Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum said Wednesday she pressed charges against a man who groped her on the street Tuesday.
A video of the incident circulating on social media shows a man approach Sheinbaum from behind, put his arm around her and kiss her on the neck. Another man, later identified by Sheinbaum as her aide, Juan José Ramírez Mendoza, intervened.
During her daily press briefing, Sheinbaum, Mexico’s first female president, said the man appeared intoxicated and she did not realize what had occurred until Ramírez Mendoza stepped in.
The Mexican leader added that she decided to press charges because “this is something that I experienced as a woman, but also we as women experience in our country.” She noted that she experienced similar harassment while using public transportation when she was 12 years old.
Mexico City Mayor Clara Brugada said on the social platform X on Tuesday evening that the man was arrested by the country’s Secretariat of Security and Citizen Protection.
“If they touch the president, they touch all of us,” Brugada added.
Mexico City police were able to link the man to two other incidents of harassment against Mexico on Tuesday, CNN reported.
Sheinbaum said Wednesday that she and her team decided to walk from the National Palace to the Education Ministry to avoid traffic. The Presidential General Staff, a military body that assists with the president’s security, was dissolved by Sheinbaum’s predecessor, former Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador.
Sheinbaum also called on states to improve safeguards for women to report assaults saying that “women’s personal spaces must not be violated.”
In 2021, 49.7 percent of women ages 15 and older in Mexico reported they had experienced sexual violence at some point in their life, with 34.7 percent saying they had experienced physical violence at some point, according to a report from country’s National Institute of Statistics and Geography.
That same year, 99.7 percent of sexual violence incidents against women went unreported, according to México Evalúa, a think tank that analyzes the country’s policies.
The Associated Press contributed.
