Javier Cercas - The Anatomy of a Moment

That’s maybe another gesture his gesture contains: a posthumous gesture, so to speak. Because the fact is that at least for its main leaders the 23 February coup was not exactly a coup against democracy: it was a coup against Adolfo Suárez; or if you prefer: it was a coup against the kind of democracy Adolfo Suárez embodied for them. Suárez only understood this hours or days later, but in those first seconds he could not have been unaware that for almost five years of democracy no politician had attracted the hatred of the golpistas as much as he had and that, if blood was going to be spilled that evening in the Cortes, the first to be spilled would be his. Maybe that might be an explanation of his gesture: as soon as he heard the first shot, Suárez knew he could not protect himself from death, knew that he was already dead. I admit this is an embarrassing explanation, which tastelessly combines emphasis with melodrama; but that doesn’t make it false, especially since deep down Suárez’s gesture is still a gesture of emphatic melodrama characteristic of a man whose temperament tended as much towards comedy as tragedy and melodrama. Suárez, it’s true, would have rejected the explanation. In fact, whenever anyone asked him to explain his gesture he opted for the same reply: ‘Because I was still Prime Minister of His Majesty’s government and the Prime Minister of the government could not dive for cover.’ The reply, which I believe sincere, is predictable, and betrays a very important characteristic of Suárez: his sacramental devotion to power, the disproportionate dignity bestowed by the office he held; it is also not a boastful reply: it presupposes that, had he not still been Prime Minister, he would have acted upon the same prudent instinct as the rest of his colleagues, protecting himself from the gunshots under his bench; but it is, furthermore or most of all, an insufficient reply: it forgets that all the rest of the parliamentarians represented the sovereignty of the people with almost the same claim as he had — not to mention Leopoldo Calvo Sotelo, who was going to be sworn in as Prime Minister that very evening, or Felipe González, who would be within a year and a half, or Manuel Fraga, who aspired to be, or Landelino Lavilla, who was the Speaker of the Cortes, or Agustín Rodríguez Sahagún, who was Minister of Defence and responsible for the Army. Be that as it may, one thing is beyond doubt: Suárez’s gesture is not the powerful gesture of a man confronting adversity at the height of his powers, but the gesture of a man politically finished and personally broken, who for the last six months has felt that the entire political class was plotting against him and maybe now also feels that the seditious Civil Guards bursting into the chamber of the Cortes is the result of this same widespread conspiracy.

The first feeling is quite accurate; the second not so much. It’s true that during the autumn and winter of 1980 the Spanish ruling class has devoted itself to a series of strange political manoeuvres with the objective of bringing down Adolfo Suárez’s government, but it’s only partly true that the attack on the Cortes and the military coup are the result of this widespread conspiracy. Two different things are involved in the 23 February coup: one is a series of political operations against Adolfo Suárez, but not against democracy, or not in principle; the other is a military operation against Adolfo Suárez and also against democracy. The two things are not entirely independent; but neither are they entirely united: the political operations were the context that fostered the military operation; they were the placenta of the coup, not the coup itself: the nuance is key in understanding the coup. For this reason we don’t need to pay too much attention to the politicians of the time who state that they knew in advance what was going to happen in the Cortes that evening, or that many people in the chamber knew, or even that the whole chamber knew; they are almost certainly fictitious, vain or self-interested memories: the truth is, since the political operation and the military operation barely communicated, nobody or almost nobody in the chamber knew, and very few people outside knew.

What everyone in the whole country did know was that a coup d’état was in the air that winter. On 20 February, three days before the coup, Ricardo Paseyro, Madrid correspondent for Paris Match , wrote: ‘Spain’s economic situation is verging on catastrophe, terrorism is on the rise, scepticism towards institutions and their representatives is profoundly damaging the soul of the nation, the state is collapsing beneath the assault of feudalism and the excesses on the part of the autonomous governments, and Spain’s foreign policy is a fiasco.’ He concluded: ‘There is the scent of a coup d’état, a golpe de estado , in the air.’ Everyone knew what could happen, but no one or almost no one knew when, how and where; as for who, prospective candidates to carry out a coup d’état were not exactly in short supply in the Army, although it’s certain that as soon as Lieutenant Colonel Tejero burst into the chamber everyone or almost every one of the deputies must have recognized him immediately, because his face had been in the newspapers ever since mid-November 1978 when Diario 16 broke the news that he had been arrested for planning a coup based on taking the government hostage when the Cabinet was meeting at Moncloa and using the resulting power vacuum as an excuse to take over control of the state; after his arrest, Tejero was put on trial, but the military tribunal ended up imposing a laughable sentence and a few months later he was already at liberty and available for duty, that is without a concrete professional assignment, that is without any occupation other than making preparations for his second attempt with maximum discretion and the minimum number of people, which ought to prevent the leak that made the first one fall through. So, in the most absolute secrecy, counting on a very reduced number of military conspirators and with a very high degree of improvisation, the coup was hatched, and this explains to a great extent how, of all the threatened coups looming over Spanish democracy since the previous summer, this was the one that finally materialized.

The threats against Spanish democracy, however, had not begun the previous summer. A long time after Suárez left power a journalist asked him at what moment did he begin to suspect that a coup d’état might be in the works. ‘From the moment I gained the use of prime ministerial reason,’ Suárez answered. He wasn’t lying. Less than an accident of history, in Spain the golpe de estado is a vernacular rite: all democratic experiments in Spain have been finished by coups d’état, and in the last two centuries there have been more than fifty; the last had been in 1936, five years after the installation of the Republic; 1981 was also five years since the starting point of the democratic process; combined with the difficult time the country was going through, that chance turned into a numerical superstition and that numerical superstition gnawed away at the coup d’état psychosis among the ruling class. But it was not just a psychosis, nor just a superstition. In reality, Suárez had even more reasons than any other democratic Spanish Prime Minister to fear a coup d’état from the very moment when he showed by his actions that his intention was not, as might have seemed at the beginning of his mandate, to change something so everything would stay the same, prolonging the content of Francoism by airbrushing its form, but to restore a political regime essentially similar to the one against which forty years before Franco and the Army had risen up in arms: it was not just that when Suárez came to power the Armed Forces were almost uniformly Francoist; they were, by Franco’s explicit mandate, the guardians of Francoism. The most famous phrase of the transition from dictatorship to democracy (‘Everything is tied up and well tied’) was not spoken by any of the protagonists of the transition; it was spoken by Franco, which perhaps suggests that Franco was the true protagonist of the transition, or at least one of the protagonists. Everyone remembers that phrase spoken on 30 December 1969 in his year-end speech, and everyone interprets it for what it is: a guarantee issued by the dictator to his faithful that after his death everything would carry on exactly as it was before his death or that, as the Falangist intellectual Jesús Fueyo put it, ‘after Franco, the institutions’; not everyone remembers, on the other hand, that seven years before Franco pronounced an almost identical phrase (‘Everything is tied up and guaranteed’) during a speech to an assembly of Civil War veterans gathered at Garabitas Hill, and on that occasion he added: ‘Under the faithful and insurmountable guardianship of our Armed Forces.’ It was an order: after his death, the Army’s mission was to preserve Francoism. But shortly before he died Franco gave the military a different order in his will, and it was that they should obey the King with the same loyalty with which they’d obeyed him. Of course, neither Franco nor the military imagined that the two orders could come to be contradictory and, when the political reforms brought the country into democracy demonstrating that indeed they were, because the King was deserting Francoism, the majority of military officers wavered: they had to choose between obeying Franco’s first order, preventing democracy by force, and obeying the second, accepting that it contradicted and annulled the first, and consequently accepting democracy. That wavering is one of the keys to 23 February; it also explains that almost from the very moment he reached the premiership in July 1976 Suárez would live surrounded by rumours of a coup d’état. At the beginning of 1981 the rumours were no more tenacious than they had been in January or April of 1977, but never had the political situation been as favourable for a coup as it was then.