Javier Cercas - The Anatomy of a Moment

At the beginning of September 1976, when he was Chief of the Army General Staff and just a few days before Adolfo Suárez brought him into politics by naming him Deputy Prime Minister of his first government, General Gutiérrez Mellado was one of the military officers most respected by his comrades-in-arms; only a few months later he was one of the most hated. There was no lack of people who attributed this sudden change to the errors of Gutiérrez Mellado’s military policies; it’s quite probable that there were errors, but it’s beyond doubt that, had there not been, the result would have been the same: for the Army — for the majority in the Army, stonily entrenched in the mentality of Francoism — Gutiérrez Mellado’s error was his unconditional support for Adolfo Suárez’s democratic reforms and his role as the Prime Minister’s military lightning rod and guarantor. He paid dearly for both: Gutiérrez Mellado spent the last years of his life a shadow of the proud soldier he’d once been, despised by his comrades-in-arms, trying in vain to make sense of their collective defection, admired by people whose admiration flattered him but didn’t matter much to him and rejected by people whose affection he’d done nothing but seek. He loved the Army with a passion, and the hatred he sensed from its members destroyed him; it was also the cause of the drastic metamorphosis he underwent during his brief political career: at the beginning of the 1970s, when he found himself assigned to the High Command General Staff at the orders of General Manuel Díez Alegría — a liberal officer with enlightened touches of whom he considered himself a disciple from then on — Gutiérrez Mellado was a serious, cordial, calm and open-minded man; less than a decade later, when he left government after 23 February, he’d turned into a surly, nervous, distrustful and irritable man, reluctant to take an objection or criticism patiently. Politics crushed him: although in the 1970s he’d developed a strong vocation for politics — in part as a result of his contacts with military commanders from democratic countries, who had persuaded him of the Spanish Army’s inefficiency, of the third-world anachronism of the role of guardian it played in the country and of his own capacity to carry out a reform that could not be postponed — he was not prepared for politics; although the military reform he drove through meant the modernization of an antiquated, needy, archaic, outsized and inoperative army, the political reform, the intransigence of his comrades and his own errors ended up hiding it; although his main aim was to divorce the Army from politics (‘One is either in politics and leaves the military, or one is in the military and leaves politics,’ he said), he did not manage to get his comrades-in-arms to accept a separation he applied first of all to himself, requesting his transfer to the reserves and becoming a retired general, nor did he manage to keep them from accusing him of still being in the military while being in politics; although he had spent his life among soldiers, he didn’t seem to know the military mentality of his times, or maybe he resisted knowing it or admitting that he knew it: he never acknowledged the evidence that the majority of the Army did not accept democracy or only accepted it reluctantly; he never acknowledged the evidence that the majority of the Army resisted submitting to the civilian power embodied in the government and aspired to enjoy a broad degree of autonomy that would allow it, under the direct command of the King, to run itself in accordance with its own criteria and direct or guard the country’s course; perhaps because he’d barely exercised direct command of troops, he didn’t understand or had forgotten that in his relationship with his superiors a soldier does not want reasons, suggestions or exchanges of opinions, but orders, and that in the Army anything that is not an order runs the risk of being interpreted as a sign of weakness. These and other contradictions, that he could not avoid or reconcile — maybe because in the years he had to govern it was impossible to do so — left too many flanks open to the criticisms of those who from the start of the transition opposed the loss of the Army’s power as the guarantor of the continuity of Francoism, and in the end overwhelmed him, so before he noticed the idea had spread among his comrades that he had betrayed the Army and the nation for dirty political ambition and a desire for public prominence, and he lacked sufficient prestige and power to contradict it.

It was a Calvary that began on the afternoon of 21 September 1976, when General Gutiérrez Mellado took on the deputy premiership of Adolfo Suárez’s first government as a replacement for General Fernando de Santiago. That very morning de Santiago had threatened the Prime Minister that he’d resign if, as the Minister of Industrial Relations had announced, the left-wing trade unions were legalized; Suárez, who had inherited de Santiago from the government of his predecessor and knew that his unwavering Francoism would be an obstacle to his plans for reform, seized the opportunity and accepted his resignation (or imposed it), and as soon as de Santiago had left his office he phoned Gutiérrez Mellado and summoned him to offer him the post. He had spoken with him only on a couple of occasions, but he had no doubt that this was his man: everyone knew of his technical skill, his tolerant disposition and his modern military ideas and vocabulary, and more than a few people with influence over him — from the King to Díez Alegría himself — had recommended him as the general Suárez needed to renovate the Army. Besides, it was not the first time Suárez had offered him a ministry: when he formed his first government in July of that year the Prime Minister had proposed that he take the Internal Affairs portfolio, but Gutiérrez Mellado turned down the offer, claiming that he did not possess adequate knowledge to carry out the brief (which in itself gives the lie to the unbridled passion for power his enemies always reproached him for); now, however, he did not hesitate to accept: the Deputy Prime Minister’s office had vast powers in defence matters, and in this sphere the general did consider that he knew what had to be done and was prepared to do it. As for the political project he would carry out for the government of which he was going to be Deputy Prime Minister, it is no secret that Gutiérrez Mellado was a man of few political ideas and fundamental conservatism, so he most likely thought at that moment, as almost everyone thought, as perhaps Suárez himself thought, that the task of government would go no further than adapting the old structures of Francoism to the country’s new reality; for the same reason it’s likely that only as reality imposed its discipline and Suárez yielded to the discipline of reality that Gutiérrez Mellado finally came to understand — maybe with some confusion but when it was already too late, because he was too committed to Suárez and to what Suárez represented to go back — that the political system he was helping to construct was not essentially different from the one he’d helped to destroy half a century before, and that constructing it meant constructing a democratic army on top of Franco’s Army.

Appointing Gutiérrez Mellado Deputy Prime Minister was a brilliant move on Suárez’s part: the general’s then still intact prestige calmed the military and the far right, guaranteeing with his prominent presence in the government that the Army was controlling the reforms; it also calmed those who sought to liberalize the regime and the still illegal democratic opposition, guaranteeing with his reputation as someone who was open to change that the reforms were serious; and it calmed an immense majority of people in the country in whom the memory of the war instilled a dread of sudden shocks, guaranteeing that the reforms were going to happen in an orderly way and without violence. On the other hand, for Gutiérrez Mellado accepting Suárez’s appointment meant half-opening a breach in his military prestige, and he had barely taken up his post when the general realized that those who until then had admired or appreciated him would henceforth seize any opportunity to attack him. A gaffe by the government itself gave them the first, and the breach was open. A few days after Gutiérrez Mellado’s appointment, General de Santiago sent a communiqué to his comrades-in-arms in which he justified his resignation as Deputy Prime Minister by stating that he considered validating the legalization of the left-wing unions banned by Franco with his presence in the government to be incompatible with his soldierly honour; this declaration was applauded and supplemented by General Carlos Iniesta Cano in an article published in El Alcázar in which he deemed it dishonourable for any soldier to accept the post de Santiago had left, and accused the new Deputy Prime Minister of perjury. Determined to crush the slightest hint of military defiance, Suárez decided to punish both officers with their immediate relegation to the reserve list; the measure was fair and brave, but it was also illegal and, when the government noticed its mistake, it had no choice but to retract it, which did nothing to avert the first press campaign against the general in the far-right media, poisoning the barracks, denouncing Gutiérrez Mellado’s complicity with a government ready to bypass the law in order to humiliate the Army.