Manuel Gutierrez Mellado
Manuel Gutiérrez Mellado (Madrid, April 30, 1912-Torremocha del Campo, Guadalajara, December 15, 1995) was a Spanish soldier and politician, I Marqués de Gutiérrez Mellado, Captain General ad honorem of the Army, First Vice President of the Government for Defense Affairs and Minister of Defense during the transition.
Biography
Military education and training
Born into a family of the Madrid Restoration bourgeoisie and orphaned by father and mother at a very young age, his uncle-in-law, the famous publisher Saturnino Calleja, paid for his high school studies at the elitist boarding school of the Royal College of the Pious Schools of San Antón. There he demonstrated for the first time his future mettle and sense of responsibility, responding to the solidarity of his family with a brilliant school record, kept in the archives of the Cardenal Cisneros Secondary School in Madrid. (Puell de la Villa, 1997, pp. 32-48)
The reform of military education by the Primo de Rivera dictatorship in 1927 thwarted his purpose of directly opposing admission to the Artillery Academy and in 1929 he joined the General Military Academy of Zaragoza, directed by General Francisco Franco. Just after the Second Republic was proclaimed, he was promoted to second lieutenant and finished his military training at the Academy of Artillery and Engineers of Segovia, from which he was released as an Artillery Lieutenant in July 1933 with number one in his promotion. (Puell de la Villa, 1997, pp. 49-75)
Second Republic and Civil War
His first assignment was the Horse Artillery Regiment, stationed in the Madrid canton of Campamento. In 1935 he joined the Falange Española de las JONS (Serrano de Pablo Jiménez, 1986, p. 32) and at dawn on On July 20, 1936, he actively participated in the rebellion of his unit against the Popular Front government. Once the rebellion in Campamento was put down, he fled on horseback, through the countryside through Villaviciosa de Odón, from where he returned to Madrid at the beginning of August.. Suspected of being disaffected by the republican regime, he was imprisoned in the same school where he had studied.
In February 1937, the Emergency Court no. of the rebellion and, therefore, had not participated in the uprising. Other police investigations discovered his active participation in it, so he decided to seek refuge in an embassy. A couple of weeks later, he joined the clandestine intelligence services of the Francoist side that operated in Madrid, provided with false documentation in the name of Teodosio Paredes Laína.
In 1938 he was promoted to captain and, when Franco organized the Military Police and Information Service (SIPM), he was appointed head of one of the three sections of the SIPM attached to the army corps that besieged the capital. In this task, he provided invaluable information on the Republican plans, deployment and weapons to the aforementioned large unit and evacuated more than a hundred pilots and military engineers to the rebel zone, specialties that were not abundant in it.
Military career
In 1941, as a captain, he graduated from the General Staff School (Rosa Morena, 2009) and joined the Blue Division Headquarters in Germany that year, attached to the 3rd General Staff Section (Operations).. During World War II, he was promoted to commander and was in charge of classifying and deciding the fate of the many foreign subjects who crossed the Pyrenees (San Martín, 1983, p. 223).
In 1945, once Germany had been defeated, he was attached to the Information Section of the High General Staff, traveling to Belgium, France and Switzerland to report on the activities of the Republican exiles (Puell de la Villa, 1997, pp. 135 -136).
From 1953 to 1955, as a result of the signing of the military agreement with the United States, he acted as liaison between the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the US military mission in charge of building the bases granted by the agreement (Puell de la Villa, 1997, pp. 137).
In 1956, on the eve of his promotion to lieutenant colonel, forced by the scarcity of his military salary and considering it unethical to work multiple jobs in order to support his four children, he asked to be promoted to supernumerary status in the Army and He worked for seven years as a manager in various companies (San Martín, 1983, p. 223). Approximately two thirds of the professional military stationed in the big cities practiced the so-called moonlighting during the years of Franco's government, but very few, like Gutiérrez Mellado, made the drastic decision to temporarily stop wearing the uniform because they were unwilling to to reconcile two jobs, normally to the detriment of their full dedication to the militia (Puell de la Villa, 2005, p. 207).
In 1963 he returned to active service, occupying a vacancy as a professor in the permanent staff of the Higher Premilitary Instruction (IPS), an organization in charge of training officers and non-commissioned officers from the University (Puell de la Villa, 2010)..
Two years later, he was promoted to colonel and was assigned to the Operations Section of the Central General Staff. His perfect command of English and French earned him being sent as an observer to various NATO maneuvers. This experience allowed him to become aware for the first time of the unfortunate operational capacity of the enormous army that Spain maintained at the end of the Franco regime (Puell de la Villa, 1997, pp. 151-152).
In 1967 he was appointed commander of the 13th Field Artillery Regiment, headquartered in Getafe, and on April 13, 1970, he was promoted to artillery brigadier general.
For little more than a year he worked as a professor at CESEDEN, then directed by Lieutenant General Manuel Díez-Alegría and, when he was appointed chief of the High General Staff, he took Gutiérrez Mellado with him, who became his right hand (Puell de la Villa, 1997, pp. 156–158). At that time, specifically on December 14, 1971, he gave a conference at CESEDEN, whose language began to attract the attention of public opinion.
On March 12, 1973, he was promoted to Major General and on March 15, 1974, he delivered a second and much more resonant conference in the same rostrum, in which he openly advocated the urgent need to introduce far-reaching reforms. Permeated in the structure and organization of the Armed Forces, an approach that attracted the eyes of political personalities who, after Franco's death, would promote the process of transition to democracy.
On June 14, 1975, he was appointed commander-in-chief and delegate of the Government of Ceuta, positions he held at the time of Franco's death and which he made compatible with that of head of the military delegation that negotiated the legislative treaty with the United States signed in January 1976 (Puell de la Villa, 1997, pp. 169–174).
On April 13, 1976, the first government appointed by the King of Spain, Juan Carlos I, promoted his promotion to lieutenant general and named him captain general of the VII Military Region, headquartered in Valladolid. His inauguration speech earned front-page headlines in every newspaper and lengthy opinion pieces in the many political magazines in existence at the time. Not in vain was it the first time that, on the hazardous and uncertain eves of the transition to democracy, with public opinion very aware of what the military thought, no less than a lieutenant general openly committed himself to the new Rule of Law and demanded from his subordinates full and unconditional subordination to civil power: «Let us never forget that the Army, no matter how sacred its missions may be, is not there to command, but to serve; and that this service, always under the orders of the Government of the Nation, is exclusive for Spain and for our King».(Gutiérrez Mellado, 1981, p. 29)
The almost immediate arrival on the scene of Adolfo Suárez, whom the king warned of the virtues that adorned the captain general of Valladolid, led him in July 1976 to the headquarters of the Central General Staff of the Army and, barely three months later, on September 23, to replace Lieutenant General Fernando de Santiago Díaz de Mendívil, who had resigned to express his opposition to the reform promoted by Suárez, in the First Vice Presidency of the Government for Defense Affairs, conceived to promote from it the urgent reform of the Armed Forces.
Vice President of the Government and Defense Minister
By the time he was appointed Vice President, General Gutiérrez Mellado must have spent many years thinking and planning what needed to be done to transform and modernize Franco's obsolete army. He must have thought so much about it that on January 4, 1977, that is, when he had not yet been in government for a hundred days, he was able to capture his reform plans on a simple sheet of paper to submit them for approval by the Delegate Commission. of the Government for Military Affairs, which met that day under the presidency of Adolfo Suárez. (Puell de la Villa, 1997, pp. 205–206) The plan included a series of specific actions in the following areas: higher defense organization; updating of the program of budget allocations for the Armed Forces; joint personnel policy, and limitation of the powers of military justice.
But the most surprising thing about the plan is that it was fully complied with and was even expanded in certain aspects, some of them as transcendental as the creation of the Ministry of Defense on July 4, 1977, a department that Gutiérrez Mellado took over. until September 23, 1979, the date on which the politician from the Union of the Democratic Center (UCD), Agustín Rodríguez Sahagún, the first civilian minister to be in charge of Defense issues since 1939, was appointed to serve. Gutiérrez Mellado continued to be part of the governments of Adolfo Suárez during the first two years of the second legislature (1979-1982), with the title of First Vice President of the Government for National Security and Defense Affairs, a position in which he ceased on February 26, 1981, when the chaired by Leopoldo Calvo-Sotelo was formed.
Among the main milestones of the military reform promoted by Gutiérrez Mellado, apart from the aforementioned creation and organization of the Ministry of Defense and the consequent suppression of the Army, Navy and Air ministries, the following should be mentioned: creation of the Board of Chiefs of Staff (JUJEM); attribution of operational command over their respective armies to the Chiefs of Staff of the Army, the Navy and the Air Force; approval by the Cortes Generales of the law of bases of basic criteria of the defense and of the military organization of 1980, derived from the Constitution of 1978; preparation of the first Joint Strategic Plan (JSP) and the Joint Force Objective (OFC); criminalization of military interventionism in politics; updating of the Ordinances of 1768, called Carlos III; start-up of the Social Institute of the Armed Forces (ISFAS); abolition of the commemorative parade of the victory of 1939 and creation of the Day of the Armed Forces; regulation of the promotion system for professional soldiers, and equalization of their remuneration to that of civil servants of a similar category, a measure that managed to definitively eradicate moonlighting. (Puell de la Villa, 2012)
Obviously, this reformist project has been subsequently touched up by the successive heads of the Ministry of Defense, but its doctrinal foundations have hardly changed. The true merit of Gutiérrez Mellado in this regard was laying the foundations that made possible the spectacular transformation of the Armed Forces that took place in the last thirty years of the 20th century, thanks to which they have become one of the institutions most valued by the Spanish in the newspapers surveys of the Center for Sociological Research (CIS).
Without a doubt, the best-known image of Gutiérrez Mellado was produced during the coup attempt on February 23, 1981. By mere chance, due to the simple carelessness of a civil guard who did not notice that a television camera was following ignited, all of Spain watched in astonishment as a frail figure of almost seventy years old, whom most Spaniards had probably never noticed, intrepidly rose from his seat and, with no more weapons than words, faced some civil guards who they wielded pistols and submachine guns, who did not hesitate to use force to try to bring him down and, when they failed to do so, they opened fire to prevent their gesture from being imitated from other seats. The repeated broadcast of the moment in which he stood up alone to defend the freedom won by the Spaniards would turn General Gutiérrez Mellado into a myth, a legendary character, one of the main icons of the transition for several generations of Spaniards.(Fences, 2009)
Last years
After leaving the government, and having abandoned his military career when he was appointed minister to make it clear to his comrades in arms that political activity was incompatible with the military profession, he did not hold any position until, on May 28 In 1984, the first government of Felipe González appointed him a permanent advisor to the Council of State, where he presided over its First Section until his death.
In September 1986, shocked by the overdose death of the son of a close friend, he managed to get a select group of businessmen and financiers to support and subsidize his project to organize the Fundación de Ayuda contra la Drogadicción (FAD), which he presided over. until his death.
The FAD was born with the vocation of society helping youth to overcome the attraction to drugs, at a time when heroin was causing terrifying havoc. Its founder wanted society not to be content with trying to alleviate its effects or repress drug trafficking and consumption, but to provide adolescents with the necessary moral support to reject it, to have the courage to say "No, thank you", as it proclaimed. the poster of one of his first advertising campaigns.
During the last years of his life, many Spanish universities opened their doors to hear him talk about the transition or about the work of the FAD. In 1994 King Juan Carlos I granted him a marquisate; the Congress of Deputies, the Order of Constitutional Merit, and the Superior Council of the Army unanimously proposed his honorary promotion to the position of captain general, granted by the last government of Felipe González on May 28, 1994. In September of that same year, for the first and last time he wore the capitan general's gimp in the austere tribute that the cadets of the General Military Academy paid him in the same patio where he had sworn flag sixty-five years before.
Fourteen months later, on December 15, 1995, when he was going to Barcelona at the age of eighty-three to give a lecture at the Ramon Llull University, the ice caused his vehicle to skid and he died on the edge of the river. kilometer point 115,000 of the national highway N-II, in the vicinity of Torremocha del Campo (Guadalajara). His remains were transferred to the Army Headquarters, where the entire political class, headed by the king and queen, paraded, where he was given the funeral honors of captain general, and from where his coffin was carried on the shoulders of the road to Villaviciosa de Odón, a town in the that he had spent long periods of time since his childhood and of whom he was an adopted son. There they rest together with those of his wife, Carmen Blasco, who died in 2010, whom he had married in 1938 and with whom he had had five children, of which one died at a very young age. In an interview given in his last years, he was asked how the tragedy of the Spanish Civil War could have been avoided, he replied that it was inevitable, and advised that, in order not to fall into partisanship, four generations (one hundred years) would pass since 1936 before historians to delve into their study.[citation required]
As a posthumous tribute to his career, the Ministry of Defense agreed to give his name to the University Institute that was in the process of being created, in co-sponsorship with the National University of Distance Education (UNED), to promote the culture of defense in the university environment and offer Spanish society a research and teaching center specialized in issues related to the search for peace, security and defense.
Since its creation in 1997, the General Gutiérrez Mellado University Institute (IUGM) has organized regulated postgraduate and training courses, promoted debate forums and edited various publications on matters within its competence.