Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum has announced she will file charges against a man who groped her during a public appearance.
Cellphone footage of Tuesday’s incident shows Sheinbaum speaking to a group of supporters on a street near Mexico City’s National Palace.
In the video, a man approaches her from behind and attempts to kiss her neck and place his hands on her body.
Sheinbaum quickly walked away and a member of her team intervened, but she was visibly shaken. The offender was arrested.
“My point of view is: If I don’t press charges, what will happen to other Mexican women? If they do this to the president, what will happen to all the women in our country?” Sheinbaum said at a news conference Wednesday.
“I decided to file a complaint because it is something that I experienced as a woman, but that we experience as women in our country,” she said. “I have already experienced it, when I was not president, when I was a student.”
She added that she decided to pursue charges against the suspect because he allegedly harassed other women in the crowd.
“A line needs to be drawn,” she said.
Women’s rights groups and feminist commentators said the incident showed the extent of entrenched machismo in Mexican society, where a man believes he has the right to even approach the president if she is a woman.
Femicide is also a huge problem in Mexico, where an estimated 98% of gender-based murders go unpunished.
Sheinbaum promised to tackle this problem as a candidate, but so far under her administration there has been no discernible improvement in this area of violent crime.
The incident also comes amid discussions about presidential security and, more broadly, the security of politicians.
As president, Sheinbaum has largely followed the approach of her predecessor, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, maintaining close and regular contact with his supporters on the streets or at campaign events.
At times, this posed security concerns for his team. However, she confirmed at her new conference that she has no plans to change her policy of interaction with her supporters.
The incident also occurred just days after the killing of Carlos Manzo, the mayor of Uruapan, a municipality in the violent state of Michoacan, during local Day of the Dead celebrations.
Manzo had asked Sheinbaum for greater federal support for Uruapan in the fight against drug cartels. About 35 candidates were killed in the run-up to last year’s general elections, in what was considered the bloodiest campaign in modern Mexico.
Since taking office, Sheinbaum has made progress in improving the country’s dire security situation, particularly in cracking down on fentanyl trafficking – a key issue for his US counterpart, President Trump.
