Ghosts of Spain (14 page)

While the Amical de Mauthausen was plotting to try Serrano Suñer, I found myself, as a journalist, constantly called on to
follow
the attempts of Spain's celebrated and controversial Judge Baltasar Garzón to pursue other military strongmen who had killed and tortured. The men being chased by Judge Garzón, an investigating magistrate at Madrid's powerful Audiencia Nacional, were not, however, Spanish. They were Chilean, Argentine and from several other Latin American countries. Garzón's pursuit of the military thugs who ruled much of South America in the 1970s and 1980s is a cause célèbre in Spain. He has declared himself competent to pursue them, and is backed by higher courts, because these are ‘international crimes'. The alleged perpetrators had declared amnesties for themselves, thus preventing trials in their own countries.

The Argentines, looking for a way to pacify their own military, found a perfect description when they named their ‘
Ley de Punto
Final
', ‘Full Stop Law', in 1986. The ‘full stop' was meant to put an end to the story of repression and torture started when the military juntas took over ten years earlier (1976). Spaniards, especially those on the left, condemned Argentina's
punto final
law. Few stopped to think, or even realised, that their own amnesty had, in effect, also been a ‘full stop' law.

Picking up
El Mundo
newspaper one morning as Garzón
struggled
to get government approval for his extradition petitions for thirty-nine presumed Argentine torturers, I found an editorial entitled ‘The laws of impunity continue to benefit the repressors.' The newspaper was angry that the Argentines might not be
extradited
, thus ‘creating a serious risk that impunity will triumph'. A few days later it repeated the message: ‘While the criminals remain free, able to rub shoulders with the victims and their
families
, we must applaud any initiative that seeks to condemn them and reestablish justice.'

Argentina has since struck down the Punto Final law. Nothing similar happened in Spain. There was no public outpouring of guilt, no formal attempt at naming and shaming – though there is now belated pressure for the creation of a truth commission. The same Brigada Político-Social police agents who regularly beat and tortured their detainees were not only free of any guilt, but could carry on their careers uninterrupted. Infamous Brigada Político-Social torturers – like Roberto Conesa in Madrid or the brothers Creix in Barcelona – continued their careers and went into
comfortable
retirement. Some even went on to become important police chiefs under Suárez or the Socialist governments that took over in the 1980s. The writer Manuel Vázquez Montalbán was one of those to fall into the hands of brothers Juan and Vicente Creix in the cells at Barcelona's Vía Laietana. ‘We, their victims, did not do anything to shine a light on them. The political reforms had already absolved those who owned the Creixes. Would it have been right to pursue their servants?' he asked. In 2001 one of the more notorious Brigada bosses, Melitón Manzanas, was awarded a posthumous medal. This was gained for having been killed by Basque terror group ETA.

In some cases the perceived need for wiping out the past was taken literally. In 1977, Interior Minister Rodolfo Martín Villa, a former Francoist civil governor and Movimiento leader in Barcelona, sent out instructions to some civil governors of Spain's provinces. These were also, still, the regional bosses of the Movimiento Nacional. He told them to destroy the Movimiento's records.

The details of exactly what was destroyed, and how, are sketchy. A Civil Guard officer once told me – on second-hand information – that a team of three officers was sent to the central archive of the Civil Guard police in Madrid, sorting out the documents to be burnt. In Barcelona, a truckload of papers – the entire archive – was taken from the Movimiento's headquarters in the Calle Mallorca to a disused industrial oven in Poble Nov and incinerated. The then civil governor, Salvador Sanchez-Teran, says he contemplated the historical import of what he was doing but decided it was best to
destroy the archive. ‘Those archives smelt of the remote past,' he explains in his memoir of the time. It was 1977, Franco had died less than two years earlier. The Movimiento itself had only just been disbanded. The paper-burners left behind holes that
historians
, presumably, can no longer fill. These sorts of decisions were no impediment to career-making. Sanchez-Teran is went on to head the popular, church-owned, right-wing COPE radio station.

I went to Gijón, the port city on the Atlantic coast in Asturias, to hear a story of how some papers had, temporarily, slipped through the net. The man who told the story to me was a retired Civil Guard officer who, from the way he spoke about them, had no sympathy for left-wingers. Fermín had been posted to the Asturian town of Colunga in the late 1980s and had found the records there still intact. His story – uncheckable, but convincingly told – gave me a glimpse of how Francoist repression had worked. There, in different coloured files – white, blue and red – ranking them in degrees of ‘danger' were the records on those deemed to be subversive. They were written on super-thin
papel
cebolla
, literally ‘onion paper', which enabled them to make
multiple
copies. Leafing through them, even Fermín was amazed at just how much information was kept. ‘Some included everything from the person's wedding day to their first arrest,' he said.

There was also a separate section of files on all the police informers, he explained, be they paid
soplones
, snitches, or members of the then illegal parties and trade unions such as the Communist Comisiones Obreras or the Socialist Unión General de Trabajadores. Fermín burned the lot. ‘They were meant to have done it years earlier,' he said. I wonder how many reputations he, and the other burners, saved.

The destruction of documents has made reconstructing the mechanisms of Francoist repression much more difficult. It has, especially, helped keep the names of those who took part in it out of the public eye. ‘The active or passive participation of sectors of Spanish society in the repression was more important than we care to remember,' recall Nicolás Sartorius and Javier Alfaya, two former political prisoners, in a recent study.

One of the few to have been named as a regime collaborator, however, is none other than Spain's Nobel Prize-winning novelist Camilo José Cela. Cela, the cantankerous and controversial author of
The Family of Pascual Duarte
and
The Hive
, was
awarded
the Nobel Prize in 1989 for his ‘rich and intensive prose, which with restrained compassion forms a challenging vision of man's vulnerability'. He died in 2002. Shortly after his death, historian Pere Ysàs unearthed papers showing that Cela had snitched to the information ministry on those who attended a Spanish writers' conference in 1963. He told officials that 42 of the 102 signatories of a letter denouncing police violence against striking miners in the northern region of Asturias – which he himself had signed – were members of the Spanish Communist Party. He apparently suggested that some dissident writers could be bribed, tamed and reconverted by the generalísimo's regime. Cela's views were
contained
in an internal report written by an official working for the then information minister. This was the same Manuel Fraga who would become interior minister and, later, head of the Galician government when Spain was a democracy. The novelist claimed, according to the report, that some fellow signatories were ‘totally recoverable [for the regime], either through the stimulus of publishing their work or through bribes'. He suggested the regime should target Pedro Laín Entralgo, a leading intellectual, on the basis that he was a weaker character than others in the group.

Spaniards argue over exactly when the
Transición
came to an end. Some say it still has not done so. They point out that the 1978 constitution was written to the
ruido de sables
, the sound of
sabre-rattling
from army officers threatening to rebel if too much of Francoism was ditched. The
Transición
, they say, will not properly be over until it is rewritten.

One moment that is a candidate for the end of the
Transición
, however, is the day the sabres stopped being rattled and were actually drawn in anger. Spaniards simply call it ‘
El 23-F
'. Proof that the
ruido de sables
was no joke was provided by the
comic-looking
, but distinctly unfunny, figure of Lieutenant Colonel Antonio Tejero on 23 February 1981. Dressed in the winged, shiny,
tricorn patent leather hat of the Civil Guard, a walrus moustache bursting over his upper lip, Tejero stormed Las Cortes that day with 200 men. The deputies were in the middle of an important parliamentary debate that was due to elect Leopoldo Calvo Sotelo to replace Suárez as prime minister for his centre-right party. They took almost all Spain's deputies hostage.

The American magazine
Time
dubbed Tejero ‘the tricorned coupster'. It was a clumsy sort of a coup attempt, and one that has never been fully, or satisfactorily, explained. The ‘coupsters' failed to turn off one of the television cameras – thus conserving a
valuable
record of what happened. Tejero's men peppered the ceiling of the debating ceiling with gunfire while most deputies cowered on the floor in response to Tejero's shouts of: ‘
¡Al suelo!
', ‘To the floor!' They also, however, shouted ‘
¡En nombre del Rey!
', ‘In the King's name!'

In Castelldefels, a beachside Barcelona dormitory town, I met a one-legged musician who told me he had taken part in the events of 23-F. His story added an element of comedy to the coup. The musician still had two legs at that time and was doing
military
service in Madrid. ‘One day we were called out into the parade ground and ordered to get into lorries. We had no idea where we were going. We ended up pulling up in front of Las Cortes. We sat there doing nothing, unsure of what was going on and awaiting orders. I had run out of cigarettes so, when the sergeant wasn't looking, I sneaked off to buy some. When I got back my unit had disappeared. I asked a policeman where they had gone. He pointed a finger to Las Cortes and said: “In there.” So I went and joined the rest of them.' I was never sure whether the musician had been part of the coup or part of the forces who took control of the building after Tejero gave himself up. But it was a sign of the confusion that reigned over two days in Madrid, in what was, in reality, a very unfunny episode.

King Juan Carlos stopped the coup. He ordered wavering
generals
to stay loyal. He told those who had backed the coup to take their men back to their barracks. In a famous broadcast to the nation he wore the uniform of the commander-in-chief of Spain's
armed forces. He told Spaniards he would not tolerate ‘actions or attitudes of anyone who wants to interrupt by force the
democratic
process that was decided when, by referendum, the
constitution
was voted on by the Spanish people'.

Tejero was soon abandoned to his fate by his fellow plotters. He had no option but to surrender. He and two dozen other plotters were sent to jail. These included General Alfonso Armada, who had been one of the king's closest advisers, and General Jaime Milans del Bosch, a swaggering hero of the Civil War siege of El Alcázar barracks in Toledo. As military commander of Valencia, he had ordered his tanks out onto the streets. Milans del Bosch was, thankfully, the only one of Spain's regional military
commanders
to do so. But it is clear that these were not the only
conspirators
. A whole raft of other figures, be they military, political or civilian, were simply waiting to see what happened. It was never clear who they were. The plotters obviously believed they had Juan Carlos on their side. There were even rumours that opposition politicians had been ready to form a ‘government of national unity' under the guidance of a mysterious, and
unidentified
, coup leader codenamed
Elefante Blanco
– White Elephant. The coup remains, to this day, one of the great mysteries of recent
Spanish
history. It has sparked dozens of theories about who was really behind it. ‘I do not understand why this has not been talked about in depth, why all the facts on it have not been published. Because the civilian part has remained silenced,' ex-
El País
editor Juan Luis Cebrián says, and Felipe González agrees, in a co-authored book. The Socialist leader, having been held hostage by Tejero, would, indirectly, become one of the greatest beneficiaries of the coup. He won a landslide electoral victory the following year.

Another question that has not been fully answered is why the plotters believed they were operating on the king's orders. Did they delude themselves entirely? Or did the king give them reasons to do so? Armada and Milans del Bosch both seemed convinced they had the king's backing to form a government of national unity led by Armada. ‘I had spoken to the monarch by phone several times and had even visited him,' Milans del Bosch later claimed in a prison
conversation with a controversial former army colonel, Amadeo Martínez Inglés. ‘He always told me I should trust Armada.

Armada's mistake was to let the fanatical and excitable Tejero lead the assault on the parliament. He ignored Armada and, instead of negotiating the formation of a government of national unity, demanded the creation of a military junta. Armada, an old tutor and friend of the king's, was sentenced to thirty years in prison in 1983. Five years later he received a pardon. This was
justified
on grounds of ill-health. He went on, however, to enjoy a sprightly old age.