Antonio Tejero, author of the 23-F coup d'état, dies
The former lieutenant colonel of the Civil Guard was 93 years old
MadridThe author of the failed coup d'état of February 23, 1981, Antonio Tejero Molina, has died in Valencia at the age of 93, according to various media outlets that have confirmed the information with the family. The death of the former lieutenant colonel coincides with the same day the Spanish government declassified documents about the 23-F coup d'état. Tejero had been in delicate health for several years and this Thursday night he gave up. Born on April 30, 1932, in Alhaurín el Grande (Málaga), he joined the Civil Guard in 1951, from which he was expelled after being sentenced to 30 years in prison for military rebellion. He served part of his sentence in Sant Ferran Castle in Figueres, a former military prison. In 1996, he was released having served only half of his sentence.
Tejero has gone down in history for violently storming Congress shouting "Quieto todo el mundo" during the investiture vote of Leopoldo Calvo-Sotelo as president of the Spanish government after the resignation of Adolfo Suárez. From that moment on, the 350 deputies were held hostage in the Spanish chamber for more than seventeen hours. Tejero arrived accompanied by more than 250 armed civil guards and ordered all elected representatives to lie on the ground while he fired several shots at the ceiling. All the deputies obeyed his orders except three: Adolfo Suárez; the vice-president, Manuel Gutiérrez Mellado; and the leader of the Communist Party (PCE), Santiago Carrillo.
Behind the coup d'état was also the second chief of staff of the army, Alfonso Armada, and the captain general Jaume Milans de Bosch, who declared a state of emergency in Valencia and brought tanks to the streets. The latter, like Tejero, was also sentenced to 30 years in prison on June 3, 1982, while Armada was only sentenced to 6 years because he was held responsible for conspiracy. In that trial, there were about thirty defendants, eleven of whom were acquitted. A year later, the Supreme Court reviewed the sentence and also placed Armada at the head of the rebellion. However, Armada was later pardoned.
The military operation of 23-F failed as soon as a televised message from King Juan Carlos I was broadcast. In military uniform, he supported the Constitution and democracy, although his role and the extent to which he knew what was going to happen has often been questioned. Especially since Armada had been secretary-general of the Royal Household, and is credited with the idea of torpedoing the democratic process. "I screwed King Juan Carlos alive. He had prepared a government to his liking with General Alfonso Armada. But a soldier was needed to stage the coup. That was me. However, when I saw what it would be, I stopped it," Tejero explained in an interview with El Español in October 2023. According to his account, when he saw that Armada intended to form a government of concentration with members of the left, he aborted the coup. The official and accepted version is not this, but rather that Tejero surrendered with the king's intervention: although he stormed Congress at half past six in the afternoon, he left it after midnight. The next morning, the rest of the civil guards left.
Before the failed coup d'état, Tejero had already tried to put an end to the incipient democratic process that was opening up at that time. In 1978, he participated in Operation Galaxia, an attempt by a group of military personnel to assault the government during a meeting at the Moncloa Palace, taking advantage of the king's absence from Spain on an official trip to Mexico. The plot was thwarted in advance, and Tejero was tried and sentenced to seven months in prison, but this did not prevent him from continuing to work as a police officer until the sentence for the events of 23-F.
The exhumation of Franco
The last time Tejero was seen was on October 24, 2019 at the El Pardo-Mingorrubio cemetery, on the day Francisco Franco's remains were transferred there from the Valley of the Fallen [now Cuelgamuros]. He was 87 years old and attended dressed in formal wear and a tie, to applause and shouts of "Viva Franco". There has been little news about him in recent years, although all of it has been to prove his reactionary ideology: in 2012, he filed a complaint against the then president of the Generalitat, Artur Mas, five days before the elections of November 25 of that year, in which he accused him of "conspiracy and incitement to sedition". It was the beginning of the Procés. Years later, in October 2023, and in full negotiation over the amnesty, Tejero filed another complaint with the Prosecutor's Office for the "anti-Spanish maneuvers" of the Spanish president, Pedro Sánchez.
Tejero will not live to see the 50th anniversary of Franco's death next November 20, nor the series about 23-F by Alberto Rodríguez and produced by Movistar+ that will premiere that same day. It is titled Anatomy of an Instant and is inspired by the work of the same name by the writer Javier Cercas. Filmed in the hemicycle of Congress, which for a few days traveled back in time with period decoration, it recreates the attempted coup d'état of 23-F that Tejero starred in.
