Tejero: the great mutiny of 23-F?

The death of Antonio Tejero Molina at the age of 93, coinciding with the declassification of parts of the secret documents surrounding the plot, has given double prominence to the Lieutenant Colonel of the Civil Guard who carried out the last successful military coup. It was the afternoon of February 23, 1981 (23-F), when the Congress of Deputies was voting on the investiture of Leopoldo Calvo-Sotelo as head of government. Tejero burst in shouting “Everyone to the floor!” at the head of 265 members of the Civil Guard who fired warning shots and kidnapped the parliamentarians. Jaime Milans del Bosch joined the coup in Valencia, where he was Captain General and brought tanks into the streets. However, the leader of the coup was General Alfonso Armada, who encouraged Tejero's assault on Congress and later presented himself as the savior of the deputies: he offered to negotiate with Tejero for the formation of a broad-spectrum government that the general would preside over if the parliamentarians voted for him. But when Tejero heard that Armada's executive included socialists and communists, he considered it a “botch job”. He said he had not pulled off that “feat” to end up like that and aborted the maneuver. When King Juan Carlos I condemned the coup on television in the early hours of the 24th, it collapsed. The implicated military personnel were tried in a court-martial, and Tejero was sentenced to 30 years in prison, but was released in 1996. After the trial, he withdrew from public life and allowed himself to be honored in prison by the stream of civilians who visited him (buses came) and bought his paintings. And, although he might have considered fleeing, he did not. Nor did he publish his testimony, even though the publishing house Planeta offered him a blank check in 2000. He became the “great silent one” of 23-F. In February 2016, the newspaper El Mundo reported that Tejero had written memoirs in prison, and the military man explained that one of his sons wanted to write a book about him. It would not be surprising, therefore, if the “Tejerista” vision of the coup were to emerge. But it seems unlikely that it would overturn what we know about the events, well documented by historian Roberto Muñoz Bolaños (El 23-F y los otros golpes de estado de la Transición, 2021). In fact, he points out that, above all, the civilian plot of the so-called “Armada solution” needs to be clarified: the plan that Armada devised to lead a motion of no confidence in Congress against Adolfo Suárez, which would lead him to preside over a broad-spectrum government. When the choice of Calvo-Sotelo as president thwarted him, Armada activated the 23-F coup. Thus, according to Muñoz, the most important of the archives on coup plots still inaccessible due to the official secrets law are likely the data on meetings of “economic and political sectors since 1977 with the aim of replacing Suárez” and making “a conservative turn” in the political change, meetings that gave birth to the aforementioned “Armada solution”. Nothing was declassified about this yesterday. However, if Tejero's testimony were to come to light, the plot he led among lower-ranking military personnel and civilians could be unraveled. This could include the Frente de la Juventud, so that its members would be the ones to occupy Congress. Likewise, it could shed light on a previous coup plot that Tejero orchestrated with fellow military man Ricardo Sáenz de Ynestrillas: the so-called Operation Galaxia, which aimed to occupy Moncloa in November 1978. Once discovered, the plot was downplayed to avoid causing concern, and those involved were sentenced to a few months in prison.

What is Tejero's historical importance, then? In essence, it marked the end of a coup tradition that began in the 19th century. His photograph in Congress in uniform, with a tricorn hat and pistol in hand, was the cliché. But the image has made us forget that 23-F could have led to the success of the “Armada solution” and given an authoritarian turn to the Transition. Or does anyone think that a government led by Armada, voted in that day, would have been easily changed? With an army irritated with politicians and terrorism that made 1980 the bloodiest year of the Transition (with one death every 60 hours), it seems unlikely. In fact, Tejero embodied the end of traditional coup-mongering, which saw the solution to problems in a military junta. He was imbued with a staunch Spanish nationalism close to Falangism and filtered by his time in the Basque Country, where the ETA crimes against his men, whose corpses he kissed, marked him. But he also entered politics in the 1982 elections by leading the party Solidaridad Española with the slogan “Enter Parliament with Tejero!”. The reason for doing so (was he seeking parliamentary immunity?) and the fact that it garnered him 28,451 votes are unknown. The experience ratified the rejection of old praetorianism and foreshadowed the need to oppose democracy at the ballot box. Tejero could hardly explore and exploit this because he was a coup-making military man between two eras.