Claudia Sheinbaum Groping Story: What the World Missed

On November 5, Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum was sexually assaulted by a drunk man while receiving supporters outside the presidential palace in Mexico City. The man put his arm around her shoulder, touching her hips and chest while trying to kiss her neck. The assault was recorded on smartphones and quickly went viral.

At her morning press conference on November 6, the president said she would press charges against the man arrested by police in Mexico City.

On November 5, Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum was sexually assaulted by a drunk man while receiving supporters outside the presidential palace in Mexico City. The man put his arm around her shoulder, touching her hips and chest while trying to kiss her neck. The assault was recorded on smartphones and quickly went viral.

At her morning press conference on November 6, the president said she would press charges against the man arrested by police in Mexico City.

“My thinking is: If I don’t file a complaint, what will happen to other Mexican women?” Sheinbaum said. “If this happened to the president, what would happen to all the women in our country?”

The scale of gender-based violence in Mexico is staggering. In 2021, 70% of the 50.5 million women and girls aged 15 or older experienced some type of violence – up 4 percentage points from 2016 – and it is estimated that 10 women and girls are killed every day in Mexico.

Sheinbaum later announced that her administration would continue to criminalize sexual assault across state jurisdictions, with the Federal Ministry for Women developing a range of measures to address gender-based violence in the country.

As an embodying moment of feminist leadership—in which a female head of state experiences a public sexual assault and responds by using her power to stop it for all women—Sheinbaum has been the subject of international feminist praise and support. As many have noted, the incident is powerful evidence of the entitlement men feel toward women’s bodies everywhere, even that of a female president.

However, it is difficult to see how Sheinbaum’s announcement that she will pursue criminal charges and the increased criminalization of assault in federal and state laws will actually help reduce the rate of gender-based violence among ordinary Mexican women. Indeed, some Mexican feminist groups — which have grown exponentially in recent years and catalyzed the “Green Wave” that has led to the country electing its first female president in 2024 — see the push for consequences for a single sexual assault as obscuring the ongoing threat of state violence, including against women.

The first problem This is how Sheinbaum’s quest for criminal law reform and stricter consequences for sexual assault in judicial rulings is embodied in practice. About 92% of crimes in Mexico go unpunished, and gender-based crimes are no exception.

As Mexican feminist civil society organization Intersecta has pointed out, recent reforms to the legal system – such as the creation of a popularly elected judiciary and new restrictions on the prosecution of injunctions – are unlikely to increase the strength of the rule of law in the country. Judicial reform effectively collapsed this branch of the state and transferred it to the executive, meaning that in order to practice, judges had to “earn the favor of the powers that be,” as the Intersecta analysis noted.

The administrations of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, and his successor Sheinbaum, also pursued a policy of “preventive imprisonment,” which was criticized by the United Nations and other human rights authorities. More than 40,000 people, many of them women, are currently trapped in this type of detention without trial. According to an analysis conducted daily by independent media Animal politicsnew restrictions on judicial orders will prevent people detained in preventive prison from petitioning for their freedom.

In a legal system involving judicial favoritism and detention without trial, the meaningful investigation and adjudication of gender-based crimes before the law is necessarily threatened. In addition, the moral authority of feminist claims against mistreatment, assault and murder of women in wider society is at risk. Simply creating new laws in a system that operates with these features is unlikely at best to make any difference to the prevention and accountability of gender-based violence. At worst, it provides just another tool that can be used against holding the powerful to account.

To make matters worse, Sheinbaum has just announced a new chapter in the “war on drugs,” which has failed, fails women time and time again, and only leads to more violence.

In the week that the president was attacked, Mexico was once again rocked by the brutal assassination of a political leader. On November 1, Carlos Manzo, mayor of the city of Uruapan in the southwestern state of Michoacán, was shot dead while attending a Day of the Dead celebration. Believed to be linked to the Jalisco cartel, Manzo’s killing was the seventh of a mayor since 2022 in Michoacán, where armed criminal groups have a heavy presence and fight for control of territory. In response, Sheinbaum announced a security strategy called the “Michoacán Plan”, which will see the deployment of about 10,000 military troops to the region.

The deployment of armed forces to fight gangs was a cornerstone of former President Felipe Calderon’s war on drugs, which he declared in 2006, and which can be linked to at least 450,000 murders and the disappearance of more than 100,000 people. These numbers have continued to rise under both López Obrador and Sheinbaum, despite the National Renewal Movement (known as Morena) party’s claim to have ended the neoliberal trade and social policies, government corruption, and state-to-state criminal pacts that have fueled Mexico’s scourge of runaway armed violence. Indeed, mass militarization has been a policy pursued by both López Obrador and Sheinbaum, with the ranks, strength, and arsenal of the armed forces – of which the president is commander-in-chief – expanding at an unprecedented rate.

In Chiapas, Mexico’s southernmost and poorest state, for example, the introduction of an elite military police force, the Pakalis (Fuerza de Reacción Inmediata Pakal, or FRIP) in 2024, has led to widespread targeting of the poor and indigenous people – with women, as always, bearing the brunt. In the words of indigenous feminist scholar Dilmi Tania Cruz Hernandez, the “war mentality” means that being poor, unemployed or indigenous “is criminalized, and the real perpetrators go unpunished.”

Where Sheinbaum can When they are assaulted in the street and a campaign against gender-based violence is announced in response, the security motivations for women and people of diverse sexual orientations in Mexico lie elsewhere – in how state leaders respond to armed violence. As a continuation of the War on Drugs, the acceleration of Michoacan-style militarization across Mexico has made life more dangerous for many.

While Sheinbaum and her counterparts in state government continue to pursue strategies such as national security policy, their claim to making life safer for women in Mexico is highly questionable.