Mexican President presses charges after a shameful street assault. Her reason goes deeper than the incident itself

Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum has decided to take legal action against a man who sexually attacked her on a street in Mexico City on Tuesday. A video that spread quickly online shows the man coming up behind the president, wrapping his arm around her, and kissing her neck. Her assistant, Juan José Ramírez Mendoza, stopped him right away.

The attack happened while Sheinbaum and her team were walking from the National Palace to the Education Ministry because they wanted to skip the heavy traffic, as per The Hill. During her regular morning press conference on Wednesday, Sheinbaum said the man looked drunk and she didn’t even know what was happening until her assistant jumped in to help.

Mexico City Mayor Clara Brugada shared on social media Tuesday night that police had arrested the man. She wrote that “if they touch the president, they touch all of us,” showing that this was about more than just a security problem. Police in the city later found out that the same man had harassed two other women earlier that same day.

This isn’t just about what happened to the president

Sheinbaum made it clear that she’s not filing charges just because of what this man did to her. She told reporters she’s doing it because “this is something that I experienced as a woman, but also we as women experience in our country.” She even opened up about being harassed on public buses when she was just 12 years old, making the point that what happened to her happens to countless women across Mexico.

The numbers back up what she’s saying. A 2021 report from Mexico’s National Institute of Statistics and Geography found that almost half of all women 15 and older in the country have been sexually attacked at some point. More than a third have faced physical violence too.

What makes things worse is that almost no one reports these crimes. The same year, 99.7 percent of sexual attacks against women were never reported to police, according to México Evalúa, a group that studies government policies. This huge gap shows that most victims either don’t trust the system or are too scared to come forward.

Sheinbaum used what happened to her to push state governments to make it easier and safer for women to report attacks. She said that “women’s personal spaces must not be violated,” treating this as a basic human rights issue that needs real solutions.

People also started asking questions about how the president’s security works. The Presidential General Staff, which was a military group that used to protect the president, was shut down by the previous president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador. Because of this change, fewer security guards were around Sheinbaum when she walked through the city.

As Mexico’s first female president, Sheinbaum is treating what happened to her as part of a much bigger fight against violence toward women. By taking the man to court and talking about her own past experiences with harassment, she’s shining a light on a problem that affects millions of Mexican women who almost never get justice.