Antonio Tejero

Antonio Tejero Molina (born 30 April 1932) is a Spanish former Lieutenant Colonel of the Guardia Civil, and the most prominent figure in the failed coup d'état – also known as the 'Tejerazo' – against Spanish democracy on 23 February 1981.

Career
Tejero entered the Guardia Civil in 1951 with the rank of Lieutenant and was sent to Catalonia. In 1958 he was promoted to Captain, and was posted to Galicia, Velez-Malaga and the Canary Islands. In 1963 he was promoted to Major, and served in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria and Badajoz. In 1974 he became a Lieutenant Colonel, serving as the leader of the Comandancia in the Basque province of Guipúzcoa, but had to ask to be transferred to another region when his public declarations against the Basque flag, the Ikurriña, became known. For his accomplishments in Vascongadas, and in combating the ETA, he was named Chief of the Planning Staff of the Civil Guard in Madrid. But along the way, he had also begun to accumulate a record of incidents of dissent.

In 1978 Tejero, Police Captain Ricardo Sánez de Ynestrillas and an Army General Staff colonel, whose name has not been made public, attempted a coup d'état, known as Operation Galaxia. He was condemned to prison for mutiny after the collapse of the attempted coup. Tejero was in prison seven months and seven days.

Attempted coup
On 23 February 1981, he entered the Congress of Deputies, the lower house of the Spanish Parliament, with 200 Guardia Civil and soldiers and held the deputies hostage for some 22 hours. King Juan Carlos gave a nationally-televised address denouncing the coup and urging the maintenance of law and the continuance of the democratically-elected government. The following day the coup leaders surrendered to the police.

Tejero was the last of the coup leaders to be released from jail on 2 December 1996, having then served 15 years in the military prison at Alcalá de Henares. He lives in Torre del Mar in the Province of Málaga. In 2006 he wrote to the newspaper Mellila Hoy, calling for a referendum on the Spanish Socialist Workers' Party (PSOE) proposals for giving a new measure of autonomy to Catalonia. In 2009, Tejero's son, Ramón Tejero Díez, wrote to the conservative newspaper ABC describing his father as a sincere religious man who was trying to do his best for Spain.