Valeria Marquez was chatting with her TikTok followers during a livestream from her chic beauty salon in Zapopan, Mexico, radiating charm and confidence. The 23-year-old beauty influencer lit up the screen, tossing her long blonde hair with a smile as she opened a small package just delivered to her door.
“Aww, it’s a little piglet!” she laughed, holding up the plush toy for her audience to see.
But the lighthearted moment turned horrifying in an instant.
Without warning, Valeria collapsed, blood spreading across the desk in front of her. The livestream kept rolling, capturing the chilling silence that followed. It finally cut off when someone picked up her phone—just long enough for their face to flash across the screen.
According to the Jalisco Attorney General’s Office, Valeria Marquez was gunned down inside her salon by a male intruder—an act now under investigation as a suspected femicide, a gender-based killing that underscores a chilling pattern of violence against women.
The brutal murder of the 23-year-old influencer—who had amassed over 100,000 followers on Instagram—has reverberated across Mexico, igniting outrage in a country already grappling with alarming rates of homicide and endemic violence against women.
Just days before Valeria’s killing, tragedy struck again—this time in Veracruz, where a woman running for mayor was shot dead during a livestream, along with three others. The eerie parallel has deepened public shock and highlighted a disturbing trend: women being murdered in real time, with cameras still rolling.
While not every killing of a woman is classified as femicide, far too many are. In 2020 alone, a staggering 25% of all female homicides in Mexico were investigated as femicides, according to Amnesty International. These crimes occurred in every one of the country’s 32 states—a grim testament to how widespread and entrenched gender-based violence has become.
