It was, among the many things that it was, a grotesque. At the headquarters of the Central Bank on the Rambla in Barcelona, touching Plaza Catalunya, there were 263 hostages in the hands of an unsuspected gang of criminals. Was it terrorism or a simple robbery? The government leaned towards the former. The year was 1981, the day, May 23, and it had been three months since the attempted coup in Congress. February 23, May 23: it couldn’t be a coincidence. The climate did not help: democracy was not consolidated and in the streets the violence intensified. ETA killed, GRAPO killed, ultra-right forces lurked. People were afraid and fear, at that time, was concentrated in the Central Bank. Many thought that the State was in check. Then call James.
James, like many, call the Central Bank and manage to communicate as if it were a normal day -263 hostages. A thousand policemen outside, watching the building. The man asks for a hostage, and when he gets on the phone he asks him… if he has the budget for the works. As if nothing happened. As if it were a normal day. As if the hostage was in his house. Jaume reminds him that it is urgent. The hostage, who surely doesn’t believe it, gets angry and says: “How do you want me to take care of it if I’m here…”
A fragile democracy
Why was it ignored? the recommendation of the geos to cut the lines and leave only one for negotiation? One can only speculate: because everyone was hysterical. Because very few thought clearly. The group led by José Juan Martínez Gómez, from Almeria, an old police acquaintance, had entered the bank shortly after nine. Then, by means of a note left in a telephone booth, they had informed the authorities that they had 72 hours to free Tejero and three other soldiers imprisoned by 23F, as well as to have two planes to take them all, coup plotters and robbers, to Argentina. “Long live Spain & rdquor ;, they ended. At the time it seemed that way. A blow from 23F.
“It was a time when it was thought that anything could happen,” he says Mar Padilla, journalist and author of ‘Assault on the Central Bank’ (Libros del KO), where he reconstructs what happened on May 23 through interviews with those involved, from Martínez Gómez himself to members of the secret services of the time. And yes: the social balances were fragile, the political ones too, and Spain seemed like an easy democracy to destabilize. According to Padilla, the assailants took advantage of that. “That in essence it was a robbery, that’s for sure. And it does not seem to me to be ruled out that they had the support of a destabilization group, either from the security forces or from the extreme right. Someone saying: ‘Now that you are, we are going to destabilize democracy’. I do not rule that out & rdquor ;. It was a group of petty criminals who had planned the assault on a Barceloneta bar. A group so inexperienced as to believe that a drill would open the way out through the bank walls. And still, they did. They put democracy in check.
Ramona “the one with the cat”
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The note convinces the government that the taking of the bank is the work of civil guards. General Pajuelo, then commander of the Civil Guard in Catalonia, calls the bank and asks for Captain Sánchez-Valiente, supposedly involved in 23F and has since disappeared; he is convinced that he is in the bank. The leader of the gang, Martínez Gómez, alias ‘El Rubio’, alias ‘Número Uno’, does not get him out of his mistake. The telephone number of the bank headquarters is used frequently: a hostage calls a woman named Ramona in Morata de Jalón, Ramona “the one with the cat”, but she gets confused and ends up talking to a certain Loli. But neither the bit to perforate the stone wall nor the delirious calls from the entity’s terminals match the nonsense of the police director and the Government delegate when they make the decision to enter the bank. Nothing would have been easier for the assailants, if they really had political motives, than to release the others and stay with them.
In the book, ‘El Rubio’ continues to maintain that the objective of the assault was to take some papers related to 23F from the bank -a commission-, “but it is the theory to which I give the least credit,” says Padilla. It remains, 43 years later, a world of theories that of the assault on the Central Bank. “Conspiracy theories are something that never fades,” he continues, “whether they are about the assassination of Kennedy, about the arrival on the Moon or about the assault on the Central Bank. They are very much of our time & rdquor; Days later, the government assumed that the assailants had no political motives, and so He settled them as a “band of sausages, pimps and anarchists & rdquor; (General Aramburu, director of the Civil Guard), but the truth is that those thugs managed to get the possibility of dissolving the Civil Guard considered. Nothing better reflects the abyss between what ‘El Rubio’ and his gang were doing and what outsiders believed they were doing than the phrase that a police officer blurts out at the mastermind of the assault when, once the bank has been released, he sees him with hands leaning against a Civil Guard tank, watched by two inspectors from the Anti-Terrorist Brigade: “Damn, José Juan, what are you doing here. The one you’ve messed up & rdquor ;.