Javier Cercas - The Anatomy of a Moment

* The word of the moment is disenchantment; if it made its fortune as a description of the time it’s because it reflected a reality: in the second half of 1976, shortly after Suárez came to power, 78 per cent of Spaniards preferred political decisions to be made by representatives elected by the people, and in 1978, the year the Constitution was approved, 77 per cent defined themselves as unconditional democrats; but, according to the Metroscopia Institute, in 1980 barely half of Spaniards preferred democracy over any other form of government: the rest had doubts or didn’t care, or supported a return to dictatorship.

Journalists are plotting against Suárez (or Suárez feels they are plotting against him). Of course, the far-right journalists are plotting, attacking Suárez daily because they consider that destroying him equals destroying democracy. It’s true there are not many of them, but they’re important because their newspapers and magazines — El Alcázar, El Imparcial, Heraldo Español, Fuerza Nueva, Reconquista — are almost the only ones that get inside the barracks, persuading the military that the situation is even worse than it actually is and that, unless out of irresponsibility, egotism or cowardice they allow themselves to be complicit with an unworthy political class that is driving Spain to the brink, sooner or later they’ll have to intervene to save the endangered nation. The exhortations for a coup have been constant since the beginning of democracy, but since the summer of 1980 they are no longer sibylline: the 7 August issue of the weekly Heraldo Español had an enormous white horse rearing up on the cover and a full-page headline demanding: ‘who will mount this horse? wanted: a general’; inside, a pseudonymously signed article by the journalist Fernando Latorre proposed avoiding a hard military coup by staging a soft military coup that would place a general in the premiership of a government of unity, bandied about a few names — among them that of General Alfonso Armada — and imperiously suggested the King should choose between two types of coup: ‘Pavía or Prim: let he who can choose.’ In the autumn and winter of 1980, but especially in the weeks before 23 February, these harangues were an everyday occurrence, especially in the newspaper El Alcázar , perhaps the most combative publication of the far right, and undoubtedly the most influential: three articles were published there between the end of December and the beginning of February signed by Almendros — a pseudonym that probably disguised the reserve general Manuel Cabeza Calahorra, who in his turn collected the opinions of a group of retired generals — calling for the interruption of democracy by the Army and the King, just as the reserve general Fernando de Santiago — who five years earlier had been one of the Deputy Prime Ministers in Suárez’s first government — called for fifteen days before the coup in an article entitled ‘Extreme Situation’; there, on 24 January, the editor-in-chief of the newspaper, Antonio Izquierdo, wrote: ‘Mysterious unofficial emissaries, who claim to be well informed about everything, are going around these days communicating to well-known personalities in news and finance that “the coup is about to happen, within two months everything will be settled”’; and there, in spite of the stealth with which the coup was hatched, the night before 23 February some clued-up readers knew that the following day would be the great day: the front page of the 22 February issue of El Alcázar showed a photo three columns wide of the empty chamber of the Cortes, beneath which, as the paper had done on other occasions, a red sphere warned that the front page contained agreed information; the information could be found by joining with a straight line the point of a thick arrow pointing to the chamber (inside which could be read: ‘All ready for Monday’s session’) to the text of the article by the editor that appeared to the right of the photo; the phrase of the article the straight line pointed to gave almost the exact time Lieutenant Colonel Tejero would enter the Cortes on the following day: ‘Before the clock marks 18.30 next Monday.’ So, although it is most likely that none of the deputies present in the Cortes on the evening of 23 February knew in advance what was going to happen, at least the editor of El Alcázar and some of his contributors did know. There are four questions: who provided them with that information? Who else knew? Who knew how to interpret that front page? Who was the newspaper trying to warn?*

But not only far-right journalists are plotting against Suárez — and against democracy — democratic journalists are also plotting against him — or Suárez feels they are plotting against him. It is the feeling of a cornered man, but maybe it’s not an inexact feeling. The final stages of Francoism and the beginnings of the transition had brought about a singular symbiosis between journalism and politics, a cronyism between politicians and journalists that allowed the latter to feel themselves protagonists of the first order in the change from dictatorship to democracy; by 1980, however, that complicity has broken, or at least the complicity has broken down between Suárez and the press, which considers itself disdained by power and attributes to this disdain the responsibility or part of the responsibility for the terrible time the country’s going through. The wounded pride the press is feeling then is a translation of Suárez’s wounded pride (and also a translation of the wounded pride the country is feeling) and, given that some significant journalists claim the mission of dictating the government’s policies and consider Suárez little short of an impostor and in any case a deplorable politician, in much of the media the criticism of Suárez is brutally harsh and contributes to spurring on the coup d’état mentality, feeding the phantom of an emergency situation and giving space on their pages to constant rumours of political operations and hard or soft coups under way that, rather than prevent them, serves to prepare the ground for them. Furthermore, four and a half years in power — and especially four years as intense as those experienced by Suárez — have been more than enough to make many enemies: there are spiteful journalists who change their adulation in a very short time into scorn; there are critical journalists who turn into kamikaze journalists; there are editorial conglomerations — like the 16 Group, owners of Diario 16 and Cambio 16 , the most important political weekly of the time — that in the summer of 1980 initiate a ferocious campaign against Suárez instigated by the leaders of his own party; there are cases like that of Emilio Romero, undoubtedly the most influential journalist of the late stages of the Franco regime, who after being ousted by Suárez from his privileged position in the press of the Movimiento, the only party allowed to exist under Franco, developed a lasting hatred for the Prime Minister, and who, in his column in ABC a few days before the coup, proposed General Armada as a candidate to lead the government after the surgical coup or touch on the rudder that should displace Suárez. The case of Luis María Anson, a very prominent journalist in democratic times, is different and more complicated.

Anson was a veteran defender of the monarchist cause whom Suárez had helped in the early 1970s, when he thought he was going to be charged for insulting Franco as a result of an article published in ABC ; later, in the mid-1970s, it was Anson who helped Suárez: encouraged by the future King, the journalist urged on Suárez’s political career while in charge of the magazine Blanco y Negro , boosted his candidacy for Prime Minister of the government and celebrated his appointment in Gaceta Ilustrada with an enthusiasm unusual in the reformist press; finally it was Suárez who helped Anson again: just two months after reaching the premiership he appointed the journalist to the post of director of the state news agency EFE. Although Anson remained at the head of the agency until 1982, this mutual exchange of favours was cut short a few months later, when the journalist began to feel that Suárez was a weak politician and had a complex about his Falangist past and that he was handing power in the new democracy to the left, and turned into an implacable detractor of the Prime Minister’s policies; implacable and public: Anson met periodically in the EFE agency canteen with politicians, journalists, financiers, Church officials and military officers, and in those meetings stirred up discontent against his erstwhile patron from very early on; also, according to Francisco Medina, as early as the autumn of 1977 he discussed a plan to rectify democracy — in reality a concealed coup d’état — inspired by the events of June 1958 that allowed General de Gaulle to return to power and found the French Fifth Republic: the idea was that the Army would put discreet pressure on the King to persuade Suárez to resign and oblige him to establish a theoretically apolitical government led by a technocrat, a government of unity or salvation that would place constitutional legitimacy in brackets for a time with the aim of re-establishing order, stopping the bloodbath of terrorism and overcoming the economic crisis; with the addition of a military officer leading the government, large doses of improvisation and recklessness, and a head-on crash with constitutional order, that was the plan the golpistas tried to execute on 23 February. Anson’s relationship with General Armada — described in his memoir as ‘a good friend’ with whom he’d kept in touch over ‘many years’ — the rigid monarchical convictions that united them, the fact that certain witnesses claimed Anson figured as a minister in the government Armada planned to form as a result of the coup, EFE’s resistance after 23 February to accepting the general’s role as leader of the rebellion, Anson’s belligerence towards Suárez’s politics and his prestige as perpetual conspirator extended suspicions about the journalist over time. However, the truth is that Anson and Armada’s relationship was not as close as the general made it out to be, that the journalist figured in the supposed list of Armada’s government along with numerous democratic politicians ignorant of the role the general desired to assign them as guarantors of the coup, and that EFE’s unwillingness to admit that the King’s former secretary would have led the attempted military coup was a reflection of a quite generalized incredulity in the days immediately following 23 February; as for the idea of the coup, it was most probably that of the general himself — who had arrived in Paris as a student at the École de Guerre shortly after de Gaulle’s ascent to power in France and had experienced its consequences up close — who conceived it and spread it so successfully that from the summer of 1980 it was circulating profusely throughout the political village of Madrid and there was hardly a political party that did not consider the hypothesis of placing a soldier at the head of a coalition or caretaker or unity government as one of the possible ways of expelling Suárez from power. In short, no serious indication exists that Anson was a direct promoter of Armada’s candidacy for the leadership of a coalition government — and much less that he was linked to the military coup — although there is no reason to disregard that at some point in the autumn and winter of 1980 he might have considered that emergency solution to be reasonable, because it is certain that the journalist encouraged any effort designed to replace as soon as possible a head of government who, in his opinion as in that of almost all of the ruling class, was leading the Crown and the country to disaster.