Tejero, the 23-F and the ironies of fate

In a twist of fate, Antonio Tejero, the former Civil Guard lieutenant colonel who led the 23-F coup attempt, died just hours after the Moncloa Palace declassified confidential documents related to that fateful day. He was 93 years old and never recanted or renounced his Francoist ideology. The analysis of the documents declassified on February 25, 45 years after the coup, does not fundamentally alter the account of events we already knew and confirms the key role of King Juan Carlos that night in persuading the main conspirators, especially General Jaime Milans del Bosch, who had deployed tanks to Valencia, to back down.

However, the various documents also demonstrate that the then fledgling Spanish democracy did not want to conduct a thorough investigation of the coup, perhaps because the ramifications would have implicated too many powerful sectors, and limited itself to handing down exemplary sentences only for its two visible figures, Tejero and Mil. The rest, including Alfonso Armada, were pardoned and spent very little time in prison.

It is particularly disturbing, for example, that CESID (the former CNI) itself acknowledged in a report that six of its agents from a special unit were involved, and that only one was tried and convicted. Captain Francisco García Almenta, who according to CESID was the one giving orders to the rebel agents, didn't even face a trial. He simply left the unit and went to work for the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The head of the unit, Commander José Cortina, was acquitted and assigned to Jaén. The feeling, then, is that they wanted to bury this case, even at the cost of having coup plotters on active duty within the army until they retired.

Also noteworthy is the CESID cable reporting prominent sources who claim that King Juan Carlos I met with the coup plotters before the trial to try to minimize the negative impact on the Crown. There is no documentary evidence as to whether these meetings took place or not, but the intelligence services gave them enough credibility to include them in a report.

Clearly, the declassification of documents is a step forward, but not the definitive one to clarify everything that happened in relation to February 23rd. Many questions remain, for example, regarding what is called the civilian plot of the coup, that is, the economic and political sectors that hoped to gain something from it. But, as with all conspiracies, it is unlikely that all those meetings left a documentary trace. Now historians have their work cut out for them, and perhaps the documents will help to follow some specific leads.

What is clear, however, is that it makes no sense to declassify the documents of February 23rd and, at the same time, maintain the validity of a Francoist official secrets law that prevents, among other things, knowing many of the things that happened around 1981, such as the dirty war. The next step should be to take the bill that's been under discussion since 2022 out of the drawer and finally pass it.