Under siege: Hero hostages and the moment that nearly changed Spain's history in 1981
23/02/2021
BARELY 16 hours, but the whole of Spain gripped with terror and high-profile lives on the line – this day, February 23, was one of the longest nights in recent living memory 40 years ago. And King Felipe VI, masked and addressing the public, remembers it well – he had just turned 13 and his dad was among those attempting to negotiate with his rebelling Armed Forces, before reassuring the nation on TV just hours before the siege was over.
The attempted coup d'état in 1981 still sends a chill down the spines of Spaniards old enough to recall it first-hand, even now, four decades later – not least Queen Letizia's father.
Future Queen's dad recalls fearing for his family's lives
Recently retired, reporter Jesús Ortiz revealed today how he was on his way home to Oviedo, Asturias, when he heard the terrifying headlines and immediately feared for the safety of his three girls.
Telma, nine, Letizia, eight and Érika, six – who committed suicide in 2007, aged 31 – were at ballet class with their mum, Paloma Rocasolano, in Marisa Fanjul's studio.
And the studio was just one floor above the headquarters of one of Spain's main unions, the Labourers' Commissions (CCOO), one of the targets of the coup.
Ortiz turned round immediately, headed back to the studio, and tore up the stairs.
“I told the family, come on, we're going now, hurry – and I quickly told the ballet school leader what I was afraid of,” he told the celebrity news magazine Lecturas.
Once his wife and daughters were safely home, Ortiz's professional instinct kicked in and he wanted to go out into the streets and tell everyone what was happening – but his editor stopped him, as the situation was still very delicate and one false move could mean lives were lost and the whole of Spain under military rule, just six years after it had come out of a 37-year dictatorship.
Not everyone backed democracy
The coup arose when things came to a head, having been simmering below the surface as Spain underwent some of the most rapid and ground-breaking changes in its modern history – the Transition from tyrannical, fascist rule to a fully-fledged democracy.
General Franco's death in 1975, followed almost straight away by Juan Carlos I being proclaimed King, and then Adolfo Suárez's being named government president in 1976 marked the beginning of a new era; in 1977, Spain held its first democratic elections, and the following year, on December 6, the Constitution was signed – and the exact same text remains in force today.
Suárez formed his third government four months later, in April 1979, but was already in the firing line: Former supporters of Franco, in particular, including various sectors of the Armed Forces, opposed the new régime, and their resistance to a democratic system, combined with the teething problems involved in the new territorial organisation of the State – what, ultimately, became the 17 autonomously-governed regions of today, or 19, including the northern African cities of Ceuta and Melilla – the relatively-new threat of the Basque separatist terrorists, ETA, and Spain's being stricken with a major financial and economic crisis escalated into tensions that had long threatened to boil over before they finally did so.
A planned coup aiming to dethrone Suárez ahead of the Constitution's signing was thwarted before it got off the ground, and its main instigator, Antonio Tejero, sentenced to seven months in jail.
This only incensed him further, and led to his bursting into Parliament at 18.23 mainland Spain time on February 23, 1981, just as Adolfo Suárez had resigned as president and his successor, Leopoldo Calvo-Sotelo y Bustelo, was about to be sworn in.
MPs risk their lives and face down 200 armed officers
The investiture voting round had just begun when around 200 Guardia Civil officers, led by Tejero – machine-gun at the ready – stormed into the room, ordered everyone to freeze and then to get down on the ground.
Deputy president of the government and the highest-ranking military officer present, Manuel Gutiérrez Mellado got up from the floor, marched straight up to Tejero and ordered him to stand firm and hand over his weapon; Suárez, who has long been held to be one of the heroes of the moment, moved to help him, and in the ensuing scuffle, Tejero fired a shot in the air, and dozens of his men followed suit – 37, in fact, according to subsequent official claims, was the number of reports heard.
Gutiérrez Mellado – at the time, considered to be an 'old man'; he was 68 – stood his ground, whilst Suárez, along with MP Santiago Carrillo of the left-wing Communist Party of Spain (PCE), remained obstinately in their seats.
The first civilian said to have been allowed to leave the building was Carmen Fernández de Córdoba y Calleja, Gutiérrez Mellado's niece.
Nearly an hour and a quarter into the siege, Suárez got up and requested to talk to the coup leader, remaining firm in his resolve despite warnings from Tejero and one of the officers threatening the other MPs with a machine-gun. Finally, after a tense five minutes, Tejero frogmarched Suárez into the ushers' quarters.
Left alone together, Suárez demanded to know 'what kind of madness is all this', to which Tejero responded, “It's all for the good of Spain,” and, in the face of Suárez's persistence, lost his temper and said, “What's it to you? You're not president of anything any more.”
The siege in Parliament was caught on camera, since reporter Pedro Francisco Martín of TVE – at the time, Spain's only television channel – had been filming the investiture and had let his reel continue to run, although the footage was not broadcast until it was all over.
Meanwhile, in Valencia...
At the same time as Suárez was risking his life confronting Tejero, 350 kilometres east, in Valencia, Captain General Jaime Milans del Bosch and his troops had taken the city, declared a State of Siege, surrounding the centre with 50 tanks and 2,000 soldiers, training their weapons on the regional government and city council buildings.
This, dubbed 'Operation Turia' – after the river that once ringed the city but had since been diverted and turned into botanical gardens – fuelled a domino effect across the nation, with military factions staging uprisings in Sevilla, Barcelona and Zaragoza and expressing their support for Milans del Bosch as national leader.
Meanwhile, just outside Valencia city, Armed Forces lorries had set out from the military bases in Bétera and Paterna and a column of blacked-out vehicles was heading for the air-base in Manises – what is now Valencia airport.
But dissenting sectors of the Army had placed themselves firmly on the side of the King and the democratically-elected government – the military regions of Madrid and Valladolid, the Mediterranean Maritime Zone and the General Captaincies of the Balearic and Canary Islands radioed to Juan Carlos I to tell him they were 'at his disposal for whatever he wanted'.
King addresses the nation: “Just trust me”
Juan Carlos I's refusal to support the coup was key to its being thwarted, and he appeared live on TV at exactly 01.14 in the morning in Captain General uniform and in his capacity as supreme head of the Armed Forces of Spain – a rôle which the country's monarch automatically holds, which is currently in the hands of his son Felipe VI and will eventually pass to the latter's daughter, Princess Leonor.
Addressing 'all the people of Spain, briefly and concisely', Juan Carlos I called for calm and for the public to 'trust him' in light of the 'extraordinary circumstances' of the present moment.
Mobilising the Army, Juan Carlos I ordered Milans del Bosch to lay down his arms and leave Valencia, and told his TV audience that 'any military action that needed to be taken' required the approval of the Head of State.
“The Crown, symbol of continuity and national unity, cannot tolerate in any manner the actions or attitudes of persons who would attempt to forcibly interrupt the democratic process that the Constitution, voted for by the people of Spain, provided for via referendum,” the King concluded.
By 05.45 on February 24, Milans del Bosch had duly called off the State of Siege.
Female MPs were permitted to leave the Parliament building at 10.00, but the men did not get out until 12.15, after long negotiations with Tejero that led to his agreeing to walk out, provided no journalists were present and none of the Guardia Civil officers below the rank of Lieutenant would face trial.
The deal has been hitherto referred to as the 'Bonnet Pact', since it was signed by all parties to it on the bonnet of a Land Rover.
Margaret Thatcher: “It's an act of terrorism”
Reactions from elsewhere in the world did not take long in making themselves heard. Whilst the USA remained doggedly neutral – Secretary of State General Alexander Haig called it an 'in-house issue' which was 'personal to Spain', only changing his message to one of 'congratulations' on the 'triumph of democracy' once it had been confirmed, without doubt, that the coup had failed – the European Union, then known as the European Economic Community (EEC), harshly condemned the siege.
Spain was, at the time, negotiating its entry into the EEC, and was finally accepted into the bloc in 1986.
Among the most vocal of the EEC member States was the UK, whose prime minister Margaret Thatcher called the coup 'an act of terrorism'.
Milans del Bosch was sentenced to a year in jail and Tejero to 15 years, although they had initially been facing 30 years behind bars each.
Another 12 members of the Armed Forces, 17 Guardia Civil officers and one civilian were sentenced, although they were all either pardoned or released before the end of the decade, except Tejero, who was released on probation on December 3, 1996.
Where are they all now?
During his time behind bars, Tejero wrote his memoirs, studied languages, took a degree in geography and history, and took up painting – which he still does, as a hobby.
Aged 88 and living partly in Madrid and partly in his beach apartment in Torre del Mar, near Vélez-Málaga on the Costa del Sol, married and with six children – one of whom is a priest – Tejero largely keeps a low profile nowadays, unless something happens in politics that he disagrees with.
This included the regional statute of Catalunya's being signed in 2006, which sparked a letter from the retired Lieutenant Colonel to the newspaper Melilla Hoy, former president of Catalunya Artur Mas' determination to call an independence referendum, where Tejero reported him, in 2012, for 'conspiracy and attempted sedition', and the exhuming of General Franco from the Valle de los Caídos ('Valley of the Fallen'), when Tejero appeared at the dictator's new burial site, in October 2019, to protest about his being moved.
Back in 2011, when Spain commemorated the 30th anniversary of the coup, Tejero opted to shelter himself from the 'media circus' – but failed, because the then 78-year-old was tracked by journalists to a luxury hotel in Los Llanos de Ariadne on the Canarian island of La Palma.
Adolfo Suárez, having narrowly escaped his behind-closed-doors conflab with Tejero alive, remained living for another 33 years. Still a much-lauded and well-loved public figurehead, he was often called upon to make speeches and address conferences, but in 2003, aged 71, those present noticed he had become uncharacteristically absent-minded, tripping over his words, repeating sentences and forgetting his lines.
This was apparently the start of early-onset Alzheimer's, although his children said later they had started to notice 'signs' up to 10 years earlier.
Within less than a decade, Suárez could not remember ever having been president of Spain and, although he loved all the time he spent with his grandchildren, did not know who they were.
He passed away in early 2014 as a result of his dementia, but Madrid's Barajas airport was named after him.
King Juan Carlos I abdicated the same year as Suárez's death after he and the Royal family had started to fall from favour due to a string of media 'embarrassments', including his son-in-law, Iñaki Urdangarín facing charges for public fund embezzlement and the monarch's daughter, the Infanta Cristina, being investigated in its connection – both have since lost their titles of Duke and Duchess of Palma, Cristina lives in Geneva with the couple's children, and Urdangarín is in prison – and photos of Juan Carlos I himself shown hunting elephants in Botswana.
The King – a national hero for one generation and an unpopular figurehead for another who had either been very young or not yet born at the time of the coup – decided the Royal family could use some young blood and a fresh face; that year, he passed the crown to Prince Felipe of Asturias, who is now King Felipe VI.
Meanwhile, Juan Carlos I has been living in Abu Dhabi for six months after a court investigation dating back to 2011, linked to a Spanish railway-building contract to the holy city of Mecca, the Saudi King, Juan Carlos I's good friend and former countess Corinna Larssen, and offshore funds in Panamá came back to haunt him.
“Courage and loyalty”
As yet, the inquiry has not been concluded, so Juan Carlos I has not been charged – but this year is the first 'landmark' anniversary of the February 23 coup where he has not been present.
But his son made sure he was in Spain in spirit during his commemorative speech, describing the 'firmness and authority' his father displayed, which were 'determining factors in the defence and triumph of democracy'.
Felipe VI referred to his father, to the late Adolfo Suárez, and to 'a long list of men and women, civil and military' who 'offered a true example of courage and loyalty to the institutions of the State and the Constitution' on a day that could have changed everything for Spain but which, thankfully, only served to reaffirm the nation as one where freedom, democracy, peace and human rights were unbreakable values.
Related Topics
BARELY 16 hours, but the whole of Spain gripped with terror and high-profile lives on the line – this day, February 23, was one of the longest nights in recent living memory 40 years ago. And King Felipe VI, masked and addressing the public, remembers it well – he had just turned 13 and his dad was among those attempting to negotiate with his rebelling Armed Forces, before reassuring the nation on TV just hours before the siege was over.
The attempted coup d'état in 1981 still sends a chill down the spines of Spaniards old enough to recall it first-hand, even now, four decades later – not least Queen Letizia's father.
Future Queen's dad recalls fearing for his family's lives
Recently retired, reporter Jesús Ortiz revealed today how he was on his way home to Oviedo, Asturias, when he heard the terrifying headlines and immediately feared for the safety of his three girls.
Telma, nine, Letizia, eight and Érika, six – who committed suicide in 2007, aged 31 – were at ballet class with their mum, Paloma Rocasolano, in Marisa Fanjul's studio.
And the studio was just one floor above the headquarters of one of Spain's main unions, the Labourers' Commissions (CCOO), one of the targets of the coup.
Ortiz turned round immediately, headed back to the studio, and tore up the stairs.
“I told the family, come on, we're going now, hurry – and I quickly told the ballet school leader what I was afraid of,” he told the celebrity news magazine Lecturas.
Once his wife and daughters were safely home, Ortiz's professional instinct kicked in and he wanted to go out into the streets and tell everyone what was happening – but his editor stopped him, as the situation was still very delicate and one false move could mean lives were lost and the whole of Spain under military rule, just six years after it had come out of a 37-year dictatorship.
Not everyone backed democracy
The coup arose when things came to a head, having been simmering below the surface as Spain underwent some of the most rapid and ground-breaking changes in its modern history – the Transition from tyrannical, fascist rule to a fully-fledged democracy.
General Franco's death in 1975, followed almost straight away by Juan Carlos I being proclaimed King, and then Adolfo Suárez's being named government president in 1976 marked the beginning of a new era; in 1977, Spain held its first democratic elections, and the following year, on December 6, the Constitution was signed – and the exact same text remains in force today.
Suárez formed his third government four months later, in April 1979, but was already in the firing line: Former supporters of Franco, in particular, including various sectors of the Armed Forces, opposed the new régime, and their resistance to a democratic system, combined with the teething problems involved in the new territorial organisation of the State – what, ultimately, became the 17 autonomously-governed regions of today, or 19, including the northern African cities of Ceuta and Melilla – the relatively-new threat of the Basque separatist terrorists, ETA, and Spain's being stricken with a major financial and economic crisis escalated into tensions that had long threatened to boil over before they finally did so.
A planned coup aiming to dethrone Suárez ahead of the Constitution's signing was thwarted before it got off the ground, and its main instigator, Antonio Tejero, sentenced to seven months in jail.
This only incensed him further, and led to his bursting into Parliament at 18.23 mainland Spain time on February 23, 1981, just as Adolfo Suárez had resigned as president and his successor, Leopoldo Calvo-Sotelo y Bustelo, was about to be sworn in.
MPs risk their lives and face down 200 armed officers
The investiture voting round had just begun when around 200 Guardia Civil officers, led by Tejero – machine-gun at the ready – stormed into the room, ordered everyone to freeze and then to get down on the ground.
Deputy president of the government and the highest-ranking military officer present, Manuel Gutiérrez Mellado got up from the floor, marched straight up to Tejero and ordered him to stand firm and hand over his weapon; Suárez, who has long been held to be one of the heroes of the moment, moved to help him, and in the ensuing scuffle, Tejero fired a shot in the air, and dozens of his men followed suit – 37, in fact, according to subsequent official claims, was the number of reports heard.
Gutiérrez Mellado – at the time, considered to be an 'old man'; he was 68 – stood his ground, whilst Suárez, along with MP Santiago Carrillo of the left-wing Communist Party of Spain (PCE), remained obstinately in their seats.
The first civilian said to have been allowed to leave the building was Carmen Fernández de Córdoba y Calleja, Gutiérrez Mellado's niece.
Nearly an hour and a quarter into the siege, Suárez got up and requested to talk to the coup leader, remaining firm in his resolve despite warnings from Tejero and one of the officers threatening the other MPs with a machine-gun. Finally, after a tense five minutes, Tejero frogmarched Suárez into the ushers' quarters.
Left alone together, Suárez demanded to know 'what kind of madness is all this', to which Tejero responded, “It's all for the good of Spain,” and, in the face of Suárez's persistence, lost his temper and said, “What's it to you? You're not president of anything any more.”
The siege in Parliament was caught on camera, since reporter Pedro Francisco Martín of TVE – at the time, Spain's only television channel – had been filming the investiture and had let his reel continue to run, although the footage was not broadcast until it was all over.
Meanwhile, in Valencia...
At the same time as Suárez was risking his life confronting Tejero, 350 kilometres east, in Valencia, Captain General Jaime Milans del Bosch and his troops had taken the city, declared a State of Siege, surrounding the centre with 50 tanks and 2,000 soldiers, training their weapons on the regional government and city council buildings.
This, dubbed 'Operation Turia' – after the river that once ringed the city but had since been diverted and turned into botanical gardens – fuelled a domino effect across the nation, with military factions staging uprisings in Sevilla, Barcelona and Zaragoza and expressing their support for Milans del Bosch as national leader.
Meanwhile, just outside Valencia city, Armed Forces lorries had set out from the military bases in Bétera and Paterna and a column of blacked-out vehicles was heading for the air-base in Manises – what is now Valencia airport.
But dissenting sectors of the Army had placed themselves firmly on the side of the King and the democratically-elected government – the military regions of Madrid and Valladolid, the Mediterranean Maritime Zone and the General Captaincies of the Balearic and Canary Islands radioed to Juan Carlos I to tell him they were 'at his disposal for whatever he wanted'.
King addresses the nation: “Just trust me”
Juan Carlos I's refusal to support the coup was key to its being thwarted, and he appeared live on TV at exactly 01.14 in the morning in Captain General uniform and in his capacity as supreme head of the Armed Forces of Spain – a rôle which the country's monarch automatically holds, which is currently in the hands of his son Felipe VI and will eventually pass to the latter's daughter, Princess Leonor.
Addressing 'all the people of Spain, briefly and concisely', Juan Carlos I called for calm and for the public to 'trust him' in light of the 'extraordinary circumstances' of the present moment.
Mobilising the Army, Juan Carlos I ordered Milans del Bosch to lay down his arms and leave Valencia, and told his TV audience that 'any military action that needed to be taken' required the approval of the Head of State.
“The Crown, symbol of continuity and national unity, cannot tolerate in any manner the actions or attitudes of persons who would attempt to forcibly interrupt the democratic process that the Constitution, voted for by the people of Spain, provided for via referendum,” the King concluded.
By 05.45 on February 24, Milans del Bosch had duly called off the State of Siege.
Female MPs were permitted to leave the Parliament building at 10.00, but the men did not get out until 12.15, after long negotiations with Tejero that led to his agreeing to walk out, provided no journalists were present and none of the Guardia Civil officers below the rank of Lieutenant would face trial.
The deal has been hitherto referred to as the 'Bonnet Pact', since it was signed by all parties to it on the bonnet of a Land Rover.
Margaret Thatcher: “It's an act of terrorism”
Reactions from elsewhere in the world did not take long in making themselves heard. Whilst the USA remained doggedly neutral – Secretary of State General Alexander Haig called it an 'in-house issue' which was 'personal to Spain', only changing his message to one of 'congratulations' on the 'triumph of democracy' once it had been confirmed, without doubt, that the coup had failed – the European Union, then known as the European Economic Community (EEC), harshly condemned the siege.
Spain was, at the time, negotiating its entry into the EEC, and was finally accepted into the bloc in 1986.
Among the most vocal of the EEC member States was the UK, whose prime minister Margaret Thatcher called the coup 'an act of terrorism'.
Milans del Bosch was sentenced to a year in jail and Tejero to 15 years, although they had initially been facing 30 years behind bars each.
Another 12 members of the Armed Forces, 17 Guardia Civil officers and one civilian were sentenced, although they were all either pardoned or released before the end of the decade, except Tejero, who was released on probation on December 3, 1996.
Where are they all now?
During his time behind bars, Tejero wrote his memoirs, studied languages, took a degree in geography and history, and took up painting – which he still does, as a hobby.
Aged 88 and living partly in Madrid and partly in his beach apartment in Torre del Mar, near Vélez-Málaga on the Costa del Sol, married and with six children – one of whom is a priest – Tejero largely keeps a low profile nowadays, unless something happens in politics that he disagrees with.
This included the regional statute of Catalunya's being signed in 2006, which sparked a letter from the retired Lieutenant Colonel to the newspaper Melilla Hoy, former president of Catalunya Artur Mas' determination to call an independence referendum, where Tejero reported him, in 2012, for 'conspiracy and attempted sedition', and the exhuming of General Franco from the Valle de los Caídos ('Valley of the Fallen'), when Tejero appeared at the dictator's new burial site, in October 2019, to protest about his being moved.
Back in 2011, when Spain commemorated the 30th anniversary of the coup, Tejero opted to shelter himself from the 'media circus' – but failed, because the then 78-year-old was tracked by journalists to a luxury hotel in Los Llanos de Ariadne on the Canarian island of La Palma.
Adolfo Suárez, having narrowly escaped his behind-closed-doors conflab with Tejero alive, remained living for another 33 years. Still a much-lauded and well-loved public figurehead, he was often called upon to make speeches and address conferences, but in 2003, aged 71, those present noticed he had become uncharacteristically absent-minded, tripping over his words, repeating sentences and forgetting his lines.
This was apparently the start of early-onset Alzheimer's, although his children said later they had started to notice 'signs' up to 10 years earlier.
Within less than a decade, Suárez could not remember ever having been president of Spain and, although he loved all the time he spent with his grandchildren, did not know who they were.
He passed away in early 2014 as a result of his dementia, but Madrid's Barajas airport was named after him.
King Juan Carlos I abdicated the same year as Suárez's death after he and the Royal family had started to fall from favour due to a string of media 'embarrassments', including his son-in-law, Iñaki Urdangarín facing charges for public fund embezzlement and the monarch's daughter, the Infanta Cristina, being investigated in its connection – both have since lost their titles of Duke and Duchess of Palma, Cristina lives in Geneva with the couple's children, and Urdangarín is in prison – and photos of Juan Carlos I himself shown hunting elephants in Botswana.
The King – a national hero for one generation and an unpopular figurehead for another who had either been very young or not yet born at the time of the coup – decided the Royal family could use some young blood and a fresh face; that year, he passed the crown to Prince Felipe of Asturias, who is now King Felipe VI.
Meanwhile, Juan Carlos I has been living in Abu Dhabi for six months after a court investigation dating back to 2011, linked to a Spanish railway-building contract to the holy city of Mecca, the Saudi King, Juan Carlos I's good friend and former countess Corinna Larssen, and offshore funds in Panamá came back to haunt him.
“Courage and loyalty”
As yet, the inquiry has not been concluded, so Juan Carlos I has not been charged – but this year is the first 'landmark' anniversary of the February 23 coup where he has not been present.
But his son made sure he was in Spain in spirit during his commemorative speech, describing the 'firmness and authority' his father displayed, which were 'determining factors in the defence and triumph of democracy'.
Felipe VI referred to his father, to the late Adolfo Suárez, and to 'a long list of men and women, civil and military' who 'offered a true example of courage and loyalty to the institutions of the State and the Constitution' on a day that could have changed everything for Spain but which, thankfully, only served to reaffirm the nation as one where freedom, democracy, peace and human rights were unbreakable values.