Seeking to Appease the Generals

"Perhaps the real transition to democracy begins now"

The menace has crystallized in a single, indelible video-tape image replayed again and again on countless TV sets throughout Spain: Guardia Civil Lieut. Colonel Antonio Tejero Molina standing in the Cortes last Feb. 23, holding the Spanish government, and the nation, at gunpoint. Tejero and his fellow military conspirators in the coup attempt were soon arrested, and Spain's young democracy survived its gravest challenge.

But now many Spaniards are beginning to wonder just who won that fateful encounter. Far from being totally discredited after the coup, the country's ultra-conservative armed forces—unchanged and unbending since Francisco Franco's day—seem hardly affected. "Zero percent of the people here believe that the putsch failed," says a moderate politician in Madrid. "Some think it is still going on, and many believe it actually succeeded."

Unquestionably, the aborted coup attempt has transformed Spanish politics. Old issues—institutional reform, regional autonomy—have been swept aside for the time being; the balance of power among the parties has shifted. The government has launched an investigation into the coup conspiracy, but almost no one in Madrid expects major purges to follow. However dubious its loyalties, the army is too powerful to be punished and shunted out of political life. Instead, Spain's wary civilian leaders are seeking to pacify the generals, giving them, in effect, a silent veto in many areas of national policy. "We now have three chambers in the Cortes," laments a prominent Socialist legislator, "the Congress, the Senate and the joint chiefs of the general staff."

Nowhere is the army's continued influence more evident than in the Basque country, where the separatist group ETA is waging a bloody terrorist war. During his 4½ years in office, former Prime Minister Adolfo Suárez resisted military pressure to allow the army into what he and many others viewed as a police problem.

All that changed, however, less than a month after the aborted coup when ETA gunmen killed two army colonels. Suárez's successor, Leopoldo Calvo-Sotelo, felt compelled to grant the army and navy limited, border-patrolling duty in the Basque region—a first step, critics charge, toward a new cycle of violence and repression whose main victim could be democratic government in Spain.

This month the bishops of the Basque cities of Bilbao, San Sebastián and Vitoria said as much in a pastoral letter that warned of the "coercive pressures" of the military on individual liberty. The three prelates condemned ETA's continuing terrorism, but they also cautioned that the military's new role in the Basque country could eventually pose a threat to democracy. "When the armed forces set themselves up as judge over the democratic process and feel tempted to intervene," they wrote, "this constitutes a serious danger rather than a genuine defense of the interests of the people."