DonQuixote's colonels
Patrick Desmond
SPain, like some other new democracies
launched on a flood of good intentions, seems to have prescribed itself too strong a dose of democratic principle. Parliament's most ostentatious enemy, Colonel Tejero
he of the luxuriant moustache, trembling trigger finger and thirty-year jail sentence was pronounced eligible to stand for it at the general election this week and he in- sisted on doing so. Tejero even announced the formation of his own political party, whose programme must presumably include a severe restriction of parliament's powers and rights, if not its reduction to the purely symbolic role which it fulfilled under Franco.
But Tejero ought not really to frighten the constitutional parties, despite the ease of access to him which the code of military imprisonment allows his friends and sup- Porters. The soldiers who should alarm the politicians are not those whom they can IdentifY, but those they cannot. The three a. rrested on 2 October, all artillery colonels, look like stumblebums. They were intent enough on taking control of the state. Their "tri was to isolate the king and the prime !Moister in their residences outside Madrid, Interrupt the military communication cir- cuits (through which the king talked down the
Tejero coup in February 1981) and then
their the arrival of units sympathetic to Leir programme. But their methods make those of Stauffenberg's co-conspirators in the abortive bomb plot against Hitler look almost Machiavellian. The agents of ESID, the military intelligence service, were not only alerted to their political to by the frequency of their visits but the imprisoned confederates of Tejero, lit were able to make use of the four hours Spent by one of them closeted with General ans del Bosch to search his car parked Outside the prison and establish from the documents it contained exactly what they Were up to. Unfortunately for CESID, the docu- ments did not reveal the names of all their fellow intransigents. They are alleged to number about one hundred, but to be in contact with a large group who might show their colours if and when a coup looked like succeeding. What is it about the Mediterra- neanclimate that does things to colonels? overthrow of the Greek monarchy in ; 967 was the work of officers of that rank, anent on saving the country from com- munism, as was the overthrow of the Egyp- 2an monarchy in 1952. Nasser and friends ..,,we!'e reformers, which Papadopoulos and leJero would presumably die rather than admit to being. But there is nevertheless something about the air in the barrack- r°on) around the latitude 35 which sets
moustaches tapping. Middle age is the dangerous age, and no less for soldiers than for any other sort of male. Indeed, perhaps more so: the glamour of wearing a uniform is long over, the pleasure of being called 'General' a hope which may have begun to fade. Politi- cians look a shifty lot, particularly when party discipline is compared to military discipline. A shot into the ceiling and the bellow of a loud voice promises to do them a power of good, above all in a country where soldiers are committed to thinking that the electorate does not know its own mind. And it is certainly true that the Spanish party system, and perhaps the elec- torate behind it, is volatile by northern European standards. Political opinion has moved steadily to the left in the past five years, for no good reason, and the parties of the centre and right have given it no en- couragement to return. When Calvo Sotelo resigned as leader of the government party, the Democratic Centre Union, and was replaced by Speaker Lavilla, Sotelo's thwarted rival, Adolfo Suarez, went off in a huff, taking a quarter of the deputies with him. Lavilla's efforts to strengthen the non- socialist group by allying with Fraga's con- servative Popular Alliance foundered on Fraga's insistence on having the leadership, leaving the UCD to go it alone with the small Liberal Party. As a result, the non- socialist vote must split three ways, con- fronting the army with the spectre of a left- wing government for the first time since the twitching and boot heels Popular Front came to power in 1936.
In 1936 the reaction of part of the army — not all of it — was to raise the standard
of rebellion. The result was the Civil War, which perhaps not even the bloodthirstiest of them, veterans of the Riff wars in Morocco, may have wanted. It is certainly not clear what Tejero's associates want. Traditionally the army has feared any move to accord autonomy to the regions, par- ticularly Catalonia and the Basque country, and the Left is more concessionary than the Right on this issue. Calvo Sotelo's govern- ment has taken Spain into NATO, and by no means all the army is keen on that. It shrinks from public comparison with the better-equipped and more opened-minded armies of the original members of the alliance, and doubts whether NATO is in- terested in its local preoccupations — the recovery of Gibraltar, the defence of the Moroccan enclaves and the security of the Canaries. It probably suspects that a left- wing government would reintroduce the humiliating limitations on military privilege imposed by the Republicans before the Civil War — the abolition of the nine Captaincies-General, in which considerable regional powers are vested, and the subjec- tion of officers to the civil courts. Such anx- ieties are not enough to call the reliability of the whole army into question. Two at least of the Captains-General are outspoken champions of democracy and the majority of the younger officers are probably with them. But the dissident minority is a nag- ging threat to an Anglo-Saxon-style civil- military relationship.
Can they bring democracy down? The terrorist menace, which they were to use as the pretext for a takeover on 27 October, arouses real public anger. But it would not compare with the outrage a coup would provoke. It seems unlikely that the intran- sigents are prepared to face that. The modern Spanish officer, even when middle- aged, is essentially a middle-class figure, probably of lower-middle-class origins. He has no military experience. He is too young to have served in the Civil War and has had no opportunity to serve elsewhere. A tiny number took part in the disengagement from Spanish Morocco. Some still serve in the Spanish Foreign Legion and the regulares of the Moroccan enclaves. But, even for them, soldiering is a theoretical business. Not so for their predecessors in 1936. The Civil War was made by men, Franco prominent among them, who had leant on their chinstraps in 20 years of desert warfare. These africanistas knew bloodshed and were prepared to risk a little of it in Spain itself if that would save the country from the Left. But there are no africanistas today, and no large garrison in Morocco to provide an invading force. The three artillery colonels now languishing in custody had code-named their plan Cer- vantes, and that is probably appropriate. It seems best to think of them as woebegone, would-be feudalists, tilting at the modern world like Don Quixote at those menacing windmills.
Previous page
