In Mexico, first outrage, then victim-blaming over murdered TikTok influencer

MEXICO CITY - No sooner had 23-year-old beauty influencer

Valeria Marquez been murdered on a TikTok live stream

than the Mexican rumour mill started. Comments poured in on social media blaming her for her own death: She was involved in shady business, her former boyfriend was a narco, she had it coming, they said.

By May 16, the media and politicians were already moving on. Ms Marquez seems destined to become one in a long line of Mexican women whose murder briefly shocks the conscience, only to recede into the background until the next gruesome crime happens.

“It sort of reflects a level of saturation, a level of societal acceptance of these sorts of killings,” said Dr Gema Kloppe-Santamaria, a sociologist at University College Cork in Ireland who studies gender-based violence in Mexico.

“There’s a lot of re-victimisation that I think allows people to say, ‘Let’s move on. This is something that won’t happen to us. It doesn’t happen to good girls. It doesn’t happen to decent Mexican women.’”

Ms Marquez, who had nearly 200,000 followers across Instagram and TikTok, was known for her videos about beauty and make-up. On May 13, she clutched a stuffed toy and live-streamed from the beauty salon where she worked in the state of Jalisco, when a male voice in the background asked: “Hey, Vale?”

“Yes,” Ms Marquez replied, just before muting the sound on the live stream.

Moments later, she was shot dead. A person appeared to pick up her phone, with their face briefly showing on the live stream before the video ended.

Almost immediately, local media honed in on a man they identified as Ms Marquez’s former boyfriend, who they said was a regional leader of the Jalisco New Generation Cartel, one of Mexico’s most notorious drug cartels. Local media shared alleged text messages between the couple that appeared to show the former boyfriend threatening Ms Marquez because she ignored him.

Reuters was not able to independently verify the identity of the former boyfriend or contact him for comment. Ms Marquez’s family declined to speak with Reuters.

The Jalisco state prosecutor said Ms Marquez’s murder is being investigated as a possible femicide – the killing of women or girls for reasons of gender – but declined to say whether Ms Marquez’s former boyfriend was a suspect.

“Anyone associated with this girl, whether friends, relatives, acquaintances, or boyfriends, is being investigated or interviewed,” Mr Salvador Gonzalez de los Santos said in a press conference on May 16.

Outrage passes

Ms Marquez is one of countless murdered girls and women whose deaths in recent years have triggered a groundswell of outrage and protests only for the status quo to prevail.

Among them: Ms Ingrid Escamilla, 25, who was stabbed, skinned and mutilated in 2020. Fatima Cecilia Aldrighett, seven, who in the same year was abducted from school and her body later found wrapped in a plastic bag. Ms Debanhi Escobar, 18, who disappeared from the side of a highway in 2022 and whose body was found in a cistern 13 days later.

Ms Escamilla’s boyfriend was convicted and sentenced in her killing. Two people were recently sentenced in Aldrighett’s case. Ms Escobar’s case remains unsolved after an investigation riddled by mistakes and the firing of two prosecutors for “omissions and errors,” according to a statement by the prosecutor’s office. A government autopsy initially alleged that Ms Escobar had fallen into the cistern, a version contradicted by two subsequent autopsies.

“Each case goes through its media cycle and then there’s another one,” said Ms Anayeli Perez, legal adviser to the National Citizens’ Observatory on Femicide. “It speaks of a society whose social fabric is falling apart.”

In 2023, Mexico recorded 852 femicides, according to the most recent report by the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean. It has the fourth-highest rate of femicides in the region on a per capita basis, with Honduras, the Dominican Republic and Brazil even higher. Many advocates say the number is likely underestimated.

Jalisco is among Mexico’s more dangerous states, with 910 homicides recorded since the beginning of President Claudia Sheinbaum’s term in October 2024, according to data consultancy TResearch.

Ms Sheinbaum, who made history as Mexico’s first female leader, said on May 15 that the powerful national security Cabinet was working with the state prosecutor to investigate Ms Marquez’s murder. She implored people not to share the live stream of Ms Marquez’s murder on social media out of respect for Ms Marquez and her family.

But Ms Sheinbaum’s rhetoric – and gender – has added only a veneer of competence to what remains a fundamentally broken system for addressing violence against women, Ms Perez said.

“The prosecutors are still negligent, the experts don’t have training, the police don’t have a gender perspective,” she said.

Under police presence, Ms Marquez was buried on May 15, her casket topped by a bouquet of white roses. REUTERS