The influencer César Gastélum, 25 years old, was executed with a shot to the head while doing a live stream outside a snack bar in Culiacán, capital of Sinaloa, Mexico, on August 4. The assassin arrived by motorcycle without raising suspicion and fled after the crime. In May of last year, influencer Valeria Márquez, 23 years old, was also killed by a motorcycle rider while broadcasting live from her beauty salon in Zapopan, in Greater Guadalajara. Both cases are part of a growing trend in Mexico: the murder of content creators amid the bloody cartel war over drug trafficking. Since 2024, 19 such deaths have been recorded, eight of them in Sinaloa alone.
Influencers are being used as propaganda weapons by criminal groups and, at the same time, becoming targets of their rivals. In Gastélum's case, a specific detail is suspected to have turned the influencer into a target: in his last videos, he appeared wearing a hat that is a symbol of the La Mayiza faction, linked to the Sinaloa Cartel. This type of visual identification with a specific faction may have indicated alignment with a group adversarial to his assassins, making him a threat from the rivals' perspective.
