Linda Diebel was a tenacious reporter and gifted story-teller who broke new ground as the Toronto Star’s first Latin American Bureau chief in 1995.

Diebel died this week of natural causes several months after a serious fall down the stairs in her Toronto home. She was 71.

“Linda was a one of a kind trailblazer,” said Torstar chair John Honderich, a former publisher of the paper.

“She was our first female correspondent in Washington and her work as a correspondent in war-torn Mexico was both daring and insightful” Honderich said.

Former Star managing editor Mary Deanne Shears recalled Diebel’s doggedness as a reporter.

“Linda exuded a very deep passion for journalism and was just about unstoppable in her search for truth,” Shears said.

“When she took on an assignment, her editors knew no stone would be left unturned. Her work ethic demanded she be given the appropriate time to research and write,” she said.

Diebel was known to friends and colleagues for an intense and quirky personality and a flamboyant fashion sense.

“To be sure, she was intense, a trait that led her to write award-winning journalism and books,” Shears said.

“No subject was beyond her grasp: political intrigue, wars, civic issues. She cared about them all,” she said.

Olivia Ward, a close friend and fellow foreign correspondent at the Star, remembers Diebel as an ace reporter who would dig until she uncovered the full story.

“Linda was an absolutely fierce and dedicated journalist who would go to the limit on any story,” says Ward, who covered Moscow for the paper in the 1990s.

Diebel joined the Star’s Ottawa bureau in 1988 after stints as a senior writer for Maclean’s Magazine and in the Montreal Gazette’s Ottawa bureau.

She also worked at the Vancouver Sun and the now defunct Montreal Star in her early career.

Tim Harper, a former national editor and columnist at the Star, recalled Diebel not only as a tenacious reporter, but as as a fine writer.

“I worked with Linda in Ottawa, Washington and Toronto and never saw anyone attack a story with such tenacity,” said Harper. “The richness of her writing and her eye for detail were second to none,” he said.

Ian Urquhart, also a former Star managing editor, also recalled Diebel’s skill as a reporter.

“She was a brilliant journalist …. She was, in my view, a great journalist,” Urquhart says.

“She was trilingual (Spanish, French and English) and loved going off the beaten path of journalism and finding stories that other people weren’t finding,” he says.

Diebel was born in Sudbury in 1948 and attended Hamilton’s McMaster University in the late 1960s, where she earned an honours degree in English and history.

She became the Star’s Washington Bureau Chief in 1990, where her intense opposition to the first Gulf War earned her the ire of then U.S. president George H.W. Bush.

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“He called her that nasty Diebel person,” recalls Ward, who added that it was a reproach Diebel relished.

From Washington she broke ground as the paper’s first Latin American Bureau chief, setting up headquarters in Mexico City but seeing all of Mexico and Central and South America as her bailiwick.

Her work earned her a National Newspaper Award in 2000 for stories about the kidnapping business in Colombia. It was her fourth nomination for that prestigious award.

“Diebel … travelled deep into dangerous guerrilla territory, sometimes by mule, and found a sophisticated kidnapping operation assisted by computers,” the Star wrote at the time.

Diebel used her bureau experience to write the 2006 book Betrayed: The Assassination of Digna Ochoa, about the killing of a Mexican human rights lawyer.

She wrote a second book published a year later on then national Liberal leader Stephane Dion.

Back in Toronto in 2002, Diebel worked extensively on national and local political issues. And her stories in 2010 about a sex scandal involving city counsellor Adam Giambrone put the brakes on his incipient mayoral campaign.

Beneath her intense exterior, there were deep layers of loyalty and compassion, said Ward, who added that Diebel was also deeply involved in human rights issues.

“She was an extremely loyal friend,” Ward said.

“And her heart was with the poorest people in society. She was also a fashionista. She loved the good things in life, but she always identified with the poor.”

Ward also recalled Diebel’s passion for her feline companions.

“More than anything in the entire world, she loved her cats,” said Ward, who recalled that she brought two rescued animals back with her from Mexico.

A celebration of Diebel’s life will be held at a later date.