MEXICO CITY (AP) — 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 stomach-churning viral moment after a video captured a drunk man groping the president.
The brief clip has given the daily harassment and assaults that women suffer in Mexico their highest-profile platform. And on Wednesday, Sheinbaum used her daily press briefing to say that she had pressed charges against the man.
She also called on states to look at 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, because if not, where would that leave Mexican women? “If this is done to the president, what is going to happen to all of the young women in our country?”
Indeed, if Mexico’s president cannot be in the street for five minutes without a man approaching her from behind, putting his hands on her body and leaning in for a kiss, then it’s not difficult to imagine what women with hours-long 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.
“It’s not good that men attack us,” she said. “You can’t walk around free in the street.”
Sheinbaum said Wednesday that she understands how widespread the problem is.
“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.
She said she had similar experiences of harassment when she was 12 years old and using public transportation to get to school. As president, she said, she felt like she had a responsibility to all women.
Mexico City Mayor Clara Brugada had announced overnight that the man had been arrested.
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 save time. She said they could walk it in five minutes, rather than taking a 20-minute car ride.
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.”
Lilian Valvuena, 31, said she didn’t think Sheinbaum had really taken violence against women seriously until yesterday when she had a first-hand experience. 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.
“You lose confidence in the institutions,” Reyna said. “The people stop going to report it, because when you report it nothing happens.”
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By FABIOLA SÁNCHEZ and FERNANDA FIGUEROA
Associated Press
