The president of Mexico, Claudia Sheinbaumsaid Wednesday that she filed a complaint against a man who he groped her and tried to kiss her while greeting people on the street, a day after a video of the incident went viral.
Sheinbaum, the first woman to govern the Latin American nation, said in her regular morning news conference that the incident was a crime, adding that she, like other women in Mexico, has experienced similar situations before.
“If they do this to the president, what will happen to all the young women in our country?” he said, adding that the man was very drunk.
Video of the incident quickly went viral on the Internet before being removed by some accounts, underscoring for many in Mexico the insecurity women face in a country impregnated with machismo and gender violence.
The images have also raised questions about the president’s security team. Like her predecessor and political mentor, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, she travels with minimal security and makes herself widely available to the public, even wading into crowds.
Sheinbaum said Wednesday that he did not plan to change that practice, saying “we can’t be away from people.”
The incident occurred on Tuesday in the historic center of the capital when the president was making the short walk from the National Palace to the Ministry of Education.
In the video you can see how a middle-aged man puts his arm around her, touches her chest and tries to kiss her. She moves his hands away before a member of her staff steps between them. The ruler’s security personnel did not appear to be near her at the time.
The man was harassing other women on the street and was later arrested, Sheinbaum said Wednesday, who also lashed out at Mexican newspaper Reforma for publishing images of the man groping her, saying he considered it “revictimization” and crossed an ethical line.
“The use of the image is also a crime,” Sheinbaum said. “I’m waiting for an apology from the newspaper.”
The federal government’s Women’s Secretariat, created under Sheinbaum, issued a statement on Tuesday encouraging women to report violence against them, but asking the media “not to reproduce content that violates the integrity of women.”
Even so, feminist activists Sheinbaum has been heavily criticized in the past for not doing enough to address violence against women. Among other things, they point out the mediocre judicial actions and investigations of femicides, the murders of women due to their sex.
In 2024, Mexico registered 821 femicidesaccording to government data. As of September this year, 501 have been counted, and many human rights advocates say the numbers are likely greatly underestimated.
Ana Yeli Pérez, from the National Citizen Observatory of Femicidesaid that the groping of Sheinbaum puts the issue of violence against women back on the national agenda.
“It is reprehensible, it must be denounced, it must be named, because it is an act of violence, but it is also a significant and symbolic fact of what women experience every day,” she said.
