“Hey Vale” – a live-streamed killing and the scourge of femicide in Latin America

Last Wednesday afternoon, Valeria Márquez, a 23-year-old Mexican cosmetics and lifestyle influencer with more than 200,000 followers on social media, set up a camera and began livestreaming on TikTok from her beauty salon near Guadalajara, Mexico.

Moments later, as she spoke to her followers while holding a stuffed animal, a man entered the salon.

“Hey Vale?” He asks out of frame, using a casual nickname for Márquez as he apparently offers her a gift. He then shoots her to death, picks up the camera, and switches it off.

Several days later, Maria José Estupiñán, a Colombian model and social media star, was also gunned down in the doorway of her home in the border town of Cúcuta by an apparent stalker.

The killings of the two women, both relatively affluent, young, and with large public profiles, have shaken the two countries, throwing fresh attention on the wider problem in Latin America of femicide – the killing of women or girls because of their gender.

Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum has assigned her top security team to investigate the killing of Márquez, which authorities have already classified as a femicide.

According to a study published late last year, roughly 11 women were murdered every day in femicides in the region in 2023. The most dangerous countries were Honduras, where 7.2 out of every 100,000 women died in femicides, and the Dominican Republic, where the rate was nearly 3. In Colombia, local watchdogs recorded nearly 900 femicides last year, a seven-year high.

As elsewhere in the world, the vast majority of these crimes are committed by men who are known to the victims – current, former, or aspiring romantic partners, as well as male family members.

But addressing the problem, experts say, is a complicated mix of changing laws and shaping minds.

Over the past three decades, countries throughout the region have passed at least some legislation to address violence against women, pushed both by United Nations conventions on violence against women, and activist movements like Ni Una Menos (“Not one woman less”), founded in Argentina a decade ago in response to the murder of a pregnant, 14-year-old girl at the hands of her boyfriend.

Some countries have gone further, developing specific frameworks for the documentation and prosecution of femicide. Mexico and Colombia, in fact, have some of the strictest laws on the books, says Beatriz García Nice, a gender-based violence expert based in Ecuador. But laws aren’t enough.

“It’s not that we lack laws,” she says, “it’s that there is impunity and the lack of enforcement.”

One part of that comes from deeply ingrained social norms, she says.

“We have to change cultural traits so that you’re not teaching kids, especially boys, that women are property, or that their only role in society is to belong to a man.”

Corruption also plays a role in a region where graft and nepotism are rampant in judiciary systems. In Mexico, for example, a study from 2023 showed nearly half of people lack confidence in the judiciary, and close to 90% of people said they didn’t report crimes for that reason.

This fuels reluctance to report gender-based crimes as well – more than 85% of women in Mexico, Honduras, and Ecuador say they don’t report episodes of physical or psychological violence. That matters because femicide, García Nice points out, is only the gruesome end of a long road that begins with other kinds of abuse.

The rise of the influencer economy can make things even worse, especially as legal frameworks addressing online harassment of women are still relatively weak in Latin America.

“Online violence bleeds into offline violence,” says Rangita de Silva de Alwis, a University of Pennsylvania law school professor who is on the UN committee that focuses on eradicating violence against women.

“The impunity that we see in the online world has real world consequences.”