We have the right to know what the king’s behavior really was in relation to the coup d’état, the dirty relations with foreign dictatorships and the most crucial questions of the internal politics of this country.
Excuse me for starting this article with a brief autobiographical reference (for what it’s worth). I am a child of the Spanish transition. I was born in 1975. I grew up in Spain, where Juan Carlos appeared as a kind, friendly and good-natured king, which was helped, it must be said, by the general pact of silence of the Spanish political elite and the Spanish press known to everyone today.
It was a Spain that was struggling to emerge from the long and dark period of dictatorship, to consolidate a modern constitution and a brand new democracy, which was opening up to the world and which was growing and developing economically, socially and culturally. For the majority of Spaniards, especially those with short memories like me, it was easy to accept the story imposed by the political class and the press of a king committed to the defense of democracy and who, even in the worst times, he lacked power and was harmless to the political and social future of our society. I have always been a Republican, in the deep sense of this venerable tradition of political thought. And despite this, as a young man, he thought and defended that republican principles were not totally incompatible with the idea of a constitutional monarchy, which was ultimately a minor issue, always taking the Nordic monarchies as an example. Ah the examples!
It turns out that over time, we know more and more about what the Spanish transition really was, about the role that the king played in the early years and especially during the coup d’état. of 1981, on his behavior, not only personal and intimate, but economic and political, also at the international level.
Even the most naive among us always knew that Francisco Franco had designated the king as his successor, naming him Prince of Spain in 1969. We always knew of his bad relations with his father, Don Juan de Borbón, and the strange circumstances of his death. .of his brother Alfonso. We always knew that accepting him and the crown was an essential part of the constitutional pact that sought national reconciliation and the rebirth of Spain on solid foundations, even if this reconciliation also had to be done with the most reactionary sectors of the Franco dictatorship. We always knew that his relationship with Sofia was just a bad professional relationship and that the king had many lovers. We even always suspected that his role in the last years of Francoism and the first years of democracy was in chiaroscuro and that we ignored many things that could be relevant. But that seemed like a lesser evil to us. It was one of those cases where it’s best not to look under the rug, as happy as we were about the new apartment we thought we bought together (only later did we learn that the apartment was for rent and the rent would end up skyrocketing from year to year!).
At the turn of the century, more than 25 years after the coronation of Juan Carlos, the pact of silence of the political elite, with Suárez, González and Aznar at the head, and of the Spanish press, of all the media that dominated the debate public in Spain, slowly began to crack. His romantic adventures began to spread little by little. The first voices appeared suggesting the possibility that the king was involved in dirty (read, illegal) dealings. In 2007, The times He openly criticized the monarch’s “luxurious lifestyle.” In 2011, the “Urdangarín case” was discovered and things began to accelerate.
At the beginning of 2012, The Spiegel revealed the content of a diplomatic cable in which the German ambassador to Spain assured that the king had shown sympathy for the putschists, a fact immediately denied by the Royal House, but which is clearly confirmed by the audios recently published with Barbara Rey. Shortly after, in the same year, the Botswana affair took place and his romantic affair with Corinna Larsen became public, which in itself would not have had a greater impact without the high economic costs generated by the treasury audience. period of financial crisis and draconian budget cuts. Public opinion had already changed. And although we still knew virtually nothing about what would be revealed later, for many it was obvious that the king had to abdicate, which ultimately happened in June 2014.
It was only later that it was learned that the king had collaborated and interceded in favor of the Argentine dictatorship of Videla. That Adolfo Suárez had admitted in an interview with Victoria Prego that during the transition, no referendum on the monarchy had been organized because it was known that it would have been rejected by the Spanish people and that it had been more smart to introduce it quietly within the framework of the constitutional pact, without the possibility of separate discussion. That in his intermediations with the dictatorships of Islamic countries such as Morocco, Jordan and especially Saudi Arabia, with which he maintained excellent relations, he could have obtained enormous personal economic advantages. That the king had million-dollar accounts in tax havens, the existence of shell companies and obscure foundations and the ownership of opaque international funds, some of which were listed as beneficiaries of the current King Felipe VI, who allegedly donated large sums of money. to Corinna Larsen, who would have committed tax fraud and would have benefited from a partial regularization offered by the Treasury, who could have committed an offense of harassment and threats against Corinna, from which he and part of the royal family would have benefited from sums significant amounts of money by means of “royal black cards” of insufficiently clarified and certainly not legal origin, and a long series of scandals and suspicions.
The last two scandals were the publication of photos with his lover Bárbara Rey and audio fragments of their conversations, which further contributed to an open secret. It was already known that the king had been informed in advance of the coup and apparently did nothing to stop it until he saw that its success was almost impossible. What the new audios reveal is his sympathy for Alfonso Armada, one of the putschists convicted of the events of 1981, for remaining silent. All of this leads us to wonder: what role did King Juan Carlos really play in the coup? Did you defend the democratic system on the night of February 23 really out of conviction or because you had no choice?
Some might think that all this no longer matters, that these are events from an increasingly distant past, that his “exile” to Abu Dhabi is already punishment enough for all that he was able to do, that we must not reopen our deep historical wounds. . But you would be wrong.
We Spaniards have the right to know. We have the right to know everything about the most important issues in our recent history. We have the right to know what the king’s behavior really was in relation to the coup d’état, to the dirty deals with foreign dictatorships, to the most crucial questions of the internal politics of this country and, in general, to possible crimes that he could commit. to have committed. We have a right to know all of this because Juan Carlos, whether we like it or not, was King of Spain and our head of state for almost 40 years. And because, whatever the legal liability for his actions, many of which would certainly not be covered by constitutional inviolability, first because they were not committed in the exercise of his functions, and second because they occurred or continued after his abdication in 2014, we have every right to judge him politically.
This is not a legal question, as I said. Nor is it about historians and biographers who will, I hope, do their job. This is a political question, in the truest and noblest sense of the term. And we, citizens, to whom Spanish democracy belongs, the one that perhaps, we do not know, Juan Carlos de Bourbón would have wanted to destroy when he was still a baby, have every right to pass a political judgment on his reign . Among other reasons, because one day, inexorably, it will happen that Juan Carlos is no longer among the living, the Spanish government in power will have to decide what will be done with his body and what type of tribute will be paid to him, and we , citizens, as true sovereigns of this country, we will have to form an opinion on whether the decision made by the government seems correct or not (and if not, possibly punish this government).
Of all the fundamental rights enjoyed by citizens in a democracy, the right to know and judge is perhaps the most fundamental. It is time for our Parliament, which claims to represent us, to open a serious and rigorous commission of inquiry into this whole affair.
