Mr. Rajoy was livid. “El Mundo distorts and manipulates to produce slander,” he told the Senate on Aug. 1. Shortly after this, the party’s secretary general, María Dolores de Cospedal, said, “I don’t read El Mundo,” which was interpreted as a government-sanctioned boycott of the newspaper. High-level officials, unlike in the past, stayed away from an international journalism awards ceremony we had established in the memory of three reporters who had died in the line of duty. Some of Spain’s biggest companies, many of which are in sectors that are heavily regulated by the government, canceled their advertising. Barry Sussman, an editor who helped lead The Washington Post’s coverage of Watergate, wrote in our pages that we were dealing with the same situation: a combination of dirty money and efforts to intimidate the press.

This heavy-handed government, which has been mum about my dismissal, reminds me of 1974, when I interviewed Mr. Wicker. Gen. Francisco Franco was still in power, but Spain’s collective desire for freedom and democracy had taken on a life of its own. He died the next year, and the press was pivotal in the transition from dictatorship to democracy. Newspapers linked to the old regime had no credibility. Opportunities suddenly opened for journalists of my generation. In 1980, at age 28, I was named editor of the newspaper Diario 16. It was a crash course in journalism and democracy.

In just a few years we endured seemingly all of the nerve-racking situations that a new democracy could possibly experience. We categorically opposed attempts by Franco’s former generals to undermine the new government. We opposed the terrorism of Basque separatists — but also the death squads that Prime Minister Felipe González’s Socialist government assembled to fight the separatist group, known as ETA.

In 1988, after our investigative reporting linked the Spanish government to the death squads’ killings in the south of France, Mr. González intercepted me in a corridor at the Parliament and asked me to stop publishing “those terrible things.” I refused, and a few months later I was fired. The owner of the newspaper had succumbed to political pressure.

Dozens of journalists quit and joined me to found El Mundo, “a new newspaper for a new generation of readers.” It was a rapid success. We quickly occupied a center-right political space, with a strong base of readers among young urban professionals. We resumed our investigation into the death squads.