Man arrested after groping Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum on the street

The president of Mexico, Claudia Sheinbaum, said this Wednesday that the harassment she suffered from a drunk man on the street near the headquarters of the Mexican government was an attack on all women, and that is why she decided to file charges against him.

Mexico City Mayor Clara Brugada announced overnight that the man was arrested.

In a video that circulated widely on social platforms, the man appeared to lean in to 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 look at 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 this type of harassment and that the problem went far beyond her.

“No man has the right to violate that space,” he said in a video that the Mexican government shared on social media when it announced the filing of charges.

“I decided to report it 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 before in her life, as a student.

“My reflection is that if I do not report the crime, in what conditions does that leave Mexican women?” she said.

The incident also raised questions about the president’s safety. Sheinbaum explained that she and her team had decided to walk from the National Palace to the Ministry of Education to save time. He said they could walk it in five minutes, instead of taking a 20-minute car ride. He said he would not change his ways.

Speaking in solidarity with the president, Brugada used some of Sheinbaum’s own language about her election as Mexico’s first female president to emphasize that harassment of any woman (in this case, the most powerful in Mexico) is an attack on all women. When Sheinbaum was elected, she said it wasn’t just about her coming to power, but about all women.

“If they touch the president, they touch us all,” Brugada wrote in a statement released Wednesday. Her statement went on to point out that Sheinbaum’s references to the collective “arrival” of women to power in Mexico “is not a slogan, it is a commitment not to look the other way, to not allow misogyny to remain veiled in habits, to not accept a single more humiliation, not one more abuse, not a single more feminicide.”

Mexico’s National Conference of Governors also expressed its support for the president when news broke that he would file charges against the man.

“From CONAGO we condemn any aggression against women, in this case the aggression against the president of Mexico,” the group said in a statement shared on social networks. “Any form of violence against a woman is unacceptable and should have no place in a society that aspires to live with respect and equality.”