Mexico President Sheinbaum presses charges after street harassment

MEXICO CITY (AP) — Mexico President Claudia Sheinbaum said Wednesday that the harassment she suffered from a drunk man in the street near Mexico’s seat of government was an assault on all women and that’s why she decided to press charges against him.

Mexico City Mayor Clara Brugada had announced overnight that the man had been arrested.

In a video circulating widely on social platforms, the man appeared to lean in for a kiss and touch the president’s body with his hands on Tuesday. She gently pushed his hands away, maintaining a stiff smile as she turned to face him. She could be heard to say in part, “Don’t worry.”

On Wednesday, Sheinbaum was firm in emphasizing that this was not the first time she had suffered such harassment and that the problem went far beyond the president. “No man has the right to violate that space,” she said.

“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. “I have experienced it before, when I wasn’t president, when I was a student.”

The incident immediately raised questions about the president’s security, but also was a high-profile example of the sort of harassment women deal with daily across Mexico.

Sheinbaum explained that she and her team had decided to walk from the National Palace to the Education Ministry to save time. She said they could walk it in five minutes, rather than taking a 20-minute car ride. She said she would not change how she acts.

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.”