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 the country's women face every day after a video captured a drunk man groping its first female leader.
On Wednesday, gender violence catapulted to the highest-profile platform, and Ms Sheinbaum used her daily media briefing to say that she had pressed charges against the man.
She also called on states to scrutinise their laws and procedures to make it easier for women to report such assaults. Mexicans needed to hear a “loud and clear, no, women’s personal space must not be violated”, she said.
Ms 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?” she said.
Widespread problem
Andrea Martinez, 27, who works for Mexican bank Nacional Monte de Piedad, said she had been harassed on public transport. In one case a man followed her home.
“It happens regularly, it happens on public transportation,” she said. “It’s something you experience every day in Mexico.”
Her colleague, Carmen Castillo, 43, said she had witnessed it.
“You can’t walk around free in the street,” she said.
Ms Sheinbaum said on Wednesday that she had similar experiences of harassment when she was 12 years old and using public transport 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
Ms 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 announced overnight that the man had been arrested.
Ms Brugada used some of Ms Sheinbaum's own language about being elected Mexico's first female president to emphasise that harassment of any woman – in this case Mexico's most powerful – is an assault on all women.
When Ms Sheinbaum was elected, she said that it was not just her coming to power, it was all women.
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”, Ms Brugada said.
Hoping for change
A World Health Organisation 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 per cent, compared to the same period in 2024, and intentional injuries against women decreased by 11 per cent, according to figures from the Federal Security Secretariat.
From 2019 to last year, only about a quarter 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 on femicide in the region.
Political scientist Manuel Aguirre, a researcher at the Seminar on Violence and Peace at the College of Mexico academic centre, said 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.
