Tejero understood it quite welclass="underline" it’s not just that the three protagonists of the coup were profoundly different and were acting on different political and personal motivations; it’s that each of them was pursuing a different coup and on the night of 23 February the two generals were trying to make use of the coup conceived by the lieutenant colonel in order to impose their own: Tejero was against democracy and against the monarchy and his coup was essentially meant to be a coup similar in content to the coup that in 1936 tried to overthrow the Republic and provoked the war and then Francoism; Milans was against democracy, but not against the monarchy, and his coup was essentially meant to be a coup similar in form and content to the coup that in 1923 overthrew the parliamentary monarchy and installed the monarchist dictatorship of Primo de Rivera, that is a military pronunciamiento to return to the King the powers he’d handed over by sanctioning the Constitution and, maybe after an intermediate phase, to lead to a military junta that would serve as a means of support to the Crown; finally, Armada was not against the monarchy nor (at least in a frontal or explicit way) against democracy, but only against the democracy of 1981 or against the democracy of Adolfo Suárez, and essentially his coup was meant to be a coup similar in form to the coup that led General de Gaulle to the presidency of the French Republic in 1958 and in content a sort of palace coup that should allow him to play with more authority than ever his role as the King’s right-hand man, turning him into the Prime Minister of a coalition or caretaker or unity government with the mission of reducing democracy to the point of turning it into a semi-democracy or a substitute for democracy. The 23 February coup was an extraordinary coup because it was a single coup and three different coups in one: before 23 February Armada, Milans and Tejero believed their coup was the same one, and this belief allowed the coup to happen; during the course of 23 February Armada, Milans and Tejero discovered that their coup was in reality three different coups, and this discovery provoked the failure of the coup. That’s what happened, at least from the political point of view; from the personal point of view what happened was even more extraordinary: Armada, Milans and Tejero staged in a single coup three different coups against three different men or against what three different men personified for them, and those three men — Suárez, Gutiérrez Mellado and Carrillo: the three men who’d carried the weight of the transition, the three men who had staked the most on democracy, the three men who had most to lose if democracy were destroyed — were precisely the only three politicians present in the Cortes who showed themselves willing to risk their necks by facing up to the golpistas. This triple symmetry also forms a strange figure, maybe the strangest figure of all the strange figures of 23 February, and the most perfect, as if its form were suggesting a significance that we were incapable of grasping, but without which it’s impossible to grasp the significance of 23 February.
Chapter 4
They were three traitors; I mean: for those to whom they owed loyalty through family ties, social class, beliefs, ideas, vocation, history, common interest or simple gratitude, Adolfo Suárez, Gutiérrez Mellado and Santiago Carrillo were three traitors. Not just to them; they were for many more people, and in a certain sense they are objectively: Santiago Carrillo betrayed the ideals of Communism by undermining its revolutionary ideology and placing it on the threshold of democratic socialism, and betrayed forty years of anti-Francoist struggle by declining to see justice done to those responsible for and complicit in Francoist injustice and forcing his party to make real, symbolic and sentimental concessions imposed by his pragmatism and by his lifelong pact with Adolfo Suárez; Gutiérrez Mellado betrayed Franco, betrayed Franco’s Army, betrayed the Army of the Victory and its radiant utopia of order, brotherhood and harmony regulated by reveilles under the radiant rule of God; Suárez was the worst, the total traitor, because his treason made possible the treason of the others: he betrayed the single fascist party in which he’d been raised and to which he owed all that he was, he betrayed the political principles he’d sworn to defend, he betrayed the Francoist leaders and barons who trusted him to prolong Francoism and he betrayed the military with his veiled promises to keep the Anti-Spain in check. In their way, Armada, Milans and Tejero could imagine themselves as classical heroes, champions of an ideal of triumph and conquest, paladins of loyalty to clear, immovable principles who aspired to reach fulfilment by imposing their positions; Suárez, Gutiérrez Mellado and Carrillo gave up doing so from the moment they began their task of retreat and demolition and dismantling and sought fulfilment by abandoning their positions, undermining themselves unknowingly. The three of them committed political and personal errors during the course of their lives, but that brave renunciation defines them. Deep down Milans was right (as were the ultraright-wingers and ultraleft-wingers of the day): in the Spain of the 1970s the word reconciliation was a euphemism for the word treason, because there was no reconciliation without treason or at least without some betrayal. Suárez, Gutiérrez Mellado and Carrillo betrayed more than anyone, and therefore were often called traitors. In a certain sense they were: they betrayed their loyalty to an error in order to construct their loyalty to a truth; they betrayed their own people in order not to betray themselves; they betrayed the past in order not to betray the present. Sometimes you can be loyal to the present only by betraying the past. Sometimes treason is more difficult than loyalty. Sometimes loyalty is a form of courage, but other times it is a form of cowardice. Sometimes loyalty is a form of betrayal and betrayal is a form of loyalty. Maybe we don’t know exactly what loyalty is or what betrayal is. We have an ethics of loyalty, but we don’t have an ethics of betrayal. We need an ethics of betrayal. The hero of retreat is a hero of betrayal.
Chapter 5
Let me recapitulate: the 23 February coup was an exclusively military coup, led by General Armada, plotted by General Armada himself, General Milans and by Lieutenant Colonel Tejero, encouraged by the Francoist far right and facilitated by a series of political manoeuvres through which a large part of the country’s ruling class intended to put an end to Adolfo Suárez’s premiership. All right then: when did it all begin? Where did it all begin? Who began it all? How did it all begin? There is no protagonist, witness or investigator of the coup who doesn’t have answers to these questions, but there are barely two identical answers. In spite of being contradictory, many of them are valid; or might be: segmenting history is an arbitrary exercise; strictly speaking, it’s impossible to pin down the exact origin of a historic event, just as it’s impossible to pin down its exact end: every event has its origins in a previous event, which originates in another previous event, which originates in another, and so on, because history is like matter and within it nothing is created or destroyed: it only transforms. General Gutiérrez Mellado said more than once that the 23 February coup originated in November 1975, at the same moment when, after being proclaimed King before the Francoist Cortes, the monarch declared that he intended to be King of all Spaniards, which meant that his aim was to bring to an end the irreconcilable two Spains that Francoism perpetuated. It is an opinion accepted by many that the coup began on 9 April 1977, when the Army felt that Suárez had deceived it by legalizing the Communist Party and had betrayed Spain by giving naturalization papers to the Anti-Spain. There are those who choose to situate the beginning of the plot in the Zarzuela Palace itself, some months later, the day when Armada found out he’d have to give up the secretariat of the Royal Household, or, better yet, some years later, when the monarch began to contribute to the political manoeuvres against Adolfo Suárez with his words and his silences and when he considered or let it be believed that he was considering the possibility of replacing the government led by Suárez with a coalition or caretaker or unity government led by a military man. Maybe the simplest or least inexact would be to go back a little bit further, just to the day at the end of the summer of 1978 when the front page of every newspaper handed Lieutenant Colonel Tejero the formula for the coup he’d been brooding on for some time by then and which would grow over the following months like a tapeworm in his brain: on 22 August that year, the Sandinista commander Edén Pastora launched an assault on the National Palace in Managua and, after holding hostage for several days more than a thousand politicians with links to the dictator Anastasio Somoza, managed to liberate a large group of Sandinista National Liberation Front political prisoners; the Nicaraguan guerrilla leader’s audacity dazzled the lieutenant colonel and, superimposed on the nineteenth-century memory of General Pavía’s Civil Guards dissolving the Parliament of the First Republic by force, catalyzed his golpista obsession and inspired first the so-called Operation Galaxia, which just a few weeks later he unsuccessfully tried to execute, and finally the 23 February coup. Perhaps with the exception of the first of them — too vague, too imprecise — any of the conjectures mentioned might serve as the origin of the coup, or at least as the starting point for explaining it. I dare to choose another, no less arbitrary but maybe more apt for what I propose to do in the pages that follow: describe the plot of the coup, an almost seamless fabric of private conversations, confidences and understandings that I can often only try to reconstruct from indirect testimonies, stretching the limits of the possible until they touch the probable and with the pattern of the plausible trying to outline the shape of the truth. Naturally, I cannot guarantee that everything I am about to tell is true; but I can guarantee that it is concocted with truth and especially that it is the closest I can get to the truth, or to imagining it.