Two weeks after Frances Robles returned from a reporting trip to Honduras, she received a phone call from a source.

Gustavo Alfredo Landaverde, Honduras’ former deputy drug czar, founding member of the Christian Democratic Party and outspoken critic of the narco-trafficking violence choking his country, had been shot to death in his car by two men on motorbikes in a brazen early morning attack.

Landaverde was only one of a handful of sources Robles interviewed who were willing to speak publicly — and on the record — about the complicity of some corrupt government officials in drug-related killings that earn Honduras the dubious title of murder capital of the world.

It stunned Robles, a seasoned foreign correspondent who spent four years in Nicaragua and Colombia for The Miami Herald.

“There are people in that story who I thought would be killed,” she said. “But he wasn’t one of them.”

It was the very nature of the tip from an activist that prompted us to travel to Honduraswithin 48 hours of getting the phone call. The tipster explained how inmates were being used as drug runners by the cops who operate the prison. They were allowed to come and go like guests at a hotel. One prisoner, upon his release, had been gunned down by guards — witnessed by the two women who were waiting to pick him up. They told human-rights activists what they saw. One was later stoned to death. The other disappeared.

A third person was willing to talk to us about the killing, but we had to get there quickly — before something happened to the source.

“There’s a trail of bodies in this story,’’ Robles said.

Soon after she landed, Robles realized the story went far beyond the murders of drug-running prisoners. The murders in Honduras, a key transit point between the drug producers in Colombia and their clientele in the United states — often involved the highest levels of the national police force.

“I realized that I was in the middle of a huge police crisis,” she said.

Nearly two dozen journalists in Honduras have been killed in the past three years Investigative reporters who cover the trail of narco-trafficking violence publish stories anonymously, without their names.

“If you say you never feel fear, then you’re lying,” Robles said. "You have to make sure you’re not being followed, that you change taxis. You never know whether you should carry your notebooks."

The truly courageous, she said, are the sources who spoke to her for the story that appears on today’s front page.

“I went in for a week, then I left,” she said. “They are still there.”

The sources took the risk to talk to a reporter because they desperately hope that shining a light on the problem in the United States will draw the attention of the U.S. government. We made a decision to tell this story in our continued commitment to covering Latin American stories that reverberate loudly here in South Florida.

“They literally risked their lives telling us their story,” Robles said. “If anyone ever found out they’d be dead in 24 hours. They’re hoping the U.S. will wake up and put pressure on the government to do something.”