* The word of the moment is disenchantment; if it made its fortune as a description of the time it’s because it reflected a reality: in the second half of 1976, shortly after Suárez came to power, 78 per cent of Spaniards preferred political decisions to be made by representatives elected by the people, and in 1978, the year the Constitution was approved, 77 per cent defined themselves as unconditional democrats; but, according to the Metroscopia Institute, in 1980 barely half of Spaniards preferred democracy over any other form of government: the rest had doubts or didn’t care, or supported a return to dictatorship.
Chapter 3
Journalists are plotting against Suárez (or Suárez feels they are plotting against him). Of course, the far-right journalists are plotting, attacking Suárez daily because they consider that destroying him equals destroying democracy. It’s true there are not many of them, but they’re important because their newspapers and magazines — El Alcázar, El Imparcial, Heraldo Español, Fuerza Nueva, Reconquista — are almost the only ones that get inside the barracks, persuading the military that the situation is even worse than it actually is and that, unless out of irresponsibility, egotism or cowardice they allow themselves to be complicit with an unworthy political class that is driving Spain to the brink, sooner or later they’ll have to intervene to save the endangered nation. The exhortations for a coup have been constant since the beginning of democracy, but since the summer of 1980 they are no longer sibylline: the 7 August issue of the weekly
Heraldo Español had an enormous white horse rearing up on the cover and a full-page headline demanding: ‘who will mount this horse? wanted: a general’; inside, a pseudonymously signed article by the journalist Fernando Latorre proposed avoiding a hard military coup by staging a soft military coup that would place a general in the premiership of a government of unity, bandied about a few names — among them that of General Alfonso Armada — and imperiously suggested the King should choose between two types of coup: ‘Pavía or Prim: let he who can choose.’ In the autumn and winter of 1980, but especially in the weeks before 23 February, these harangues were an everyday occurrence, especially in the newspaper El Alcázar, perhaps the most combative publication of the far right, and undoubtedly the most influentiaclass="underline" three articles were published there between the end of December and the beginning of February signed by Almendros — a pseudonym that probably disguised the reserve general Manuel Cabeza Calahorra, who in his turn collected the opinions of a group of retired generals — calling for the interruption of democracy by the Army and the King, just as the reserve general Fernando de Santiago — who five years earlier had been one of the Deputy Prime Ministers in Suárez’s first government — called for fifteen days before the coup in an article entitled ‘Extreme Situation’; there, on 24 January, the editor-in-chief of the newspaper, Antonio Izquierdo, wrote: ‘Mysterious unofficial emissaries, who claim to be well informed about everything, are going around these days communicating to well-known personalities in news and finance that “the coup is about to happen, within two months everything will be settled”’; and there, in spite of the stealth with which the coup was hatched, the night before 23 February some clued-up readers knew that the following day would be the great day: the front page of the 22 February issue of El Alcázar showed a photo three columns wide of the empty chamber of the Cortes, beneath which, as the paper had done on other occasions, a red sphere warned that the front page contained agreed information; the information could be found by joining with a straight line the point of a thick arrow pointing to the chamber (inside which could be read: ‘All ready for Monday’s session’) to the text of the article by the editor that appeared to the right of the photo; the phrase of the article the straight line pointed to gave almost the exact time Lieutenant Colonel Tejero would enter the Cortes on the following day: ‘Before the clock marks 18.30 next Monday.’ So, although it is most likely that none of the deputies present in the Cortes on the evening of 23 February knew in advance what was going to happen, at least the editor of El Alcázar and some of his contributors did know. There are four questions: who provided them with that information? Who else knew? Who knew how to interpret that front page? Who was the newspaper trying to warn?*