Your friend's comment about Mexico may be debatable in some ways, but it hits upon something very important for dry, academic rankings and definitions of freedo

Your friend's comment about Mexico may be debatable in some ways, but it hits upon something very important for dry, academic rankings and definitions of freedom. I myself live in Mexico and on a practical daily level, life is in many ways more free and easy than it is in many highly developed countries that are ranked as highly free. I suspect that this applies for many other countries vs. certain developed nations. For example, During the entirety of the COVID pandemic in particular, here, in this country, the level of control, tracking and restriction on freedom of movement and other related factors was extremely absent despite a government that's actually surprisingly experienced and has been previously applauded at dealing with pandemic responses and vaccination programs (in other words, it's not a question of aptitude, but of governing and social attitude during the pandemic). Aside from the entire debate about the need for COVID lockdowns and restrictions, one could really feel the difference in freedom of personal activity here vs. the stories being made about daily life in a number of other ostensibly far freer countries such as Australia, which has during COVID and for other reasons unrelated slid ever more into something resembling an authoritarian state. That's just one example, and not an attempt to slide into a debate about COVID, just a presently relevant case sample of the times. My overall point comes back to what I said at the beginning: that there are formal factors for freedom rankings, but also, there are practical factors that are hard to measure but often very valid when it comes to the business of daily life. They're worth keeping in mind too, because being free is also an innately human experience, not just a specific academic datum. Also, Mexico legally has extremely strong press freedom, at all levels. The country is however grotesquely insecure in other ways and while there are virtually no authoritarian measures against press freedom, yes, reporters often die or suffer in other ways due to reasons related to pressures from organized crime and corruption. This itself could open a whole parallel debate about practical unfreedoms and academic unfreedoms, ie: countries that enshrine the formal rules of a free society but in practice lack them for numerous informal but heavy handed reasons.