Failed coup in Spain
Guards seize parliament; the king stands by democracy
On 23 February 1981 Civil Guard Lieutenant Colonel Antonio Tejero and some 200 guardsmen burst into the Congress of Deputies during a vote and held parliament hostage. That night King Juan Carlos I went on television to defend the constitution, and the next day the rebels surrendered.
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Meanwhile around the world (±25 years)
Whole world
- 1968 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty — 13 years earlier
- 1980 Smallpox declared eradicated — 1 year earlier
- 1981 AIDS first described — same year
- 1997 Kyoto Protocol — 16 years later
Eastern Europe & Russia
- 1957 Sputnik 1, the first satellite — 24 years earlier
- 1961 Gagarin's flight — 20 years earlier
- 1985–1991 Perestroika — 4 years later
- 1989 Revolutions of 1989 — 8 years later
- 1991 Dissolution of the Soviet Union — 10 years later
Middle East
- 1978 Camp David Accords — 3 years earlier
- 1979 Iranian Revolution — 2 years earlier
- 1980–1988 Iran–Iraq War — 1 year earlier
- 1990–1991 Gulf War — 9 years later
- 1993 Oslo Accords — 12 years later
Africa
- 1967 First human heart transplant — 14 years earlier
- 1967–1970 Nigerian Civil War and Biafra — 14 years earlier
- 1974 Lucy is discovered — 7 years earlier
- 1983–1985 The Ethiopian famine — 2 years later
- 1994 End of apartheid in South Africa — 13 years later
Asia
- 1966–1976 Cultural Revolution in China — 15 years earlier
- 1975–1979 The Khmer Rouge and the Cambodian genocide — 6 years earlier
- 1978 Deng Xiaoping's reform and opening-up — 3 years earlier
- 1984 Bhopal disaster — 3 years later
- 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami — 23 years later
Americas
- 1969 Moon landing — 12 years earlier
- c. 1970 Mass deforestation of the Amazon begins — 11 years earlier
- 1980 Eruption of Mount St. Helens — 1 year earlier
- 1983 Birth of the Internet: ARPANET adopts TCP/IP — 2 years later
- 2001 September 11 attacks — 20 years later
Oceania
- 1959 The Antarctic Treaty — 22 years earlier
- 1992 The Mabo decision — 11 years later
Alive at the time
- Nelson Mandela (aged 63)
- Neil Armstrong (aged 51)
- Jorge Luis Borges (aged 82)
- Hirohito (Emperor Shōwa) (aged 80)
- Leonid Brezhnev (aged 75)
- Mother Teresa (aged 71)
- Ronald Reagan (aged 70)
- Richard Nixon (aged 68)
- Indira Gandhi (aged 64)
- Edmund Hillary (aged 62)