Chapter 6: Chronicle of a death foretold: the fall of Suárez 1979–81

"After 1979, however, the continuing failure to solve the overwhelming economic and social problems that beset Spain, along with terrorism and military
subversion, took its toll. The press began to talk more and more of widespread desencanto or disenchantment with Suárez and UCD. It was inevitable perhaps that this would be reflected in a generalized disappointment that democracy had not fulfilled all the expectations put on it. However, the bunker mistakenly concluded that the reduction in popular enthusiasm meant an active rejection of the democratic regime. Plotting was thus intensified in the misplaced confidence that the desencanto of which the media talked somehow implied that, contrary to the evidence of electoral results and opinion polls, the people longed for a return to authoritarian government."

"Inside a single party, however, the fear of electoral isolation was less great and so they were more reckless and readier to unleash a destructive power struggle to impose their views on others.

Already in early 1979, Christian Democrats within UCD, like Landelino Lavilla and Miguel Herrero Rodríguez de Miñón, had been affronted by the concessions on divorce and education which Abril Martorell had made to the PSOE during his backstairs negotiations on the Constitution. There were also signs that UCD’s Social Democrats, led by Francisco Fernández Ordóñez, were negotiating their transfer to the PSOE"

"Rumours of a coup d’état were deafening. At a meeting between Generals Félix Alvarez Arenas and Luis Cano Portal and Colonel José Ignacio San Martín the need for
military intervention was discussed. 4 Even before the tragic events of 25 and 26 May, Suárez was retreating before the military ultras. In the cabinet reshuffle of April, he had appointed the civilian Agustín Rodríguez Sahagún, as Minister of Defence. Suárez had come to the conclusion that the build-up of hostility against General Gutiérrez Mellado made it essential to remove him from the firing line. Accordingly, he was pushed upstairs to be Vice-President of the Government with responsibility for Defence and Security. The authority which he had managed to concentrate in his Ministry was now effectively devolved back to the general staffs of the three services. The new Minister of Defence began to take to extremes the policy of concession to the military hard-liners. His efforts were to little avail. Already in May, their exasperation with the government had reached a new peak. The post of Chief of the General Staff of the Army had fallen vacant. An appointment by strict seniority would have put this crucial post into the hands of the ultras who dominated the upper echelons of the army.

It was inevitable that the bunker press would latch on to the issue of seniority simply because many of the older generals who had fought in the Civil War and then in the Blue Division in Russia were fervent anti-democrats. The government, however, saw the vacancy as an opportunity to further its own ambition of liberalizing the armed forces. The logical candidates, if seniority were the only qualification, were both extreme rightists, Jaime Milans del Bosch, Captain-General of Valencia, and Jesús González del Yerro, Captain-General of the Canary Islands. The normal appointments procedure called for consultation with the Consejo Superior del Ejército, which had duly pronounced in favour of Milans. Accordingly, furious indignat on greeted the appointment of General José Gabeiras Montero, an associate of Manuel Gutiérrez Mellado. Gabeiras had to be promoted from Divisional General to Lieutenant-General and then leap-frog over five other generals. His speech on taking possession of his new post took the theme of the need for the army to respect the Constitution. A further reinforcement of General Gutiérrez Mellado’s position took the form of the promotion of another relatively liberal general, Guillermo Quintana Lacaci to be Captain-General of Madrid. 5"

Basque Guernica Statute

"The verdict of the military hierarchy on Gutiérrez Mellado’s promotion policy, which had been partly executed by General Gómez Hortigüela, and on the terrorist incidents of 25 and 26 May, was made starkly clear at the trial of General Atarés Peña. The court martial for his attack on Gutiérrez Mellado during the attempted Galaxia coup in November 1978 was held on 28 May 1979. Atarés Peña’s offence fell within the sympathetic jurisdiction of the Valencia military region commanded by General Milans del Bosch. The court’s decision of not guilty was a judgement on General Gutiérrez Mellado rather than on the defendant. Significantly, both government and opposition were silent about the acquittal of Atarés. Instead, politicians chose to pay heed to frequent declarations by various generals that the army would always respect Article 8 of the Constitution which defined its role as defender of Spain’s constitutional order and territorial integrity. However, the sudden enthusiasm of the high command for this article of the Constitution was not unconnected with their erroneous belief that it provided them with a legal justification for intervening in politics. They chose to ignore the fact that any attempt to suffocate democracy would be by its very nature anti-constitutional. 6

In fact, the increasingly open and confident statements by generals about their readiness to defend the existing order were closely linked to a belief that negotiations to concede Basque and Catalan autonomy would seriously alter that order. Again, the generals seemed oblivious of the fact that under the Constitution, that order could be changed by the popular will. Suárez was in an appalling position, exposed to the hatred of both ultras and abertzales. In December 1978, the local councillors from all the municipalities of Euskadi had approved a draft text of an autonomy statute based on the one granted by the Second Republic. Some of its clauses were at odds with the Constitution and negotiations between the Basque parties and the government centred on these incompatibilities. The Partido Nacionalista Vasco was the most open to compromise. EIA and Euskadiko Eskerra were anxious for the ‘Statute of Guernica’, as the draft was known, to remain unchanged. Herri Batasuna was hostile and regarded the text as falling far short of its goal of the Alternativa KAS. Speed was clearly of the essence, yet Euskadi was baffled by the way in which the government consistently dragged its feet.

The UCD representatives on the Cortes Constitutional Committee encharged with the negotiations were split into hawks or ‘Constitucionalistas’ who stood by the letter of the Constitution and doves or ‘pactistas’ who were prepared to compromise. The most prominent ‘Constitutionalista’ was Gabriel Cisneros; the leading ‘pactista’ was Miguel Herrero Rodríguez de Miñón. Herrero’s Basque wife and his monarchist speculations about the possibility of reviving an ancient formula whereby an independent Euskadi would be united to Spain by agreement with the crown provoked suspicion among the more patriotic sections of UCD. Herrero was removed from the Committee on 23 June because he was considered to be too sympathetic with both Basques and Catalans. Even the closely concerned Minister for Territorial Administration, the ‘pactista’ Antonio Fontán Férez was rumoured to have been marginalized from the negotiations by Suárez. At this point, ETA-Político-Militar intervened in an effort to impel the government to speed up the process. A bombing campaign against Spanish beaches was started and an abortive attempt was made to kidnap Gabriel Cisneros, which left him seriously wounded. It was the clearest illustration imaginable of ETA-PM’s policy of using violence as a supplement to more conventional measures. On 18 July 1979, Suárez agreed the autonomy statute with the Basque leader or Lendakari, Carlos Garaicoetxea. 7

A referendum to ratify the statute was scheduled for 25 October. It was to be a watershed in Basque politics. The PNV and Euskadiko Eskerra campaigned for a Yes- vote. ETA-PM accepted the statute while ETA-M declared that the war would go on. Herri Batasuna denounced the text as having been concocted behind the backs of the people. It marked the beginning of the long process whereby ETA-M would eventually be isolated. On 14 July in the prison at Soria, ETA-PM and ETA-M prisoners came to blows over the statute. In the streets of San Sebastián, there were clashes between followers of Euskadiko Eskerra and militants of Herri Batasuna who threw money at them and called them traitors. Through-out the referendum campaign, ETA-M maintained a steady rhythm of murders and even made attempts on the lives of abertzales of Euskadiko Eskerra. Mario Onaindía, who had been one of the defendants at the Burgos trial of 1970 and had led EIA into Euskadiko Eskerra, accused Herri Batasuna and ETA- M of using Nazi methods. Both organizations were making increasingly clear a readiness to impose their views on the rest of the Basque population irrespective of its democratically expressed views. When the referendum was held, 60.7 per cent of those entitled to vote exercised their right. 81.14 per cent of those who voted did so affirmatively. It was a triumph for the PNV and Euskadiko Eskerra, and even, to a lesser extent, for Suárez. Abstentions and negative votes were slightly lower in the Basque Country than in the simultaneous Catalan referendum. 8

At last the road to peace in Euskadi could be discerned. ETA-PM was not to abandon arms for some years to come but its gradual commitment to conventional politics was greater than ever before. "

Another coup

"Just as the incident provoked by General Atarés Peña’s outburst against Gutiérrez Mellado in November 1978 was linked to the Galaxia plot, so too these outbursts seemed to be directed at alerting ultra sympathizers to the fact that action was imminent. After the Galaxia fiasco, the conviction had taken root among military ultras that success in such an operation depended on the participation of an important Madrid-based unit. Their thoughts centred on the Brunete Armoured Division, the DAC. The Division Acorazada was the key to the capital and, if it led, much of the rest of the army would follow. Since mid-1979 it had been commanded by an ultra, General Luis Torres Rojas. In fact, Torres Rojas was merely the latest stage in a long process whereby the DAC had become an ultra stronghold. Practically from the beginning of the transition to democracy, right- wingers had been requesting and obtaining postings to the DAC. Under the command of Milans del Bosch, who had a remarkable capacity to capture the unquestioning loyalty of his subordinates, the DAC had been brought into the bunker. Its Chief of Staff was Lieutenant-Colonel José Ignacio San Martín, who had been the head of Carrero Blanco’s intelligence service, the SIPG, and was devoted to helping Milans turn the DAC into the élite force necessary to ‘save Spain’. Curiously, San Martín’s appointment in 1979 was partly as a result of a recommendation from General Alfonso Armada. 12

Within a month of Torres Rojas taking command on 1 June 1979, a series of unauthorized manoeuvres began, with patrols carrying out exercises in the control of the nerve centres of Madrid, armoured vehicles dominating the main access roads and troop carriers patrolling the industrial belt. Officers of the DAC were burning with rage because they were convinced that the forthcoming referendum to approve the Basque autonomy statute meant acquiescence in separatism. It appears that Torres Rojas was at the heart of a planned coup to take place just before the referendum. The plan was for the Brigida Paracaídista (parachute brigade) of Alcalá de Henares, known as the BRIPAC, to seize the Moncloa Palace with helicopter support, while armoured vehicles of the DAC neutralized the capital. Having forced the government to resign, the conspirators aimed to form a military directorate under either General Santiago y Díaz de Mendívil or General Vega Rodríguez. The Cortes would be dissolved, the Communist Party banned and the regional autonomy process reversed. The continuity with the 1977 Játiva meeting and the 1978 Galaxia attempt was obvious. The conversion of normal manoeuvres by the BRIPAC on 21 October into a full-blown coup was, however, still beyond the ultras’ reach. In the first place, there was the practical difficulty of obtaining sufficient fuel and munitions which were kept in short supply by a suspicious government. Moreover, the plotters were still in a minority within the armed forces. There were large numbers of officers who would not lightly go along with the enormity of an assault on the democratic regime. The ultra press continued, however, to urge military intervention despite the missed opportunity. Nevertheless, the conspiracy bubbling around Torres Rojas came to an abrupt end on 24 January 1980 when he was removed from command of the DAC and sent to be military governor of La Coruña.

The way in which the government handled the Torres Rojas affair paved the way to the ultimate coup attempt of 1981. It was announced that the transfer had been planned even before Torres Rojas had taken over the DAC. This was patently absurd and did nothing to mitigate the annoyance felt in military circles that he was dismissed while absent from the unit on holiday with his family in Las Palmas.

...The nervous anxiety not to offend the army was compounded by the trial of the Galaxia conspirators in early May 1980. Tejero and the newly promoted Major Sáenz de Ynestrillas were sentenced to only seven and six months detention respectively. Given the time that they had already served while awaiting trial, this meant their immediate release. A greater encouragement for plotters could hardly have been imagined."

Weakness of the UCD and Suarez

"A week later, the Joint Chiefs of Staff rejected a petition for the return to the army of the democratic officers who had led the Union Militar Democrática. The Captain-General of Madrid, Guillermo Quintana Lacaci, by military standards a moderate, commented ominously that ‘the Army should respect democracy, not introduce it into its ranks’.14 The failure of the government to press for the revindication of the UMD was a further act of weakness which helped to convince the rightists within the armed forces that they could act with impunity"

"Discontent with the President was not confined to military circles. Terrorism, street crime, inflation and unemployment were all resented by a population which had expected perhaps more than was reasonable of the new democracy. The growing levels of electoral abstention throughout 1979 and into 1980 could be largely attributed to sheer weariness with an apparently endless round of electoral consultations. However, they also reflected a creeping feeling, born in part of Suárez’s silences, that real decisions were taken elsewhere. It became fashionable in 1980 to talk of desencanto and to undervalue the very real achievements of Adolfo Suárez. Not only had he steered the country through the immediate formal and legal transition to democracy, but since 1977 his governments had also worked to create the institutional framework of a democratic Spain. Unfortunately, the work of constitutional committees was not the sort of thing to excite intense popular enthusiasm. By 1980, encouraged by the ultra press and scurrilously sensationalist magazines like Interviú, some politically unsophisticated sections of the Spanish population began to feel that things had got worse since Franco’s time. Numerous commentators pointed out that little had changed, with many Francoists still in power thanks to their conversion to UCD. Suárez’s closest collaborators, first Rodolfo Martín Villa and later Fernando Abril Martorell, despite their great political acumen, seemed to the public to be grey men. Even the Prime Minister’s own charm and charisma could be used only selectively, above all on television and in private. That was partly the consequence of his acute dental problems which rendered talking extremely painful. None the less, his undoubted talents and skills seemed to have found adjustment to parliamentary life rather difficult. Moreover, the economic and political difficulties that he was facing were not susceptible to his special brand of behind-the-scenes negotiations.

The pressure on Suárez did not come only from the right. He was increasingly the target of concentrated attacks by the PSOE. After resolving his party’s inner crisis, Felipe
González set about defeating UCD which effectively meant trying to unsaddle Suárez himself. The PSOE’s efforts took two forms. The more public was the unrelenting criticism of Suárez’s inactivity and isolation together with attacks on his immediate circle of collaborators. In particular, virulent attacks were directed against Abril Martorell, whose economic policies were described by Felipe González as comparable to the efforts of a gypsy trying to teach a donkey not to eat.16 More privately, Socialist attempts to undermine Suárez consisted of continuing negotiations with the social democrat wing of UCD. This was facilitated by the fact that UCD was a party held together fundamentally by the enjoyment of power. It had capitalized on the popular hunger for change in Spain while offering guarantees of stability. However, many of its leaders barely tolerated the social democrat reformism of Fernández Ordóñez or even of Suárez himself. If they had restrained their social conservatism until now, it was to ensure their own political survival. They were inhibited at first by fears that, if they jumped overboard, Suárez’s ship might still right itself and sail off to greater things leaving them to paddle to oblivion. In 1980 the tide was beginning to turn against Suárez sufficiently to embolden some of his erstwhile supporters to reveal their incipient hostility."

"Internal divisions and the impression of incapacity and inactivity contributed to a series of damaging electoral reverses for UCD in Andalusia, the Basque Country, Catalonia and Galicia. These setbacks went far beyond the poor showing that might have been expected of a centralist party in government in such consultations. In the case of the Andalusian autonomy referendum, held on 28 February, the government could hardly have handled things worse. In mid-January, Suárez had decided to slow down the autonomy process outside Catalonia and the Basque Country. He thereby provoked the resignation of his Minister of Culture, Manuel Clavero Arévalo, the one-time Minister for the Regions. Suárez had then set off waves of outrage and ridicule by appointing as Clavero’s successor the ex-head of the Francoist censorship machine and ‘official’ biographer of the dictator, Ricardo de la Cierva. 19 Since Andalusia was already in the ‘fast lane’ of the autonomy process, via article 151 of the Constitution, UCD attempted to sabotage its progress by campaigning for abstention in the referendum. This astonishing stance led to Clavero and several other disillusioned UCD deputies from Andalusia resigning from the party to campaign for a Yes-vote. To encourage abstention, the government invented a virtually incomprehensible question: ‘Do you give your agreement to the ratification of the initiative contemplated in article 151 of the Constitution with regard to its being carried out according to the procedure established by the said article?

Despite the bizarre efforts of the government, 54 per cent of the four-and-a-half- million-strong Andalusian electorate voted Yes. They were not so much answering the referendum question itself but generally affirming their support for the autonomy statute. In a sense, the government was victorious because article 151 required that every one of the Andalusian provinces should register a majority of Yes-votes. Since one province, Almeria with only 42 per cent affirmative votes, did not reach the required level, Andalusian autonomy was redirected to the ‘slow lane’ of article 143 of the Constitution. This meant that an autonomy statute would have to be elaborated by an assembly of all the Andalusian Cortes deputies, senators and representatives of the eight provincial councils (diputaciones). The victory for UCD was a thoroughly tainted one. By putting party interest ahead of Andalusian sentiment, Suárez ensured that the party lost massive reserves of local support. The moral victory of the Andalusian left, the PSOE and the Partido Socialista de Andalucía, provoked bitter recrimination within UCD. For the first time, the myth of Suárez’s infallibility was broken and he was subject to severe criticism by both Rodolfo Martín Villa and Landelino Lavilla. 20"

"The elections held in the Basque provinces on 9 March were even more disappointing to Suárez than the Andalusian referendum. The Partido Nacionalista Vasco won with twenty-five of the sixty seats and 38 per cent of the vote. Ominously, Herri Batasuna came second with eleven seats and 16 per cent of the vote. Any satisfaction that Suárez might have derived from seeing the PSOE come third with only nine seats and 14 percent was swamped by the humiliation of UCD. The Prime Minister’s party was beaten into joint fourth place with Euskadiko Eskerra, gaining only six seats and losing 55,000 votes by comparison with the 1979 general elections. Suárez had broken out of his lethargy sufficiently to visit Euskadi and brave the placards and chants of ‘Suárez kampora’ (‘Go home!’). His intervention had been to no avail and the internal crisis within UCD was worse than ever. 23 Less than two weeks later, on 20 March, a third body blow was delivered in the form of the results of elections to the Catalan parliament. UCD trailed home fourth with only eighteen out of the 135 seats behind the twenty-five of the Communist PSUC, the thirty-three of the Socialist PSC and the forty-three of the victorious Convergència i Unió. It was little consolation that the PSOE/PSC had confidently hoped to win and yet had lost 277,000 votes in comparison with 1979. UCD had lost 286,000 votes. Nor was it great compensation for Suárez to be told by Tarradellas that a victory for Jordi Pujol’s conservative Convergència was effectively a triumph for UCD since they were bound to vote together in parliament. No matter how things were viewed, Suárez now faced a gigantic credibility crisis. There were rumours that he would invite the PSOE to join a coalition but the Socialists rejected the idea before it got off the ground. They were, in any case, toying with the idea of subjecting Suárez to a motion of censure in the Cortes.24

UCD was in dramatic trouble. One poll showed that slightly more than half of those who had voted for the party in the March 1979 general elections had decided not to do so again. Fewer than 25 per cent of those polled expressed approval of Suárez’s record in government. The key to this decline was the popular feeling of desgobierno, of not being governed at all. A minor cut in inflation had been achieved by monetarist policies but at the price of substantial increases in unemployment. During the winter of 1979–80, energy restrictions had seen the heating systems dramatically turned down in homes, offices and factories, the consequence of which was a major upsurge of unpopularity for the government.

...In part, Suárez seemed to be trying to defuse the situation by treating ETA as if it were no more than a minor irritant and by ignoring the fact that the extreme right was virtually on a military footing. To most observers, however, it appeared as if he were simply doing nothing...His absences even from cabinet meetings were increasingly frequent."

"To some extent, the Prime Minister was cut off from the bulk of the political élite by a lack of confidence deriving from his own exiguous educational achievements. Many of them were ex-university professors, legal experts or men who had come top in their oposiciones, the competitive entry examinations for the Spanish civil service. Accordingly, he was said to feel panic at the prospect of facing parliament or the cabinet, in contrast to his consummately assured appearances in the controlled environment of television. 26 He thus remained in his office, cocooned by muzak and screened from the real political world by an inner circle of advisers known as the ‘plumbers’ (fontaneros). The Watergate-inspired nickname derived from a belief that they constituted a small espionage service working for Suárez. They included his brother-in-law and personal private secretary, Aurelio Delgado; his chief Cabinet Secretary, Alberto Aza; the economist, Alberto Recarte, who was alleged to keep files on the UCD leadership; and the one-time Secretary of State for Information and later Governor-General of Catalonia, Josep Melià. The fontaneros almost certainly caused Suárez more problems than they solved. Their biased and sycophantic advice intensified his feelings of besieged solitude. They formed a barrier around him which cut him off from the rest of the party élite. Suárez’s long-standing friend, Fernando Abril Martorell, was particularly alienated by their existence.27

...UCD deputies were beginning not to turn up for Cortes debates and some even began to vote against the government.28 "

""The dissatisfaction of Garrigues and Fernández Ordóñez was ample proof of the inadequacy of the cabinet changes to deal with the crisis which had arisen out of the electoral defeats and the continuing problems of ETA and ultra-rightist violence. On 21 May, in an effort to capitalize on the general disillusion with Suárez, the PSOE tabled its motion of censure. Felipe González delivered a blistering but dignified attack on the failings of the UCD in government. The cabinet survived the motion in the subsequent debate held between 28 and 30 May only because of the abstentions of Alianza Popular and Convergència i Unió. In dramatic contrast to Suárez’s inability to repair his tarnished image, Felipe González was able, in the first parliamentary debate televised in its entirety in Spain, to enhance his prestige with a performance of presidential quality.

"Public statements by Lavilla in the early summer made it clear that he regarded himself as a viable substitute for Suárez. 31...when challenged directly by Abril and by Suárez’s new right-hand man, the Minister of the Presidency, Rafael Arias Salgado, none of them had the courage to play Brutus. In part, the dissidents’ failure of will derived from the fact that Lavilla was at best a compromise candidate. They were also swayed by arguments to the effect that the removal of Suárez could only favour the PSOE. Finally, they were given pause by the enormity of overthrowing the popularly elected President by exactly the same kind of back-room manoeuvre which was cited as his greatest fault. 32 None the less, the writing was on the wall and Suárez was obliged to make concessions to the demands for a more collective leadership or direction colegiada as they termed it."

"By the autumn of 1980, Suárez found himself isolated from his cabinet, his party and the press. The working agreement with the PSOE was in tatters. Felipe González declared that the Prime Minister no longer had a meaningful contribution to make"

at a time when public opinion in Euskadi was rallying around the Statute of Guernica and moving away from commitment to the Alternativa KAS, the government’s apathy with regard to Euskadi bordered on criminal neglect.

The consequent resurgence in mid-1980 of both wings of ETA could hardly have been more alarming. As in the previous year, ETA-PolíticoMilitar carried out an unsuccessful bombing campaign against tourist resorts to back its demands for the release of prisoners and for the acceleration of an autonomy referendum for Navarre. Despite its failure, the inconvenience, fear and resentment generated by this disruption of the holiday season contributed to the widespread feeling that the government was incompetent."

"A chill ran through Spain’s political class since possession of such enormous quantities of explosive substantiated ETA-M’s announced readiness to unleash total war against the Spanish State to secure the inclusion into Euskadi of the province of Navarre. ETA-M and Herri Batasuna shared an almost imperialist attitude to Navarre. HB meetings were often punctuated with the shout Nafarroa Euskadi da (Navarre is Euskadi). The results of the 1979 elections in Navarre showed that the vast majority of the province’s population had no desire to be part of Euskadi. It was evidence of ETA-M’s increasing contempt for democracy that the annexationist ambition quickly led to grenade attacks on Civil Guard posts in Navarre

...The ETA aspiration of annexing Navarre provoked apoplexy among senior army officers who regarded Navarre as an inalienable part of Spain as well as a cradle of right- wing patriotic values. Navarre had provided Franco with the Requetés, the ferocious Carlist militia which had accompanied his armies during the Civil War, and had enjoyed an especially privileged position under his regime."

"Military discontent was, in any case, boiling up again during the summer of 1980. The cause of their anger was a draft military amnesty law put before the Cortes in June. The project aimed at facilitating the reintegration into the ranks of those officers who had fought with the Republic during the Civil War and of the members of the Union Militar Democrática. Anger in army quarters was reported to be even more intense than it had been after the legalization of the PCE."

"Suárez had his back to the wall but he rallied one last time. On 9 September he reshuffled his cabinet to create the so-called ‘government of the barons...The ‘government of the barons’ was well received by the press...However, it merely prolonged rather than resolved the crisis. A central problem derived from the absence of Abril Martorell, the President’s erstwhile parliamentary shield. ’"

"By dint of prior agreements with both Catalans and Andalusians, Suárez managed to survive a parliamentary vote of confidence on 18 September, although he was given a rough ride in the Cortes"

"The situation soon began to worsen inexorably. Conspiracy was rife in the army at various levels. A number of colonels were discussing the possibility of emulating the recent coup in Turkey and establishing a junta to smash ETA."

"On 17 October, twenty-six of the most prominent ultras in Spain met in Madrid to discuss finance and civilian support for a projected coup. The ultra press was muttering darkly about a so-called ‘Operation De Gaulle’. This was almost certainly an obscure reference to the activities of General Alfonso Armada. Since the beginning of 1980, Armada had been Military Governor of Lérida. He was trying to drum up support for a non-violent substitution of UCD by a government of national salvation under his own presidency. On 22 October, at a lunch in the home of the Socialist Alcalde of Lérida, Antonio Ciurana, Armada went so far as to approach Enrique Múgica of the PSOE and Joan Raventós of the PSC. Felipe González was immediately informed and passed on the information to Suárez."

"Suárez’s bankruptcy was graphically exposed on 23 October 1980. On that day, forty- eight children and three adults were killed in an accidental propane gas explosion at the village school of Ortuella in Vizcaya. At the same time, the ETA-M wave of killings culminated in the assassination of three Basque UCD members. The murders were carried out by an ETA-M offshoot known as the comandos autónomos. In the midst of these horrors, Suárez displayed an icy indifference. He remained coldly in the Moncloa Palace and refrained from making any parliamentary statement about either the disaster or the terrorist attacks. He neither visited the stricken village nor attended the funerals of his party colleagues. He was reported to have said that, if he went to one funeral, he would have to go to them all. In stark contrast, Queen Sofía flew immediately to Bilbao to be with the families of the victims of Ortuella. Suárez’s seeming callousness was loudly condemned by the press and the three principal opposition parties. 4

At a time when opinion in the Basque Country was finally moving against ETA, Suárez seemed to be displaying public contempt for the Basques. "

"The year to the end of October 1980 had seen 114 deaths as a result of terrorism, an average of one victim every three days, including fifty-seven civilians and twenty-seven civil guards, eleven army officers and nine policemen...Under the weight of ETA threats to themselves and their families, several of its senior figures were leaving the area and going to live elsewhere in Spain. The sense that the government was not governing had reached its highest point"

"Yet, paradoxically, the violence of the autumn of 1980 was finally to provoke a reaction in the Basque Country itself. On 9 November, a silent all-party demonstration of 30,000 marched through San Sebastián, local PSOE, UCD and PNV leaders linking arms. Herri Batasuna supporters erected a road block, chanted ‘PNV traidor (‘PNV traitor’) and ‘Gora ETA-Militarra’ (‘Long live ETA-Militar’) and stoned the procession. The marchers, however, turned upon them and finished the demonstration successfully. It was an important turning point. Increasing numbers of businessmen were also beginning to refuse to pay the ‘revolutionary tax’ demanded by ETA. 49 If once upon a time, in the belief that Madrid could not supply justice, the Basque population had looked to ETA to do so, that time had gone. Within a week, while ETA-M continued to kill policemen, a Basque Peace Front (Frente por la Paz) was set up by the PSOE, the PNV, Euskadiko Eskerra, the PCE-EPK or Basque Communist Party, UCD and the Carlists. They were brought together by an awareness that ETA’s assault on Spain’s democratic regime had to be countered before it was too late. However, it was only a tentative beginning. Euskadiko Eskerra could not fully reconcile itself to collaboration with ‘Spanish’ parties like the PSOE and UCD for fear of losing support to Herri Batasuna. The PNV was also to encounter some difficulties in selling the idea to its militants and, in mysterious circumstances, eventually pulled out of the Frente. In any case, as Mario Onaindía, the Euskadiko Eskerra leader, suggested, it was difficult to avoid the suspicion that the PNV was less than totally hostile to ETA terrorism. Indeed, the PNV always side-stepped a full condemnation of the violence which ultimately facilitated the negotiation of more concessions from Madrid. 50"

"Against the background of army sedition and turmoil in Euskadi, the apparent unconcern of the government was scandalous. Suárez was in fact dramatically preoccupied by the situation inside UCD. The party was a cauldron of conspiracy. Infuriated by Fernández Ordóñez’s divorce reform plans, the Christian Democrat wing went on to the attack. The post of UCD portavoz parlamentario (parliamentary spokesman and effectively president of the parliamentary party and government chief whip) needed filling after the resignation of the previous incumbent, Antonio Jiménez Blanco. Suárez’s party apparatus had a candidate, Santiago Rodríguez Miranda, ready. The críticos went into action and, to assert their power and teach the party leadership a lesson, they mobilized to elect instead the brilliantly vituperative Christian Democrat and one-time follower of Gil Robles, Miguel Herrero Rodríguez de Miñón. He campaigned on the need for the democratization of the party. Herrero compared Suárez’s mode of leadership of both the country and the UCD as Movimientista, that is to say redolent of Franco and the Falange. He gained the post by 103 votes to 45 in a vote which had curiously seen Martín Villa allow his followers a free choice. This was interpreted as clear evidence that he had abandoned the Suárez cause.53

A manifesto signed by 200 UCD críticos made public the extent of the Christian Democrat assault on Suárez. However, increasingly frequent contacts between the críticos and Fraga’s Alianza Popular and reports of substantial bank support suggested that democratization of UCD was not precisely the main object of the operation. The idea behind the so-called Operation Quirinale was to push UCD towards emulation of the Italian Democrazia Cristiana, a rightwards swing opposed by Suárez.

Under the circumstances, it was hardly surprising that Suárez began to consider resignation. Physically and psychologically exhausted after leading Spain through the transition, he had little stomach for a fight with his erstwhile colleagues. His immediate entourage, the remaining fontaneros and the ever-faithful Abril Martorell, had worked hard and were confident that Suárez would be able to carry the Congress with him. Nevertheless, over the weekend of 24–25 January 1981, Suárez was reaching the momentous decision to resign. It appears that seventeen senior generals had met on 23 January to discuss the need for a military intervention in politics...Suárez had come to the conclusion that victory in the Congress would at best gain him five or six months’ respite. Conflict would soon break out again over divorce reform and the question of incorporating Catholic universities into the state system. By then, one of the main instruments of party discipline—the letters of resignation signed by all UCD parliamentary deputies—would be useless since the Cortes would have gone beyond the point after which deputies could still be substituted.

Thereafter, with the party crumbling, there would be the prospect of coalition government, an outcome that Suárez could not countenance. In any case, opinion polls suggested that only 26 percent of the population supported him as against 43 per cent for Felipe González. Having decided that there could be no real unity in UCD under his leadership, he felt that there was no alternative to resignation and planned to make an announcement at the Party Congress. As he told his closest collaborators in the UCD leadership, he had no more rabbits to pull out of his top-hat. 56"

"rumours were fed by a line in the resignation speech where Suárez said ‘I do not want the democratic regime of co-existence to be once more a parenthesis on the history of Spain.’ Although Suárez was later to deny that there had been military pressure, the remark was an unmistakable reference to the army’s rising against the Second Republic in 1936. 57

In the light of what was to happen less than a month after his resignation, it is difficult not to see Suárez’s departure as, in some way, a response to military pressure. However, his courageous behaviour during the military seizure of the Cortes on 23 February 1981 when he confronted the armed civil guards who had burst into the chamber eliminates any suggestion that he had thrown in the towel out of cowardice. He was profoundly exhausted and had done all that he could."

"He had come to the Moncloa Palace at a time when Spain was in a ferment of strikes and demonstrations. Fatal conflict between the regime and the opposition seemed to many to be inevitable. Suárez had no democratic legitimacy and was no more than the nominee of the King. There had been prophets of doom ready then to predict that he would be lucky to last more than a few weeks. Four and a half years later, he left the presidential palace with terrorism, subversion and popular disenchantment the order of the day. None the less, his very departure in response to the wishes of his own party and to hostile opinion polls was a reflection of the enormous changes that Spain had undergone during his period in office. In 1976 and 1977, he had exchanged the sterile obstructionism of the Francoist élite for an open and positive flexibility. Between 1977 and 1980, even despite his tendency to prefer secret negotiations to parliamentary business, and at the cost of many regrettable delays, remarkable progress was made towards the creation of a constitutional democracy, the nurturing of parliamentary co-existence and the concession of regional autonomy. Whatever Suárez’s shortcomings, neither the lunacy of Tejero nor that of ETA should be allowed to deprive him of his place in the history of Spanish democracy."

Chapter 7: Out of the ashes: the consolidation of democracy: 1981–2