While the king was in Botswana killing an elephant on a private big-game hunt, Spain was still recovering from the global recession, with a 23 percent unemployment rate, rising to 50 percent among people under 30. A photo of the king proudly standing with his rifle in front of a dead trophy elephant was widely published, and harshly criticized at home at the time he was the honorary president of the Spanish branch of the World Wildlife Federation. Juan Carlos’s serious troubles began in 2012 when he went on a hunting trip to Botswana. The gravity of his fiscal crimes is sowing doubt in the minds of many Spaniards as to whether a good reason exists to continue maintaining a monarchy in the 21 st century. Meanwhile, his former lover has publicly accused him of hiding many millions of euros in ill-gotten gains for which he did not pay any taxes. The 83-year-old Juan Carlos is no longer king and has fled Spain in disgrace, gone to live a life of exiled luxury in Abu Dhabi, leaving his family behind. These days Juan Carlos is the main character in a long-running scandal that has all the ingredients of a made-for-television drama, a full-bore telenovela. It turned out to be the high point of Juan Carlos’s 39-year reign - and it has been a long fall since. That night, we all felt a tremendous sense of gratitude toward the king. The king’s adamant defense of Spain’s nascent democracy put an end to the putsch, and its instigators surrendered shortly thereafter, eventually serving prison time. I breathed a sigh of relief, and went to bed, as did millions of others. It was clear the coup was effectively over. He condemned the coup attempt and vowed to punish those responsible. The fear that it was beginning again was written on the faces around me as we all filed out the door at Catalina’s and headed to our homes.Ī few hours later, at 1:15 a.m., I was listening to my small transistor radio when I heard the king of Spain, Juan Carlos I, broadcast a message on television and radio. On that evening in 1981, young and naive, I felt for the first time a bit of what it was like to have a dictator’s yoke on my neck, a glimmer of the four decades of Franco and the Church setting the narrow boundaries of how to live. In that tiny village bar, far from armed authority, people obeyed orders and headed home. The coup attempt came less than six years after Francisco Franco’s death ended a 36-year dictatorship, so it was easy for Spaniards to believe Franco’s military followers were coming back to power.
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