Nicolas Ferrel-Ibarra was a reporter in Mexico, one of the most dangerous places on the planet to be a journalist.
Nicolas Ferrel-Ibarra, 35
Only eight other countries around the world including Iraq have had more journalist murders than Mexico, according to Committee to Protect Journalists, an international advocacy group.
Since 1992, the organization confirmed that 28 reporters, editor and photographers have been murdered directly because of their work as journalists in Mexico. Another 41 journalists in the country had been killed during the same span of time, but the motive of the murders had not been confirmed, CPJ reports.
By comparison, there have been only five journalists killed in the U.S. since 1992 including Manuel de Dios Unanue, a reporter for El Diario/La Prensa, who was gunned down on March 11, 1992, in New York City.
Ferrel-Ibarra first worked as a journalist in the border city of Juarez in the state of Chihuahua, Mexico, where two journalists have been killed since the Mexican Drug War flared up in 2007.
A colleague of his, Armando Rodriguez Carreon, 40, was a crime reporter for El Diario de Ciudad Juárez.
Armando Rodriguez, 40
Before his murder on Nov. 13, 2008, in Ciudad Juárez, Carreon spoke with a representative of CPJ about the hazards of working as a journalist in the violent city engulfed in a drug war. Carreon had been receiving threats on a routine basis.
“The risks here are high and rising, and journalists are easy targets,” Rodríguez told CPJ. “But I can’t live in my house like a prisoner. I refuse to live in fear.”
An “unidentified assailant” gunned down Rodríguez as the veteran crime reporter sat in a company sedan in the driveway of his home. Rodríguez’s eight-year-old daughter, whom he was preparing to take to school, watched from the back seat.
Days before he was murdered, Rodríguez had written an article accusing a local prosecutor’s nephew of having links to drug traffickers, according to CPJ.
Attempts to solve the case have triggered more violence.