The Basque History of the World - Mark Kurlansky [115]
Three days later, Ryan’s body was found in Vizcaya, blindfolded and shot dead. The killing of the engineer was deplored by most Basques. But instead of capitalizing on a tragic public relations victory, Madrid reacted the way it always did to ETA violence. An ETA militant, José Arregui, held incommunicado for ten days in prison, died. The gruesome wounds on his corpse testified to the ten days of torture that had killed him. So instead of widespread condemnation of the Ryan killing, Basqueland mobilized a general strike to protest the military’s killing of an ETA member. Five policemen were arrested and several government figures resigned over the Arregui killing.
To a few extremists in the military and the Guardia Civil, the insult to the king followed by the government turning against them, arresting defenders of Spain’s honor, was too much to endure. In December they began to work on a plan of action.
IN THE GENRE of horror movies, a common ploy at the end of the film, after the monster has been vanquished, is for it to suddenly rise up one more time from the muck. That was the role of Guardia Civil lieutenant colonel Antonio Tejero in the history of Franco’s Spain.
On February 23, 1981, while the Cortes in Madrid was installing a new government, twenty armed Guardia Civil entered the legislative chamber, fired rounds into the ceiling, and ordered everyone to the floor. There was Tejero, the officer who, in 1977, had been relieved of his command in San Sebastián for refusing to accept the legalization of the ikurriña, up on the speaker podium, pistol drawn, in his Guardia Civil uniform with its tri-cornered nineteenth-century hat and his long, full, nineteenth-century mustache, giving orders. The old Spanish monster was back for one more try. It was the twenty-fifth attempted military coup d’état in Spain since 1814.
The Basque government prepared to go back into exile. Garaikoetxea, at the time suffering from a sneezy bout of hay fever, was moved to the pollen-rich mountains near the border, ready to cross over.
But the coup failed. It may have been more than one coup. The relationship between the Guardia Civil action, the army’s Brunete Division, which was to move on Madrid, and various other military actions at the time has never been completely clarified. King Juan Carlos, the commander in chief of the armed forces, is credited with talking the military officers out of backing the rebellion. But some of the plotters claimed that the king knew of the plot and that they had acted believing the king was behind them. It is not known if he had ever indicated support, or if he even knew of the plot. But its success would have been unlikely without his backing, and, in the end, it was the king’s lack of support that caused these officers to back down.
Whether the king had or had not been involved in the plot, the coup’s failure was a resounding success for him, for the military, and for the Guardia Civil. The king, presented as the man who talked down the coup, gained a prestige he had never had before. The Juan Carlos jokes ended. So did rumors of military coups.
Most political leaders took February 23 as a lesson that the military and Guardia Civil needed to be kept happy. Not only the government, but Felipe González and his opposition Socialists, people who had spent their lives opposing the Guardia Civil and the military, suddenly responded sympathetically to their viewpoint and with increasing hostility to Basque nationalism. New antiterrorism laws were passed, giving the government the right to close down publications charged with “apology for terrorism,” a crime which was upgraded from misdemeanor to felony.
Tejero and General Jaime Milans del Bosch received thirty-year sentences, a third leader was sentenced to six years, and eleven others were sentenced to less than three years. But Spain was to have its transition to democracy without purging a single figure from the Franco era, without prosecuting a single one of the many crimes these men had committed