23-F was an attempted coup d'état in Spain that began on 23 February 1981 and ended on the following day. It is also known as El Tejerazo from the name of its most visible figure, Antonio Tejero, who led the failed coup's most notable event: the bursting into the Spanish Congress of Deputies by a group of 200 armed officers of the Guardia Civil during the process of electing Leopoldo Calvo Sotelo to be the country's new Prime Minister. King Juan Carlos I gave a nationally televised address denouncing the coup and urging the maintenance of law and the continuance of the democratically elected government. The coup soon collapsed. After holding the Parliament and cabinet hostage for 18 hours the hostage-takers surrendered the next morning without having harmed anyone.
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The coup d'état of 1981 was closely related to the events of the Spanish transition to democracy. Four elements created a permanent tension that the governing Democratic Center Union (UCD), a coalition of conservative parties, could no longer contain:
The first signs of unease in the army appeared in April 1977. Admiral Pita da Veiga resigned as Navy minister and formed the Superior Council of the Army. This act arose from Da Veiga's disagreement with the legalisation of the Communist Party of Spain (PCE) on 9 April 1977, following the Atocha massacre by neo-fascists (Spanish: 'ultras'). In November 1978, the Operation Galaxia military putsch was put down. Its leader, Lieutenant-Colonel Antonio Tejero, was sentenced to seven months in prison.
While insurgent sentiment grew in sectors of the military and extreme right, the government reached a profound crisis at the beginning of the decade, which throughout 1980, became more untenable at each turn. Unfolding key events saw the resignation of the Minister of Culture, Manuel Clavero on 15 January; the restructuring of the government on 3 May; the motion of censure against Adolfo Suarez by the Spanish Socialist Workers' Party (PSOE) between 28 May and 30 May; the resignation on 22 July of the vice-president, Fernando Abril Martorell, which produced a new restructuring in September; and the election in October of Miguel Herrero Rodríguez de Miñón, alternative candidate of the official bid for president of the centrist parliamentary group promoted by Suárez.
The growing weakness of Suárez at the heart of his own party led to his televised resignation as president of the government and of the UCD on 29 January 1981. On 1 February, the Colectivo "Almendros" published an openly insurgent article in the far-right newspaper El Alcázar, which was the mouthpiece of the Búnker hardliners, including Carlos Arias Navarro, Luis Carrero Blanco's successor as Prime minister, and the leader of the neo-fascist party Fuerza Nueva, Blas Piñar. From 2 February to 4 February, the King and Queen traveled to Guernica, where the deputies of Herri Batasuna received them with boos and hisses and various incidents. On 6 February, the engineer Ryan from the Lemoiz nuclear project was found murdered, having been kidnapped a few days earlier. Meanwhile, there was no further news about industrialist Luis Suñer after his abduction.
In this tense climate, the process of choosing Suárez's successor commenced. Between 6 February and 9 February, the 2nd UCD congress was held in Majorca, where the party appeared to be in disarray and Agustín Rodríguez Sahagún was named acting president. On 10 February, Leopoldo Calvo Sotelo was named candidate for president of the government.
Tensions came to a head on 13 February, when news emerged of the death in Carabanchel of the ETA militant Jose Ignacio Arregui, a victim of torture after being held incommunicado during 10 days in the General Security Directorate (Dirección General de Seguridad).[1] A general strike in the Basque region and an acrimonious debate between opposing parliamentary groups in the Congress followed. The government then dismissed various police chiefs, while in the Interior Ministry, there were resignations in solidarity with the torturers. El Alcázar judged the government's actions a show of weakness that needed to be stopped.
Against this extraordinary backdrop, Calvo Sotelo introduced his government on 18 February, but in elections on the 20th he failed to obtain the necessary majority for confirmation as Prime Minister, so a new vote was scheduled for the 23rd. This was the day that the plotters had chosen for their coup attempt. It would be the result of a strong effort by Tejero and General Jaime Milans del Bosch, on the one hand, and a more subdued one by General Alfonso Armada, a confidant of the King, on the other.
At 18:21, the different coup plots that had been fomenting since the beginning of the transition to democracy met in a coordinated action. At 18:30, led by Lieutenant-Colonel Antonio Tejero, 200 Guardia Civil agents, armed with submachine guns, interrupted the Congress of Deputies of the Spanish parliament. Several TVE cameramen and technicians (as well as members from rival station SER, who were forced off air by the military) recorded almost half an hour of the event, providing the world with an audiovisual record of the attempt (which would be transmitted several hours after the coup ended). From the rostrum, gun in hand, Tejero ordered everyone to be silent and wait for a competent military authority, who never came.
During the shooting of several machine gun rounds, whilst almost all deputies dropped terrified on the floor, three kept standing defiantly: acting Minister of Defense General Manuel Gutiérrez Mellado, who stood up and ordered Tejero to desist; acting President of the Government Adolfo Suárez, who remained sitting down instead of crouching on the floor; and Communist leader Santiago Carrillo, who, sitting down, calmly lit a cigarette and did not seem to be disturbed by the events.
General Mellado and President Suárez ordered the insurgents to disarm. The Guardia Civil agents assaulted them, following the attack, by firing numerous rounds from a submachine gun into the ceiling. By taking the parliament and dragooning the executive and legislative powers, they sought to create a power vacuum in which to establish a new political power.
Moreover, four of the deputies were separated from the rest: the still president of the government, Suárez; the opposition leader, Felipe González Márquez; the second on the rolls of the PSOE, Alfonso Guerra González; and Carrillo.
Shortly afterward, the Captain General of the Third Military Region, Jaime Milans del Bosch, rose up in Valencia, put tanks on the streets, declared a state of emergency and tried to convince other senior military figures to support the coup. At nine o'clock that night, a communication from the Interior Ministry announced the formation of a provisional government with the undersecretaries of different ministries, under the instructions of the King, to ensure governance of the state and a tight contact with the Assembly of Military Chiefs of Staff (Junta de Jefes del Estado Mayor).
Meanwhile, another insurgent general, Torres Rojas, failed in his intent to supplant General Juste in the Brunete division of the military, giving up the intention to occupy strategic points in the capital, among them the seat of radio and television operations, and the proliferation of communiques about the success of the coup.
The refusal of the King to promote the coup led to it being called off during the night. The monarch assured himself after discussions, personal and with colleagues, of the fidelity of military leaders. He also noted the attitude of the President of the autonomous government of Catalonia, Jordi Pujol, who just before 10 p.m. that evening made a short speech via national broadcasting stations, to all of Spain and the exterior, calling for peace. Until 1:00 in the morning, negotiations took place around the Congress, with the participation of the acting government as well as General Alfonso Armada, who would later be relieved of duty over suspicion that he participated in the coup.
At 1:14 on 24 February, the king interceded on television, in uniform as the Captain General of the Armed Forces (Capitán General de los Ejércitos), the highest Spanish military rank, to position himself against the insurgents, defend the Spanish Constitution and undermine the authority of Milans del Bosch. He declared, "The crown, symbol of the permanence and unity of the nation, cannot tolerate, in any form, actions or attitudes attempting to interrupt the democratic process." At that moment, the coup was taken to be a failure.
At midnight, Alfonso Armada presented himself in Congress with a dual objective: to convince Lieutenant Colonel Tejero to relinquish his posture and assume himself the role of head of government under the order of the king, in a clearly unconstitutional manner. But Armada was not the awaited "competent, military authority" and Tejero ignored him. For his part, Milans del Bosch, isolated, cancelled his plans at 5:00 that morning and was arrested, while Tejero resisted until midday of the 24th and was arrested outside the Congress building. The deputies were freed that morning.
Deputy Javier Solana has described how when he saw Tejero reading a special edition of the El País newspaper brought in by General Sáenz de Santamaría, which strongly condemned the hostage-taking, he knew that the coup had failed.[2]
Shortly after the assault, the coup was strongly condemned by country members of the EEC, with which Spain was under negotiation for adhesion (that finally took place in 1986). Margaret Thatcher, prime minister of the UK, called the coup a "terrorist act".
The United States kept a neutral official position at the beginning of the action. Several indications suggest that the Reagan administration was informed about the imminence of the coup. Among other suspect behaviors, the military involved in the putsch were received in Washington in 1980, and American forces in the Strait of Gibraltar were placed under a state of preparedness at the Torrejón de Ardoz Air Force base on the Sunday before the coup.
Tejero himself, sitting at the bench during his trial, mentioned openly that "both the United States government and the Vatican had been sounded out by the General Armada". After the appearance of Tejero in the chamber, U.S. Secretary of State, General Alexander Haig said only that "the assault on the Congress is an internal affair that concerns the Spanish People", which led to serious international criticism. Once the coup failed, he declared "we must congratulate ourselves that democracy triumphed in Spain".
After the coup, some suspects remained, especially according to the roles played by each one of the instigators and the intentions and resources of Armada. Without a doubt, the most immediate consequence was that the monarchy emerged powerfully reinforced by political resources and the public.
Later, in the judgement which followed before the Supreme Court of Military Justice, known as the Campamento trial (juicio de Campamento). Miláns del Bosch, Alfonso Armada, Carlos Fenollar and Antonio Tejero Molina were condemned as principally responsible for the coup d'état and were sentenced to thirty years in prison. Thirty people were eventually convicted for the attempted coup, out of an initial 300 who were involved.[2]
The civilian plot behind the coup was never investigated rigorously. Juan García Carrés, ex-leader of the Sindicato Vertical (the only legal trade union organisation in Francoist Spain), was the only civilian to be convicted.
Local nationalists have asserted that the LOAPA law limiting the devolution to the autonomous communities was passed to placate the military.
To date, 23-F has been the last coup attempt in the history of Western Europe.