Valeria Marquez, a beauty influencer, was shot dead by a man on May 14 while live streaming on TikTok at her beauty salon in the Mexican city of Guadalajara. The authorities are investigating the case as a suspected femicide, where women or girls are killed on account of their gender.
The killing of Marquez is part of a gender-based violence epidemic that has gripped Latin America for decades. The threat of such violence there is so severe that in 2020, as the world battled COVID, the UN secretary-general, António Guterres, called it a “shadow pandemic”.
