Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum has said she will press charges against a man who groped her during a public appearance.
Mobile phone footage of the incident on Tuesday shows Sheinbaum speaking to a group of supporters on a street near the National Palace in Mexico City.
In the video, a man approaches her from behind and attempts to kiss her on the neck and place his hands on her body.
Sheinbaum moved away quickly, and a member of her team stepped in, but she was visibly shaken. The offender has been arrested.
“My view is, if I don’t file a complaint, what will happen to other Mexican women? If they do this to the president, what will happen to all women in our country?” Sheinbaum said at a news conference on Wednesday.
“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.”
She added that she had decided to press ahead with bringing charges against the suspect as he had allegedly harassed other women in the crowd.
“A line must be drawn,” she said.
Women’s rights groups and feminist commentators have said the incident shows the extent of ingrained machismo in Mexican society, where a man believes he has the right to accost even the president if she is a woman.
Femicide is also a considerable problem in Mexico, with a staggering 98% of gender-based murders estimated to go unpunished.
Sheinbaum promised to tackle the issue as a candidate, but so far in her administration, there has been no discernible improvement in that area of violent crime.
The incident also comes amid discussions about presidential security and the broader safety of politicians.
As president, Sheinbaum has broadly followed the approach of her predecessor, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, in maintaining close and regular contact with her supporters on the streets or at campaign events.
On occasion, that has presented security concerns for her team. However, she confirmed in her new conference that she had no intention of changing her policy of interacting with her supporters.
The incident also happened just days after the murder of Carlos Manzo, the mayor of Uruapan, a municipality in the violent state of Michoacan, at the local
Day of the Dead celebrations.
Manzo had called on Sheinbaum for greater federal support in Uruapan in the fight against drug cartels. Around 35 candidates were killed in the lead-up to the general election last year in what was considered the bloodiest campaign in modern Mexico.
Since taking office, Sheinbaum has made inroads in improving the country’s dire security situation, particularly clamping down on fentanyl-trafficking – a key issue for her US counterpart, President Trump.
