers kept silent, not condemning or approving the coup, like almost everyone else, and only towards two in the morning, when the failure of the military uprising seemed sure after the King spoke against it on television, the director of the CEOE (the Confederation of Spanish Business Organizations), pressured by the head of the provisional government, finally resolved to publicly condemn the seizure of the Cortes and proclaim his respect for the Constitution. The political parties, and among them Alianza Popular, did not do so until seven in the morning.