Patent-Leather Warriors

They have skulls of lead

Therefore they never weep

With souls of patent leather

They come along the road . . .

When Garcia Lorca wrote The Ballad of the Spanish Civil Guard in 1924, twelve years before he was murdered by Franco sympathizers at the beginning of the Civil War, the paramilitary Guardia Civil was already a widely feared institution in Spain. Since its formation in 1844 during the Bourbon monarchy, the corps had been the efficient internal security force of the central government in Madrid. Under Franco, it became part of the dictatorship's apparatus of repression. For many Spaniards, the gray-green uniform and the black patent-leather cap remain symbols of reaction and oppression. Thus hardly anyone in Spain was surprised last week when the coup attempt turned out to be spearheaded by men from the corps's traffic division.

Under the slogan Todo por la Patria (All for the Fatherland), the Guardia Civil established its fearsome reputation mainly through its willingness to follow orders. Troopers are never based in their home provinces, in order to prevent the kind of personal involvement that might make them reluctant to use force. The 58,000-man Guardia Civil is part of the army and is under the command of an army general, but its basic function is police work.

In the Basque country, the force is the government's primary antiterrorist arm, commanded by officers who believe that regional autonomy poses a danger to Spanish unity. The struggle between the Basque guerrillas and the Guardia has intensified since Franco's death. The conflict has taken hundreds of lives; the Guardia too has suffered casualties.

Lieut. Colonel Antonio Tejero, who led the assault on parliament last week, commanded Guardia Civil units in the Basque province of Guipuzcoa before he was transferred, in 1977, for refusing to allow the newly authorized Basque national flag to be flown. Posted to Malaga, in southern Spain, he ordered his men to break up a government-authorized leftist demonstration on the ground that "no one is allowed to demonstrate here, because Spain is in mourning [over terrorism]." After his arrest in 1978 for participating in a plot to overthrow the government, he sent a revealing open letter to King Juan Carlos in which he urged: "What we need, Sir, is a good and agile antiterrorist law. We must silence those apologists for this bloody farce [terrorism], even if they are parliamentarians."

Tejero's hard line quickly made him the darling of the extreme right, but he could not have taken the Cortes without the Guardia Civil's willingness to follow orders--any orders. As it turned out, that no-questions-asked discipline showed up on both sides of the conflict in Madrid. Outside the parliament, hundreds of Guardias loyal to the government helped arrest their 200 comrades who were in the raiding force, some of whom insisted they had been told that they were going to rescue legislators who had been kidnaped by terrorists.

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