TIKTOK Influencers killing in front of the camera shows the female crisis in Latin America

Valeria Marquez, a beauty influencer, was shot by a man on May 14th when he streamed in her beauty salon in the Mexican city of Guadalajara on Tiktok. The authorities investigate the case as a suspected femicine in which women or girls are killed because of their gender.

The murder of Marquez is part of a gender-specific epidemic of violence that has been recorded for decades of Latin America. The danger of such violence there is so serious that in 2020, when the world fought against Covid, the UN General Secretary António Guterres, called a “shadow pandemy”.

The situation in Mexico is particularly alarming. A report by Amnesty International 2021 showed that at least ten women or girls are murdered in the country every day. The report added that the authorities have largely proven to take measures to take measures to stop the killing.

On the surface, Mexico has made considerable progress in improving gender equality. Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo was the first woman to be chosen as Mexican President in 2024. There are also several governors who lead mighty Mexican provinces, and the political leadership of female political leadership can be found in regional and municipal bodies in large numbers.

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Despite the visible presence of women in public life, parts of Mexican society remain deeply sexist. Researchers see the prevalence of Machismo, a culture that promotes an extreme feeling of male pride that has made male dominance to women easier.

Femicide in Mexico was particularly widespread in the 1990s. The introduction of the North American free trade agreement made many factories for export near the Mexican border to the USA. These factories are known as Maquiladoras.

The emergence of Maquiladoras Created low -qualified employment opportunities. And a generation of women was looking for economic freedom by working in the factories. Until 2006 more than half of the workers Maquiladoras were women, mostly the result of their comparatively low wage requirements.

While this cultural shift enabled women to greater economic autonomy, some men also led them to a deep resentment. In the nineties, Ciudad Juárez Ciudad Juárez was carried out in the Mexican border town of Ciudad Juárez, which demanded the life of around 400 women.

Studies have established a connection between female employment in the Maquiladoras And the resulting increase in the female female in Mexican border cities. Many of the women killed in Ciudad Juárez worked in the Maquiladoras.

Some people also point out that the culture of male chauvinism in Mexico – and more generally in all of Latin America – is omnipresent.

When the Mexican government set up a hotline in 2020 to report questions of domestic abuse and violence against women in the country, it was flooded by tens of thousands of reports. But when journalists asked the then President, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, he put them aside: “90% of the calls they refer to are fake.”

Culture of impunity

Gender -based violence in Mexico and in large parts of Latin America does not only exist because of the culture of extreme masculinity. It also thrives because the perpetrator's failure is institutionally brought to court.

There are robust laws and regulations to protect women from abuse in Latin America. The inter -American convention on prevention, punishment and extermination of violence against women, which was signed in the Brazilian city of Belém in 1994, is a good example.

It was adopted by all countries in Latin America and the Caribbean, making violence against women as a violation of their human rights. Despite the presence of this legal framework, there was no corresponding decline in female rates.

Improper is one of the greatest obstacles to answering the problem of female female in the entire region. In Mexico, for example, more than 90% of all crimes are unsolved. And in Brazil, many cases of violence against women are not reported.

When they are reported, the victims and their families are often exposed to obstacles in the judicial system. Despite an increase in the number of female cases in Brazil from 2019 to 2020, conviction for this crime only increased by 24%.

According to a report by the World Bank from 2023, an institutional complicity in the persecution of violence against women in Honduras is there. The report claims that the national police in the country “turns an eye to the difficult number of female female into the eye of the country”.

Similarly, according to the Diana portal of the office office of the ombudsman, femicide in the country is out of control, since the negligent state machinery is unable to address the problem. As a result, criminals have the feeling of “raping, disappearing or killing a woman without consistency”.

Latin America and the Caribbean have never had a lack of female public personalities. From 2025, the region had more than a dozen female leaders. Argentina, Brazil and Chile recently had female heads of state, while Peru, Honduras, Nicaragua and Mexico currently have female presidents. The maximum patron saint Saint, Virgen de Guadalupe, is also a woman.

However, the presence of these top -class personalities in public life has not prevented any sections of society from violating women.

The late Pope Francis, who was immortalized by the culture of impunity and male chauvinism in Latin America, was a commandment. During a visit to Peru in 2018, he said that violence against women was not treated as “normal”. “It is not right for us to look in the other direction and that so many women, especially young women, would let her feet.”

Unfortunately, despite the moral break contained in his message, Latin America was completely unable to address this subculture of gender -specific violence.