The TikTok beauty influencer shot dead during livestream in Mexico

The death of Valeria Marquez, 23, a former beauty queen, illustrates growing concerns that ‘cartels are influencers now’

The Mexican authorities say they are investigating the killing of beauty influencer Valeria Márquez as femicide.

It was a murder that shocked even violence-weary Mexico. On Tuesday the fashion influencer Valeria Marquez, wearing a pink top and clutching a cuddly toy pig, was broadcasting to her tens of thousands of followers from the Blossom beauty salon in the city of Zapopan when a man entered the room. He could be heard asking off camera if her name was Valeria. Smiling, she confirmed it was.

As the TikTok livestream continued, he shot her first in the chest and then in the head. Her body slumped on to the table. Seconds later, a woman could be seen reaching to turn off the camera.

The Mexican authorities say they are investigating the killing as femicide, the deliberate killing of women because of their gender, which is a scourge across the country and a phenomenon often blamed on Mexico’s enduring macho culture. Feminist groups in the state of Jalisco, where the influencer lived, have appealed for a thorough investigation of her death, insisting that prevalent violence against women in public and private spaces, let alone on social media, should never be normalised.

Valeria Márquez may have had a relationship with a senior member of the Jalisco New Generation Cartel, it has been suggested.

The incident has also put renewed focus on another issue in Mexico: the sometimes close connection between criminal groups and influencers. There have been unconfirmed suggestions that Marquez, 23, a former beauty queen, may have had a relationship with a senior member of the Jalisco New Generation Cartel, a gang which operates in Zapopan and is notorious for violence.

Two years ago she began posting images of herself, seemingly relishing an opulent lifestyle, including photographs taken on board a private jet. She mentioned to her followers she had a new boyfriend, whom she never named, but referred to as “The Doll”.

According to screenshots shared on social media weeks before she was killed, the influencer, who had about 200,000 followers across Instagram and TikTok, had warned that she was being threatened. In one she said an unidentified ex-partner should be held “responsible for anything that happens to me and my family”. In her final broadcast she had mentioned that perhaps someone wanted to kill her.

In northern Mexico’s Sinaloa state, 465 miles north of Jalisco and another hotbed for gang violence, at least four influencers have been murdered in recent months, all by cartels.

In October Juan Carlos Lopez, a TikTok broadcaster also known as “El Chilango”, was killed by two men while recording one of his videos showing him selling sweets on the streets of Culiacan, the capital of Sinaloa. He was apparently murdered because a rival gang saw him as a sympathiser for “Los Chapitos”, a cartel formed by the sons of the notorious drug lord, Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, who is serving a life sentence in a US jail.

Recaptured drug lord Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman is escorted by soldiers at the hangar belonging to the office of the Attorney General in Mexico City, 2016. Picture: Reuters/Henry Romero

In November, also in Culiacan, Jesus Miguel Vivanco Garcia, a prominent YouTuber who worked under the name of “El Jasper”, was found dead on a roadside with 70 bullet wounds and signs of torture on his body. Vivanco Garcia, whose jovial YouTube videos would often feature him singing on horseback had been sanctioned by the US in 2023 for his alleged involvement in the smuggling of fentanyl.

The following month another internet celebrity, Leobardo Aispuro Soto, known by his thousands of followers as “Fat Peruci”, whose videos showed him carrying out practical jokes, was murdered in the city after a group of armed men opened fire on him when he was walking in the street with his wife.

Weeks later, light aeroplanes flew over Culiacan dropping pamphlets, which stated that all three of those killed were targeted because of their links to the “Chapitos”.

The following day there was yet another murder in the same area: the victim this time was Agustin Paul, 22, alias “El Pinky”, whose posts on Instagram had earned him tens of thousands of fans. Unofficial reports indicate that those responsible for his murder were hitmen from Los Chapitos.

Back in Jalisco, in 2017, Juan Luis Lagunas Rosales, a major social media star with more than one million Facebook followers, died after he was shot at point blank range by a hit squad of at least four men who stormed a bar where he was drinking. Weeks before his killing he had made insulting comments on a YouTube video about Nemesio Oseguera Cervantes, the man who leads the Jalisco New Generation Cartel and who remains, to this day, Mexico’s most wanted man.

“Cartels are influencers now,” Anton Barba-Kay, an American academic, wrote in The Atlantic magazine last month. They are, he said, in many ways not so different from “everyone else” in that they use social media “to get attention and shape their public image”.

The Times