What should have been a five-minute time-saving walk from Mexico’s National Palace to the Education Ministry for President Claudia Sheinbaum has become a symbol of what Mexican women face every day after a video captured a drunk man groping the country’s first woman president.
She also called on states to scrutinize their laws and procedures to make it easier for women to report such assaults and said Mexicans needed to hear a “loud and clear, no, women’s personal space must not be violated.”
Sheinbaum said she felt a responsibility to press charges for all Mexican women. “If this is done to the president, what is going to happen to all of the young women in our country?”
Widespread problem
Indeed, if Mexico’s president is not exempt from street harassment, then it’s not difficult to imagine what women with hourslong commutes on public transportation are experiencing daily.
Andrea González Martínez, 27, who works for Mexican lender Nacional Monte de Piedad, said she has been harassed on public transportation, in one case the man followed her home.
“It happens regularly, it happens on public transportation,” she said. “It’s something you experience every day in Mexico.”
Her coworker, Carmen Maldonado Castillo, 43, said she has witnessed it.
“You can’t walk around free in the street,” she said.
Sheinbaum said Wednesday that she had similar experiences of harassment when she was 12 years old and using public transportation to get to school, and understands the problem is widespread.
“I decided to press charges because this is something that I experienced as a woman, but that we as women experience in our country,” she said.
Government response
The incident immediately raised questions about the president’s security, but Sheinbaum dismissed any suggestion that she would increase her security or change how she interacts with people.
She explained that she and her team had decided to walk from the National Palace to the Education Ministry to avoid a 20-minute car ride in city traffic.
Mexico City Mayor Clara Brugada had announced overnight that the man had been arrested.
Brugada used some of Sheinbaum’s own language about being elected Mexico’s first woman president to emphasize that harassment of any woman – in this case Mexico’s most powerful – is an assault on all women.
When Sheinbaum was elected, she said that it wasn’t just her coming to power, it was all women.
Brugada said that was “not a slogan, it’s a commitment to not look the other way, to not allow misogyny to continue to be veiled in habits, to not accept a single additional humiliation, not another abuse, not a single femicide more.”
Hoping for change
Lilian Valvuena, 31, said she didn’t think Sheinbaum had really taken violence against women seriously until her firsthand experience yesterday. She hopes that work to better train police to respond will follow.
“They have to prepare them,” she said. “They don’t know what protocols to follow.”
Marina Reyna, executive director of the Guerrero Association against Violence toward Women, said that watching the video she initially worried that Sheinbaum had minimized the assault, continuing to smile and talk calmly to the man. But she hoped the president’s willingness to talk about it Wednesday would change how such cases are handled, after years of activists highlighting the issue.
“You lose confidence in the institutions,” Reyna said. “The people stop going to report it, because when you report it nothing happens.”
A World Health Organization report this year revealed that one in three women in the Americas has experienced physical or sexual violence from a partner or by a third party at some point in their lives.
In the first seven months of this year cases of femicide in Mexico dropped almost 40%, compared to the same period in 2024, and intentional injuries against women decreased by 11%, according to figures from the Federal Security Secretariat.
Reyna indicated that the violence suffered by Mexican women is related to impunity, which she estimated at over 70%, and added that this situation leads women not to report crimes.
From 2019 to 2024, only 20% to 30% of women experiencing violence in Mexico, Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Ecuador, Honduras, Peru and Uruguay used state services specifically designed for them, according to a report by the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) on femicide in the region.
Political scientist Manuel Pérez Aguirre, a researcher at the Seminar on Violence and Peace at the College of Mexico academic center, argued that in the case of the president, there must be a “truly exemplary punishment” that serves as a clear message to sexual aggressors in Mexico.