The memoirs of Juan Carlos and February 23rd
In just a few days, we have received news of three people who almost 45 years ago were protagonists of the attempted coup d'état of February 23, 1981: Juan Carlos I, then head of state, who has published his memoirs with a French publisher, and Anna Balletbò, who on that February 23rd was a socialist deputy for Barcelona and died last October 24th at the age of 81.
Bedridden, Tejero will not be able to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the death of his admired Franco as he would have liked. The former military officer will go down in the history of the last quarter-century of Spain as one of the villains of the Transition, the Joker who wanted to destroy the fledgling democracy on the Iberian Peninsula. However, this cocky, impulsive Civil Guard chief from Málaga unwittingly became one of the major obstacles that prevented the rebellion from succeeding. On February 23, several coup attempts converged: they were tactically aligned—their leaders had known each other for some time—but their strategies differed.
Tejero and General Jaime Milans del Bosch intended a "hard" coup that would lead to a government composed mainly of military officers and technocrats from the former Franco regime. Their model was the Chilean and Argentine dictatorships of the 1970s and 80s.
General Alfonso Armada, on the other hand, agreed to become president of a "national salvation" government, supported and composed of politicians from various ideological leanings: his list of candidates for ministers included figures from the Socialist and Communist parties. And a few weeks before the coup, certain politicians were aware of—and in some cases even encouraged—Armada's ambitions. He wanted to emulate General de Gaulle and end the serious political and social crisis that was gripping Spain at that time. It had to be a step backward agreed upon by the vast majority of the members of parliament.
Armada's ambitions were something Juan Carlos I had known about for some time. It hasn't been proven that the then-monarch explicitly endorsed them, but neither has it been proven that he rejected them, much less that he denounced them. These were ambitions that even the elderly Josep Tarradellas, who spoke from his retirement of an imminent "change of course," might have been aware of.
The dominant narrative of the Transition states that the king stopped the rebellion and defended democracy "from the very beginning." And that those who have tried to implicate him in the coup attempts were merely Franco nostalgics obsessed with discrediting the Bourbons.
In the editorial advances of Juan Carlos's memoirs In statements that have been circulating in recent days, the former monarch says that Armada was "a traitor" and that Adolfo Suárez had already advised her to distrust him, but she hadn't listened because she "loved" the general very much. Armada, a descendant of staunch monarchist aristocrats, a hardened conservative, and godson of Alfonso XIII's mother, was Juan Carlos's tutor and the de facto ruler of the Royal Household until he was replaced at the Zarzuela Palace by Sabino Fernández Campo.
According to the narrative of the Transition, Fernández Campo was key in thwarting the 23-F coup attempt. We said that, according to the emeritus king, Armada betrayed him during those days of 1981. But some recordings stolen by the showgirl Barbara Rey to Juan Carlos And those released a year ago indicate precisely the opposite: Fernández Campo is the traitor and Armada a figure who maintains an admirable silence. In these conversations, Juan Carlos confides in his lover: "Word of honor: I laugh, darling, ofAlfonso ArmadaThis one spent seven years in prison, went back to his manor in Galicia, and the guy never said a word. Never! But this other one... –he says, referring to Fernández Campo– He's letting it all out…"Has he not said a single word about what? What secrets was Armada keeping, and what silence is Juan Carlos grateful for?"
Following the death of businesswoman, journalist and co-founder of the PSC Anna Balletbò, who was the first secretary of the Catalan socialists, Raimon Obiols recalled in an obituary When she was finally able to leave Congress by claiming she was pregnant with twins, she was able to speak on the phone with a hesitant king. In her memoir, Balletbò wrote: "He had finished asking questions, but I had a few: 'Your Majesty, what do you intend to do? There are 400 hostages inside Congress…' 'The King is at the service of the highest interests of Spain,' he said. I wasn't used to royal language. I come from cultures where the royal sense is more profound, the underlying meaning of what the speaker is saying, beyond the words themselves. 'The highest interests of Spain' didn't seem particularly concrete to me. So I mustered my courage and pressed on: 'And what else?'"
In the obituary, Obiols also explained that they both agreed in seeing Tejero as a confused victim of his own erratic nature and the manipulation of others. Although, as Obiols wrote, "he's one of those who would be shot if necessary." Tejero, in effect, was the battering ram: true to his values and loyal to the commanders who shared his far-right views, he was used by conspirators more astute than himself, who abandoned him when the stakes rose, and he became the scapegoat for all the blows while others received such a brutal beating. Next February will mark 45 years since the most serious coup attempt in recent history. The public deserves for the government to declassify all the classified documents from February 23rd to shed all the necessary light on that dark afternoon and evening.
