Javier Cercas - The Anatomy of a Moment

That was the first time they called him a traitor. The second happened seven months later, when his government legalized the Communist Party, but then it was no longer just a minority in the Army who resorted to the insult. For historians the episode is central in the change from dictatorship to democracy; for researchers interested in 23 February it is one of the remote origins of the coup; for General Gutiérrez Mellado it was something else: the crossing of a line with no turning back in his personal and political life. For forty years the Communist Party had been the bête-noire of Francoism; and also of the military, who felt that forty years before they’d defeated the Communists on the battlefield and were in no way prepared to permit their return to political life. It’s likely that, when he came to power in July 1976, Suárez had no intention of legalizing the Communists, but not that he was unaware that their legalization might constitute the touchstone of his reform, because the Communists had been the main and almost sole opposition to Francoism and because a democracy without Communists would be an abbreviated democracy, perhaps internationally acceptable, but nationally insufficient. That in any case is what Suárez gradually came to understand during his first months in government and, after overcoming many doubts, what convinced him that he should make the decision to legalize the Communist Party even in the face of military opposition. It was 9 April 1977 and it was a historic jolt. In the following days, while the country began to emerge from its incredulity, the Army was on the brink of a coup d’état: except for Gutiérrez Mellado, the military ministers of the government said they learned the news from the press, the Minister for the Navy, Admiral Pita Da Veiga, resigned from his post, and the Minister for the Army, General Álvarez Arenas, called a meeting of the Senior Army Council in which insults to the government were voiced and threats made to bring the troops out onto the street, and out of which came a tough communiqué condemning the governmental decision; all the rage of the military officers converged on the Prime Minister (and, by default, on his Deputy Prime Minister): the accusations of perjury and treason were repeated and amplified; they added the accusation that he had deceived them. None of the accusations were baseless: there is no doubt that, by legalizing the Communist Party, Suárez was violating the principles of the Movimiento he had sworn to defend; furthermore, it’s true that in a certain sense he had deceived the Armed Forces.

Eight months before, on 8 September 1976, Suárez had called a meeting of the top military commanders in the Prime Minister’s office to explain to them personally the nature and reach of the political changes he was planning. Present at the meeting were members of the High Command of the three branches of the Armed Forces — more than thirty generals and admirals in total, Gutiérrez Mellado among them — and, over three hours of uninterrupted talk, Suárez displayed all his dialectical skill and all his arts of seduction to convince those present that they had nothing to fear from reforms that, as he’d said months before in front of the Francoist Cortes, were going to be limited to ‘elevating to the political category of normal what at street level is simply normal’, and which, as those who listened to him understood (and Suárez did nothing to keep them from understanding), all in all were equivalent to a sophisticated reformulation of Francoism, or to its disguised prolongation. That was the crux of Suárez’s speech; but the crucial moment of the encounter (or the one that time ended up turning into the crucial moment of the encounter) didn’t happen while Suárez was speaking, but while lavishing jokes, embraces and smiles on the little groups that gathered once he’d finished doing so. In one of them someone asked him what would happen with the Communist Party; the Prime Minister’s answer was careful but categorical: as long as it had its current statutes, it would not be legalized. The meeting broke up a short time later amid the enthusiasm and cheers of the generals (‘Prime Minister, long live the mother who bore you!’ shouted General Mateo Prada Canillas), who left the Prime Minister’s office convinced that the Communist Party would not go back to being legal in Spain and that Adolfo Suárez was a blessing for the country. Eight months later reality showed them their error. It cannot be said, however, that Suárez lied to the military that morning: on the one hand, the proviso contained within his answer to the key question (‘as long as it had its current statutes’) was a way of protecting himself against the future, and it’s true that before legalizing the Party Suárez had the guile and prudence to accommodate it by getting the PCE to modify certain aspects of their statutes; on the other hand, Suárez didn’t yet know in September of 1976 if he would legalize the Communist Party: he didn’t know it in September, or in October, or in November, or in December, or even in January, because the transition was not a process designed in advance, but a continual improvisation that took Suárez into territories in which a few months earlier he could not even have imagined he’d set foot. But it can be said that Suárez tricked the military by letting them believe until the last moment that he wouldn’t legalize the Communist Party, although only by adding immediately that he tricked almost everybody, including the Communists themselves, probably including himself. Some military men and democratic politicians have frequently reproached Suárez for this way of proceeding: for them, if the Prime Minister had warned the military in time they would have complied with his decision without rows or threats of rebellion (and in consequence wouldn’t have begun the permanent plotting that culminated in the 23 February coup attempt); the argument seems flimsy to me, if not false: the proof is that convincing a solidly anti-Communist army of the legitimacy of the Communist Party ended up being a task that took years, incompatible in any case with the speed with which Suárez introduced his reforms that was definitely one of the fundamental reasons for their success. Be that as it may, whether or not it was necessary to trick the Army and with it almost everybody else, the fact is that as soon as they found out that Suárez had legalized their eternal enemy, ignoring or forgetting what they’d been promised or what they thought they’d been promised, the generals exchanged the enthusiasm and cheers with which they’d applauded him months earlier for the virtuous indignation of those who feel themselves to be victims of the misdeeds of a renegade.

They never trusted Suárez again. Neither Suárez nor General Gutiérrez Mellado, who not only complied with his Prime Minister’s decision but also, once the Communists were legalized and the first democratic elections held in June 1977, remained as the only military officer in Suárez’s government, and from that moment on became the favoured target of attacks that deep down were not aimed at him, but at Suárez. It was a ferocious and inflexible campaign that went on for years, that meant daily attacks in the press, personal insults, retrospective slander and periodic riots, and did not exclude from its unusual virulence those who worked either closely or distantly with him. Gutiérrez Mellado survived it as well as he could, but not all his collaborators had the same luck or the same fortitude: unable to hear himself called fucking traitor or destroyer of the Army any longer, shortly after the coup d’état General Marcelo Aramendi ended his life with a pistol shot in his office at Army General Headquarters. The aggression Gutiérrez Mellado coped with was no less cruel than that which broke General Aramendi, but it was incomparably more assiduous and more publicized. They accused him of cowardice and duplicity because he hadn’t made war on them face to face and because he’d spent a great deal of his career in the intelligence services, a double accusation perhaps predictable in an army like Franco’s, in which valour, more than a virtue, was barroom rhetoric, and in which the terrible reputation of the intelligence services had been established by a phrase attributed to Franco, a phrase by which, as Gutiérrez Mellado knew first-hand, Francoism endeavoured to abide: Spies get paid, not decorated; apart from predictable and stupid, the accusation was false: although it was true that almost from the beginning his military career had been linked to espionage, Gutiérrez Mellado had not only fought with a machine gun in his hand during the 18 July uprising, but also, converted later into one of the chiefs of the fifth column in Madrid, for three years he’d risked his life in the obscurity of the Republican rearguard much more often than the majority of the braggarts who were recriminating him for having gone through the war without firing a shot. They accused him of leading the UMD — the Unión Militar Democrática or Democratic Military Union, a tiny clandestine military association that in the fading years of Francoism tried to promote the creation of a democratic regime — when the reality is that, in spite of being personally and ideologically close to some officers incorporated in it, he fought unhesitatingly against it because in his judgement it was splitting the discipline of the Armed Forces and putting their unity at risk, and that, once its members were tried and expelled from the Army, he opposed allowing them to be readmitted to their posts, which did not prevent him from often interceding to stop the persecution his comrades unleashed against them (though not against the members of other also clandestine associations, such as the Unión Militar Patriótica or Patriotic Military Union, that advocated the prolongation of Francoism and at that time were perfectly at ease in the Army). They accused him of wanting to demilitarize the Civil Guard — something that started a campaign of newspaper articles, collections of signatures and public festivities in which Lieutenant Colonel Tejero took a spirited part — when the reality is that he was only trying to improve the corps’ efficiency, without stripping it of military allegiance, by putting its public order and security functions under the auspices of the Ministry of the Interior. They accused him of wanting to pervert, revoke or crush Army ethics with his reform of Carlos III’s Royal Ordinances — the code that had ruled military morality since passed by the Earl of Aranda in 1787 — when the reality is that he was just trying to adapt the institution’s ultraconservative ethics to the ethics of the twentieth century, permeating them with the lay and liberal values of democratic society. They accused him of every despicable thing possible, and explored his biography with a microscope in search of fuel with which to rubbish his reputation: they dug up an incident that had happened forty years earlier, during the witch-hunt against Freemasonry unleashed by Francoist authorities at the end of the war, to maintain that he’d been involved in or committed or instigated a murder, that of Major Isaac Gabaldón, gunned down one night in July 1939 while, according to certain witnesses, carrying a file of documents accusing some of his colleagues in SIMP, Franco’s intelligence service, of belonging to the Freemasons; Gutiérrez Mellado was one of the members of SIMP and, although the judge hearing the case declared that the major had been murdered by Republican partisans and found Gutiérrez Mellado and the other members of SIMP not guilty of all the charges against them, the incident cast a shadow over the beginning of his military career and was used at the end to sow new doubts about his loyalty to the Army and his personal honesty.