So at six in the evening on 23 February the essential elements of the coup were all ready and in the places assigned by the golpistas: six buses full of Civil Guards under the command of Lieutenant Colonel Tejero were about to leave the Motor Pool to head for the Cortes (and another under the command of Captain Muñecas was about to do so from Valdemoro); the military commanders of the region of Valencia had opened their sealed orders with Milans’ instructions and, once the units were stocked up with fuel and ammunition, the barracks prepared to open their gates; the brigade and regiment commanders of the Brunete were just leaving headquarters for their respective command posts with operational orders drawn up by Pardo Zancada and approved by Juste containing concrete instructions on their priority objectives, deployment zones and occupation and surveillance missions; though not in his office but in that of General Gabeiras — his immediate superior and Chief of the Army General Staff, who just summoned him to discuss a routine matter — General Armada waits at Army General Headquarters for the phone call from the Zarzuela. Half an hour later Lieutenant Colonel Tejero bursts into the Cortes and the coup is unleashed. The taking of the Cortes was perhaps an easier than expected success: neither the police who guarded the building nor the deputies’ bodyguards offered the least resistance to the attackers, and a few minutes after entering the chamber, when the interior as well as the exterior of the Cortes was under his control and the mood of his men was euphoric, Lieutenant Colonel Tejero telephoned Valencia euphorically to give the news to General Milans; it was an easy success, but not a complete success. Given that it was meant to be the gateway to a soft coup, Tejero’s orders were that the occupation of the Cortes should be bloodless and discreet: he was only to suspend the session of investiture of the new Prime Minister, to detain the parliamentarians and maintain order pending the Army now in revolt coming to relieve him and his Civil Guards and General Armada, giving the hostages a political exit; miraculously, Tejero managed to keep the occupation bloodless, but not discreet, and that was the first problem for the golpistas, because a hail of bullets in the Cortes broadcast live on radio to the whole country gave the scenery of a hard coup to what was meant to be a soft coup or meant to keep up the appearance of a soft coup and made it difficult for the King, the political class and the general public to willingly give in to it. It could have been much worse, of course; if, as at the beginning seemed inevitable to those who heard the shooting on the radio (not to mention those who suffered it in the chamber), as well as indiscreet the operation had been bloody, then everything would have been different: because there’s no turning back from deaths, the soft coup would have become a hard coup, and the bloodbath may have been inevitable. However, as things happened, in spite of the violence of the operation’s mise-en-scène nothing essential stood in the golpistas’ way ten minutes into the coup: after all a mise-en-scène is only a mise-en-scène and, although the shooting in the chamber would undoubtedly force certain adjustments to the plan, the reality is that the Cortes was hijacked, that General Milans had proclaimed martial law in his region and had sent forty tanks and one thousand eight hundred soldiers of the 3rd Maestrazgo Mechanized Division out onto the streets of Valencia, that the Brunete Armoured Division was in revolt and their AMX-30 tanks ready to leave the barracks and that in the Zarzuela the King was on the point of calling Army General Headquarters to speak to General Armada. If it’s true that the fate of a coup is decided in its first minutes, then it’s also true that, ten minutes after its start, the 23 February coup had triumphed.
* There are likewise indications that, along with the CESID agents, agents of the Civil Guard Information Service (SIGC) under the command of Colonel Andrés Cassinello participated in the seizure of the Cortes. According to a report by one member of that service published in the newspapers in 1991, at five o’clock on 23 February several officers and twenty Civil Guards of the Operations Group of the SIGC under the command of a lieutenant began to deploy in the Cortes and vicinity, and at five thirty had already combed the area to be sure that, when the moment came, the police in charge of the building’s security would not oppose the entry of Lieutenant Colonel Tejero and his Civil Guards. This information has never been refuted.
PART TWO. A GOLPISTA CONFRONTS THE COUP
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The frozen image shows the deserted chamber of the Congress of Deputies. Or almost deserted: in the centre of the image, leaning slightly to the right, solitary, statuesque and spectral in a desolation of empty benches, Adolfo Suárez remains seated on his blue prime minister’s bench. On his left, General Gutiérrez Mellado stands in the central semicircle, his arms hanging down at his sides, his back to the camera, looking at the six Civil Guards who shoot off their guns in silence, as if he wanted to prevent them from entering the chamber or as if he were trying to protect the body of his Prime Minister with his own body. Behind the old general, closer to the viewer, another two Civil Guards spray the chamber with submachine-gun fire while, pistol in hand, from the steps of the speakers’ rostrum, Lieutenant Colonel Tejero demands with gestures of alarm and inaudible shouted orders that his men stop the shooting that is pulverizing the instructions he has received. Above Prime Minister Suárez a few hands of hidden deputies appear between the uninterrupted red of the benches; in front of the Prime Minister, under and around a table covered with open books and a lit oil lamp, three stenographers and an usher curl up on the elaborate carpet of the central semicircle; closer, in the lower part of the image, almost blending in with the blue of the government benches, the crouching backs of a few ministers can be distinguished: a thread of crustacean shells. The whole scene is wrapped in a scant, watery, unreal light, as if it were going on inside an aquarium or as if the chamber’s only illumination came from the baroque cluster of spherical glass lampshades that hang from one wall, in the top right of the image; perhaps for this reason the whole scene also has a suggestion of a dance or a funereal family portrait and a hunger for meaning not satisfied by the elements that compose it or by the fiction of eternity that lends it its illusory stillness.