On February 23, according to Tejero and his wife
There have been sighs of relief among supporters and defenders of the 1978 Constitution upon discovering that the documents related to the February 23rd coup attempt have turned out to be rather weak and contained nothing relevant regarding King Juan Carlos's involvement in the preparations. This relief is rather debatable, because the image of a head of state who has had to take refuge in the United Arab Emirates for defrauding his country's treasury could hardly be more damaged. But these supporters and defenders still cling to the myth of Juan Carlos as the savior of the democracy we all built together, and they believe that this is enough (and surely it will be) to sustain the narrative of the supposedly providential parliamentary monarchy.
It turns out that the declassified papers contained some unexpected protagonists: Antonio Tejero, the Civil Guard lieutenant who stormed the Congress firing shots and shouting obscenities, and who had the good fortune to die this Wednesday, the day the documents were made public; but above all, his wife, Carmen Elvira, from whom more than three hundred pages of transcripts of tearful telephone conversations have emerged, in which she vented her frustrations, describing her husband with epithets such as wretch, silly either idiotAs an example, we can take this excerpt, which our deputy director David Miró shared in a tweet. Carmen Elvira is speaking, complaining about how General Armada and his associates let Tejero fall from grace:"So good and so honorable! Always with his country in mind... Besides, he's a very balanced man [...], and all he wants is to end terrorism so that people can live comfortably and in peace... Ah, what a pity I feel for him!"
It must be acknowledged that Carmen Elvira's monologues are pure literature, worthy of the Barbaric comedies by Valle-Inclán (as Miró says), from the novel Five Hours with Mario of Delibes (as observed by the coordinator of Más por Mallorca, Lluís Apesteguía) or of a version gypsy and barracks of Molly Bloom's monologue in theUlysses by Joyce. As literature often does, it places us before an unforeseen reality: one in which a Civil Guard officer stages a coup out of pure kindness, honesty, and patriotism, and in which the coup is a way to end terrorism so that everyone can live peacefully and without fear. It may make us laugh (it does), but when we talk about the Spanish far right, we are talking about the mindset that defines Carmen Elvira in her phone calls, filled with the dangerous combination of hatred and fanaticism.
