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 I 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.
Read more about this topic: Antonio Tejero
Famous quotes containing the word attempted:
“There may sometimes be ungenerous attempts to keep a young man down; and they will succeed too, if he allows his mind to be diverted from its true channel to brood over the attempted injury. Cast about, and see if this feeling has not injured every person you have ever known to fall into it.”
—Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865)