A man has been arrested after sexually assaulting the President of Mexico, Claudia Sheinbaum.
Sheinbaum has said she will press charges against a man who kissed and tried to grope her during a public appearance.
Mobile phone footage of the incident on Tuesday shows Sheinbaum speaking to a group of supporters on a street near the National Palace in Mexico City.
In the video, a man approaches her from behind and attempts to kiss her on the neck and place his hands on her body.
Sheinbaum moved away quickly and a member of her team stepped in, but she was visibly shaken. The offender has been arrested.
“My view is, if I don’t file a complaint, what will happen to other Mexican women? If they do this to the president, what will happen to all women in our country?” Sheinbaum said at a news conference on Wednesday.
“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. “I have experienced it before, when I wasn’t president, when I was a student.”
She added that she had decided to press ahead with bringing charges against the suspect as he had allegedly harassed other women in the crowd.
“A line must be drawn,” she said.
Women’s rights groups and feminist commentators have said the incident shows the extent of ingrained machismo in Mexican society, where a man believes he has the right to accost even the president if she is a woman.
Femicide is also a huge problem in Mexico, with a staggering 98% of gender-based murders estimated to go unpunished.
Sheinbaum promised to tackle the issue as a candidate, but so far in her administration, there has been no discernible improvement in that area of violent crime.
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