Valeria Márquez Died on Camera and the U.S. Just Declared It an Act of Terror
Ruiz Velasco has been linked to the 2012 killing of Venezuelan model Daisy Ferrer Arenas and the 2017 assassination of YouTuber El Pirata de Culiacán. Márquez’s killing follows the same pattern.
In Zapopan, Jalisco—a suburb known more for gated affluence than brutality—a 23-year-old beauty entrepreneur named Valeria Márquez livestreamed her final moments.
She was mid-sentence, holding a coffee cup and a stuffed piglet—gifts from a masked deliveryman. Then, within seconds, she was dead on the floor of her own salon.
The murder—captured live on social media—wasn’t just shocking. It was deliberate. It was the kind of killing that sends a message. And this time, the message was global.
This week, the U.S. Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) responded by sanctioning five top operatives of the Cartel de Jalisco Nueva Generación (CJNG)—naming the man believed to have ordered Márquez’s murder as a key figure in the cartel’s violent propaganda machine.
That man is Ricardo “El Doble R” Ruiz Velasco, a longtime lieutenant of CJNG kingpin Nemesio “El Mencho” Oseguera Cervantes.
The Treasury’s statement was unambiguous: “CJNG uses murder as a tactic to intimidate rivals, including the targeted killings of women.” In other words, Márquez wasn’t just killed—she was used.
A Public Death, A Private Message
Márquez wasn’t famous in the traditional sense. But on Instagram and TikTok, she was rising—Miss Rostro 2021, owner of Blossom The Beauty Lounge, and a face in the new economy of digital beauty influencers.
Her livestream, which was later pulled from platforms, showed the fear in her voice moments before the shooting. According to local reports, she told her audience: “Maybe they were going to kill me...”
This wasn’t paranoia.
The “deliveryman” who shot her multiple times was later identified by investigators as acting under cartel orders. Zapopan’s prosecutors confirmed the case is being pursued as femicide, a gender-specific form of targeted homicide that plagues Mexico, where over 10 women are killed per day, often with impunity.
But what set Márquez’s murder apart, what made it reverberate far beyond Jalisco, was who she was killed by and why.
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