The live broadcast lasted barely a handful of seconds. It was enough for the phone camera to focus on Valeria Márquez's face, who was examining a suspicious package in her beauty salon in Zapopan, before a gunman burst in and shot her dead. The sequence spread across social networks at the speed of light. And, as happens when indignation is administered with clicks, many spectators forgot that on the other side of the screen lay a 23-year-old woman who had reported threats from her ex-partner and asked for help that never came.

Her death fits into a known and unbearable statistic: in Mexico, more than ten women are murdered every day. INEGI confirms that the rate of female homicides continues to show no sustained decrease, while the curve of presumed femicides remains robustly high. The country records 2.6 homicides per 100,000 women in just one semester, and yet the figure is repeated as if it were the weather forecast.

The public reaction to the case exhibits the oldest trick of machismo: as always, blaming the victim. Part of the digital conversation became obsessed with Márquez's clothing, with her makeup videos, with the supposed narco-context of Jalisco. Sociologist Margarita Mantilla summarized it precisely: "the morality of the dead woman is evaluated before demanding the capture of the murderer." The attitude is not new, but the screen amplifies the chorus of "she asked for it" until it becomes a collective editorial that preemptively absolves the aggressor and turns misogyny into a spectator sport.

Meanwhile, institutions advance at a bureaucratic pace. The Jalisco Prosecutor's Office activated the femicide protocol, interviewed family members, and floated the hypothesis of a hired hitman, a theory so common that it already seems like a template. Jalisco has consolidated itself as the epicenter of aggressions against women in the last five years; the basic question persists: why wasn't a previous, public, and explicit complaint enough to offer her protection?

Behind the morbid curiosity, algorithms celebrate their own carnival. Each reproduction of the video, each "exclusive" note, each inflamed comment generates advertising revenue. Major platforms paint themselves purple on March 8 and swear to combat digital violence, but when the impact cycle lengthens, moderation relaxes because audiences grow. Thus, Márquez's death becomes premium content and the clickbait "influencer shot in live" performs better than any awareness campaign. The federal Security Cabinet promises results in "interinstitutional coordination," a phrase that in citizen jargon means "wait seated."

Not everything depends on the prosecutor's office or social networks. The Secretary for Women, Citlalli Hernández, accuses the Judicial Power of dragging patriarchal remnants; without judges and prosecutors trained with a gender perspective, protocols become empty scripts. The United Nations recalls that 51,100 women and girls were murdered in 2023 worldwide, most by acquaintances. But figures only move people when names and surnames appear; the challenge is to translate numbers into reforms, meaning sufficient budgets, effective patrolling, dignified shelters, comprehensive sex education, and, above all, exemplary sanctions for officials who ignore violence alerts.

The conclusion is uncomfortable precisely because it is simple. As long as popular culture tolerates sexist jokes, the press rewards scandals, and the State confuses life protocols with paper procedures, female vulnerability will continue to be written in funerals. Valeria Márquez did not die by chance; she died in an ecosystem that minimizes women's fear and normalizes armed virility. Turning her case into a turning point involves more than posthumous hashtags and requires dismantling the patriarchal script that turns each aggression into a spectacle and revoking the social license to blame the victim.