Javier Cercas - The Anatomy of a Moment

Gutiérrez Mellado’s personal honesty and loyalty to the Army were, as far as we know, unquestionable; as far as we know, the general was a decent man, congenitally incapable of guile and deceit, and perhaps therefore not suited for the practice of politics, or at least for the practice of politics in convulsive times. This does not of course mean that all the accusations poured out against him can be qualified as false or unjust. Not everything about the general’s military policies was right; but, given the exceptional circumstances he had to fight against, many of the mistakes he committed would have been hard to avoid, if not actually unavoidable. His promotions policy, for example, was the best instrument the government had at its disposal to purge the Armed Forces of its leaden Francoist hindrance. Since a hierarchical promotion ladder was sacrosanct in the Army, in this matter as in almost everything Gutiérrez Mellado was almost always caught in the crossfire: he either respected seniority, allowing the radical old guard to monopolize the top command positions and threaten the course of democracy, or he bypassed protocol and promoted reliable officers and in return infuriated the passed-over officers and gave ammunition to those in favour of an uprising. Gutiérrez Mellado confronted this insoluble dilemma on more than a few occasions; the best known, the most illustrative as well, took place in May 1979, when the new Chief of the Army General Staff was named after the retirement of General De Liniers. The candidates to replace him were General Milans del Bosch, then Captain General of Valencia, and General González del Yerro, then Captain General of the Canary Islands; Gutiérrez Mellado did not consider either of them, but instead had named General Gabeiras — a soldier who lacked standing among his colleagues but enjoyed the Deputy Prime Minister’s full confidence — thereby finding it necessary not only to promote him in an artificial and hasty manner, but also to promote the generals above him in the pecking order to avoid accusations of cronyism and of completely ignoring military norms. The ruse was in vain, and the scandal in the barracks monumental, not to mention the indignation of Milans and González del Yerro. Could he have avoided both things by arranging the change of power at the top of the Army in a different way? Perhaps, but it’s not easy to imagine how; what is easy to imagine is what would have happened if on 23 February Milans had been in Madrid in command of the Army General Staff instead of being in Valencia in command of a secondary military region (the same or almost the same applies to González del Yerro, who during the 23 February coup adopted a dangerously equivocal attitude): almost certainly it would have been much more difficult for the coup to fail. On the other hand, on 23 February Gabeiras proved to be, if not the forceful chief a democratic army would have needed to confront the coup, at least a loyal soldier, and in any case the episode of his appointment was only one of many that embittered the relationship between the government and the Armed Forces and allowed the far right to keep the barracks on a continuous war footing against the government, propagating the rumour that Gutiérrez Mellado’s military policy was just one despotic arbitrariness after another with which democracy aimed to castigate the Army, demoralizing it and eliminating any trace of its former prestige.

But the military discontent that crucified Gutiérrez Mellado and led to the events of 23 February was not only fed by professional gripes, imaginary humiliations and political intransigence; the military golpistas were not within reason, but they had reasons, and some of them were very powerful. I’m not referring to the concern around 1980 with which they watched the deterioration of the political, social and economic situation, or to the undisguised disgust they felt — they, who had not only been charged by the Constitution of 1978 with the defence of the unity of Spain but felt bound to that command by an imperative buried in their DNA — at the proliferation of flags and nationalist claims and the decentralization propelled by the Estado de las Autonomías (State of Autonomies), a combination of words that for the immense majority of military men was simply a euphemism hiding or anticipating the controlled explosion of the fatherland; I’m referring to a much more wounding matter, definitely one of the direct causes of the coup d’état: terrorism, and in particular the terrorism of ETA, which at that time was viciously attacking the Army and the Civil Guard in the face of the indulgence of a left that had not yet divested the ETA militants of their aura of anti-Franco fighters. If it’s easy to understand this attitude of the left: simply recall the disastrous role the Army, the Civil Guard and the police played for forty years in supporting the dictatorship, not to mention the voluminous list of their atrocities, it’s impossible to justify: if the Armed Forces had to protect democratic society with all their resources against its enemies, then democratic society had to protect the Armed Forces with all its resources from the slaughter to which they were being subjected, or at least support its members. It did not, and the consequence of that error was that the Armed Forces felt abandoned by a considerable part of democratic society and that putting a stop to that slaughter became, in the eyes of a considerable part of the Armed Forces, an irresistible argument for putting a stop to democratic society.

Few people were as aware of this state of affairs as General Gutiérrez Mellado, few people made greater efforts to remedy it and few people suffered from it personally as much as he did, because it was he who the indignant military, spurred on by the far right, held responsible from the beginning for allowing the murders of their comrades-in-arms and the disdain with which part of the country viewed them. That indignation provoked repeated acts of insubordination against the general and public revolts, which in their way were announcements or foreshadowings of 23 February; terrorism was not always the cause or the excuse — they didn’t always happen during the heat of funerals for murdered soldiers, Civil Guards or policemen: they also happened at briefings of the High Command, on routine visits to barracks, even at formal ceremonies or drinks receptions — but it was always the cause or excuse of the most tumultuous and violent ones. Perhaps the most serious took place on the afternoon of 4 January 1979, at Army General Headquarters, during the funeral rites for the military governor of Madrid, Constantino Ortín, killed the night before in an ETA attack, and it must be said, like the majority of military disturbances of those years, not the spontaneous result of the emotion of the moment, but an act prepared by a previous alliance of officers pushing for a coup and far-right groups. The scene, which has been described on numerous occasions by numerous witnesses, could have happened like this:

Gutiérrez Mellado, personal friend of General Ortín and sole member of the government who attends the ceremony, presides over the funeral. The parade ground of the General Headquarters is heaving with a huge military crowd. Beneath an overcast winter sky, the ceremony goes on in an atmosphere of sorrow but also of induced tension, until at a certain moment, just after the band plays a prayer and the infantry hymn and as the undertaker’s employees pick up the coffin while the commanders, officers and NCOs lined up in front of the podium fall out, shouts against the government begin to break out here and there as well as insults against the Deputy Prime Minister, who is immediately accosted by several officers who jostle him violently, corner him against the south door of the parade ground, vilify and punch him. A few metres from where this is happening, another group of officers wrestle the coffin away from the undertaker’s employees and, after threatening the sentry guarding the premises that they’ll shoot the doors open, manage to leave with the coffin on their shoulders out on to Calle Alcalá, where a crowd shouting ‘Power to the Army!’ ecstatically greets the several hundred insurgent commanders and officers, merges with them and accompanies them for three kilometres through the centre of Madrid to La Almudena cemetery, while in an office in the Headquarters, far from the military uprising inundating the streets of the capital, a crestfallen Gutiérrez Mellado who’s lost his glasses tries to recover from the humiliation among the handful of comrades-in-arms who’ve just prevented his lynching.