Chapter 2
During the months that followed the failure of the coup d’état some democratic politicians and journalists frequently repeated that the coup had triumphed, or at least that it hadn’t entirely failed. It was a figure of speech, a way of pointing up what they considered a shrinking of democracy after 23 February. The coup did not triumph, it didn’t even triumph in part, but in the short term some of the golpistas’ political objectives seemed to be fulfilled.
What in theory was the golpistas’ fundamental political objective? For Armada, for Cortina, for those who thought like Armada and Cortina — not for Milans or for Tejero or for those who thought like Milans and Tejero, who were undoubtedly the majority of the golpistas — the fundamental political objective of 23 February consisted of protecting the monarchy, rooting it in Spain and correcting or trimming or shrinking a democracy that in their judgement constituted a threat to it. To achieve this fundamental objective they had to achieve another fundamental objective: put a stop to the political career of Adolfo Suárez, who was mainly responsible for the state of affairs; then they had to put a stop to that state of affairs: they had to put a stop to the risk of a hard-core, anti-monarchist coup, had to put a stop to terrorism, had to put a stop to the Estado de las Autonomías or put it in brackets or humble its pretensions and consolidate national feelings, had to put a stop to the economic crisis, had to put a stop to international policies that irritated the United States because they were distancing Spain from the Western bloc, had to narrow the space for tolerance in all areas, had to teach the political class a lesson and had to give the country back its lost confidence. Those were in theory, I insist, the objectives of 23 February. In the months after the coup — while the country tried to take in what had happened, awaiting the golpistas’ trial with more scepticism than fear, and while the government and the opposition practised the politics of pacification with the military and certain politicians and many journalists denounced the reality of a democracy watched over by the Army — some of them were immediately fulfilled. Adolfo Suárez’s political career ended on 23 February, just as he carried out his last truly political act by remaining seated while the bullets whizzed around the chamber of the Cortes: without the coup Suárez might have had some chance to return to power; with the coup he had none: perhaps we can admire heroes, perhaps we can even admire heroes of the retreat, but we don’t want them to govern us, so after 23 February Suárez was nothing more than a survivor of himself, a posthumous politician. After the coup d’état all official offices, every municipal balcony, all the party headquarters and all the autonomous-government assemblies suddenly bloomed with national flags, and all the jails filled with common criminals. The coup d’état, it has often been said, was the most efficient vaccination against another coup d’état, and it’s true: after 23 February Leopoldo Calvo Sotelo’s government invested billions in modernizing the Armed Forces and carried out a far-reaching purge — replaced the Joint Chiefs of Staff en masse, retired the most Francoist generals, rejuvenated the command structure, strictly controlled promotions and remodelled the intelligence services — and, although after 1981 there were still several attempts at military rebellion, the truth is they were organized by an ever more eccentric and isolated minority, because 23 February not only discredited the
golpistas in the eyes of society, but also in the eyes of their own comrades-in-arms, thus hastening the end of a two-century tradition of military coups. Barely three months after 23 February, the government signed the NATO accession treaty that Suárez refused to sign for years, which reassured the United States, contributed to civilizing the Army by putting it in contact with democratic armies and embedded the country firmly in the Western bloc. A short time later, at the beginning of June, the government, businessmen and trade unions, with the support of politicians from the other parties and a similar intention to that behind the Moncloa Pact, signed a National Employment Accord, which halted the daily destruction of thousands of jobs, reduced inflation and meant the start of a series of changes that heralded the beginning of the economic recovery of the mid-1980s. And a month and a half later the government and the opposition, amid howls of protests from the nationalists, signed the so-called LOAPA, an organic law defending the need to rationalize the autonomous powers of the regions that tried to put the brakes on the decentralization of the state. The terrorists did not stop killing, of course, but it’s a fact that after the coup the attitude of the country changed towards them, the left did its best to wrest away the alibis it’d allowed them, the Armed Forces began to notice the solidarity of civil society and the governments began to fight against ETA with instruments Suárez never dared use: in March 1981 Calvo Sotelo authorized the Army’s intervention in the anti-terrorist struggle on land and maritime borders, and just two years later, recently arrived in power, the Socialists created GAL, a group of state-financed mercenaries who began a campaign of kidnapping and assassinating terrorists in the south of France. The greater social belligerence against terrorism was just one aspect of a wider social change. Seventeen and a half hours of humiliation in the chamber of Parliament amounted to a sufficient corrective for the political class, who seemed to find a sudden forced maturity, shelved for a time their furious inter-party rows and the furious greed for power that had served to create the placenta of the coup, stopped speculating with shady operations of constitutional engineering and did not mention again caretaker or interim or salvation or unity governments or involving the Army in any way; no less tough was the lesson for the majority of the country, which had passively accepted Francoism, had been excited at first by democracy and then seemed disillusioned: the disenchantment vanished overnight and everyone seemed to rediscover with enthusiasm how good liberty was, and maybe the best proof is that a year and a half after the coup an unknown majority of Spaniards decided there would be no real reconciliation until the heirs of the losers of the war governed again, permitting a rotation of power that ended up consolidating democracy and the monarchy. This is another secondary effect difficult not to credit, at least partially, to 23 February’s account: at the beginning of 1981 it was still difficult to imagine the Socialist Party governing Spain, but in October of the following year it came to power with ten million votes and all the congratulations of the monarchy, the Army, businessmen and bankers, journalists, Rome and Washington.