Mexican 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 was 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 saying, 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 her. “No man has the right to violate that space,” she said, in a video the Mexican government shared on social media when it announced charges had been filed. “I decided to press charges because this is something that I experienced as a woman, but that we as women experience in our country,” Sheinbaum continued, adding that she also experienced it earlier in her life, as a student.”My reflection is that if I do not report the crime, what condition does that leave Mexican women in?” she said. The incident also raised questions about the president’s security. 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.Speaking out in solidarity with the president, 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. “If they touch the president, they touch all of us,” Brugada wrote in a statement released Wednesday. Her statement went on to note that Sheinbaum’s references to the collective “arrival” of women to power in Mexico is “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.”Mexico’s National Governors Conference also voiced their support for the president as news broke that she would bring charges against the man.”From CONAGO we condemn any aggression against women, in this case the aggression toward the president of Mexico,” the group said in a statement shared on social media. “Every form of violence against a woman is unacceptable and should have no place in a society that aspires to live with respect and equality.”
