Tejero entered the Guardia Civil in 1951, with the rank of Lieutenant and was sent to Catalonia. In 1958 he was promoted to Captain, and was posted to Galicia, Vélez-Málaga and the Canary Islands. In 1963, he was promoted to Major, and served in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria and Badajoz. In 1974, he became a Lieutenant Colonel, serving as the leader of the Comandancia in the Basque province of Guipúzcoa, but had to ask to be transferred to another region when his public declarations against the Basque flag, the Ikurriña, became known. For his accomplishments in the Basque country, and in combating the ETA, he was named Chief of the Planning Staff of the Civil Guard in Madrid. But along the way, he had also begun to accumulate a record of incidents of dissent. ETA terrorists used putting Ikurriñas with an attached bomb; when policemen went to remove the flag, bombs exploded, several Guardia Civil died this way. When Ikurriña was 'legalized', he sent a telegram to Madrid, asking if he should pay honors to Ikurriña. In Malaga, he ordered or took main part in a military deployment around all town, close to a seizing. In 1978, Tejero, Police CaptainRicardo Sáenz de Ynestrillas and an Army General Staff colonel, whose name has not been made public, attempted a coup d'état, known as Operation Galaxia. He was condemned to prison for mutiny after the collapse of the attempted coup. Tejero was in prison seven months and seven days.
Attempted 1981 coup
On 23 February 1981, Tejero entered the Congress of Deputies, the lower house of the Spanish Parliament, with 150 Guardia Civil and soldiers and held the congressmen hostage for some 22 hours. King Juan Carlos gave, around midnight, when it was clear that no more army units joined the putsch, 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. The Tejero statement about was: 'We received a country in perfect condition, we are obliged handing it same to our offspring'
Tejero created the Spanish Solidarity party in order to run in the 1982 general election. With a total of votes all over the country, it failed to obtain parliamentary representation. He was the last of the coup participants 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 Melilla Hoy, calling for a referendum on the Spanish Socialist Workers' Party proposals for giving a new measure of autonomy to Catalonia. Following the death of Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet in 2006, Tejero attended a Pinochet homage in Madrid. 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. As of 2018, Tejero resides in Madrid and Torre del Mar, Málaga, and he works as an artist doing paintings. On 23 February 2018 he attended the funeral of The 1st Duchess of Franco. On 29 May 2018 a rumour about his death was distributed by the Spanish Armed Forces. It was denied by his son.
