On Nov. 5, Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum was sexually assaulted by a drunk man whereas she was greeting supporters outdoors the presidential palace in Mexico Metropolis. The person put his arm round her shoulder, touching her hip and chest whereas making an attempt to kiss her neck. The assault was recorded on smartphones and shortly went viral.
In her morning press convention on Nov. 6, the president stated she can be urgent expenses towards the person, who was apprehended by police in Mexico Metropolis.
On Nov. 5, Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum was sexually assaulted by a drunk man whereas she was greeting supporters outdoors the presidential palace in Mexico Metropolis. The person put his arm round her shoulder, touching her hip and chest whereas making an attempt to kiss her neck. The assault was recorded on smartphones and shortly went viral.
In her morning press convention on Nov. 6, the president stated she can be urgent expenses towards the person, who was apprehended by police in Mexico Metropolis.
“My pondering is: If I don’t file a grievance, what turns into of different Mexican ladies?” stated Sheinbaum. “If this occurs to the president, what is going to occur to all the ladies in our nation?”
The scope of gender-based violence in Mexico is staggering. In 2021, 70 p.c of fifty.5 million ladies and ladies aged 15 and older skilled some sort of violence—up 4 proportion factors from 2016—and it’s estimated that 10 ladies and ladies are murdered day-after-day in Mexico.
Sheinbaum has subsequently introduced her administration will pursue the criminalization of sexual assault throughout state jurisdictions, with the federal ministry for girls drawing up a raft of measures to deal with gender-based violence within the nation.
As a second of embodied feminist management—a feminine head of state is publicly sexually assaulted and responds to it by utilizing her energy to make it cease for all ladies—Sheinbaum has been the topic of worldwide feminist reward and help. As many have noticed, the incident is a strong demonstration of the entitlement males really feel to the our bodies of ladies all over the place, even the physique of a girl president.
But it’s exhausting to see how Sheinbaum asserting that she is pursuing felony expenses and the additional criminalization of assault in federal and state codes is definitely going to assist decrease the speed of gender-based violence for bizarre Mexican ladies. In truth, some Mexican feminist teams—which have grown exponentially lately and which spurred the “inexperienced wave” that led to the nation electing its first feminine president in 2024—argue the push for penalties from one sexual assault obscures the continued risk of state violence, together with towards ladies.
The primary drawback is how Sheinbaum’s pursuit of felony code reform and stricter penalties for sexual assault in judicial sentences meaningfully materializes in follow. Round 92 p.c of crimes in Mexico go unpunished, from which gender-based crimes are not any exception.
As Mexican feminist civil society group Intersecta has identified, current reforms to the authorized system—such because the introduction of a popularly elected judiciary and new restrictions on prosecuting injunctions—are unlikely to extend the power of the nation’s rule of regulation. The judicial reform successfully collapsed that department of the state into the chief, which means that, to follow, judges must “curry favor with the powers that be,” as an Intersecta evaluation famous.
Each the administrations of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador and Sheinbaum, his successor, have additionally pursued a coverage of “preventive imprisonment,” which has been criticized by the United Nations and different human rights authorities. There are greater than 40,000 individuals, lots of whom are ladies, presently caught on this type of detention with out trial. As per an evaluation by impartial media each day Animal Político, new restrictions on injunctions will stop individuals in preventive imprisonment from petitioning for his or her freedom.
In a authorized system that includes judicial cronyism and detention with out trial, the intense investigation and judgment of gender-based crime earlier than the regulation is essentially threatened. Plus, the ethical authority of feminist claims towards abuse, assault, and femicide in wider society is compromised. Merely creating new legal guidelines in a system that operates with these options is at greatest unlikely to make any distinction to prevention and accountability for gender-based violence. At worst, it supplies simply one other device to wield towards accountability for probably the most highly effective.
To make issues worse, Sheinbaum has simply introduced a brand new chapter within the “warfare on medicine,” which has failed, and failed ladies, time and time once more, and which solely creates extra violence.
Within the week the president was assaulted, Mexico had as soon as extra been rocked by the brutal assassination of a political chief. On Nov. 1, Carlos Manzo, mayor of Uruapan within the southwestern state of Michoacán, was shot lifeless in an expert hit whereas attending a Day of the Useless celebration. Believed to be linked to the Jalisco cartel, the homicide of Manzo was the seventh of a mayor since 2022 in Michoacán, the place armed felony teams have a heavy presence and have been combating for management of territory. In response, Sheinbaum has introduced the “Plan Michoacán” safety technique, which is able to see some 10,000 navy personnel deployed to the area.
Deploying the navy to battle cartels was the cornerstone of former President Felipe Calderón’s warfare on medicine, declared in 2006, and to which a minimum of 450,000 murders and the disappearance of greater than 100,000 might be linked. These are figures which have continued to climb beneath each López Obrador and Sheinbaum, regardless of their Motion for Nationwide Regeneration (often called Morena) get together professing to have ended the neoliberal commerce and social insurance policies, authorities corruption, and state-criminal pacts that fostered the disaster of unchecked armed violence in Mexico. Certainly, mass militarization has been a coverage of each López Obrador and Sheinbaum, with the ranks, energy, and arsenal of the armed forces—of which the president is commander in chief—increasing at an unprecedented price.
In Chiapas, Mexico’s southernmost and poorest state, for instance, the introduction of a militarized elite police drive, the “Pakales,” (Fuerza de Reacción Inmediata Pakal, or FRIP) in 2024 has introduced widespread focusing on of poor and Indigenous populations—with ladies, as all the time, bearing the brunt. In the phrases of Indigenous feminist scholar Delmy Tania Cruz Hernández, a “warfare mindset” signifies that being poor, unemployed, or Indigenous “is criminalized, and the actual culprits get off scot-free.”
The place Sheinbaum may be assaulted on the road and announce a crackdown on gender-based violence in response, the drivers of safety for girls and gender-diverse individuals in Mexico lie elsewhere—in how state leaders reply to armed violence. As a continuation of the warfare on medicine, the acceleration of Plan Michoacán-style militarization all through Mexico has solely made life extra harmful for a lot of.
Whereas Sheinbaum and her state authorities counterparts proceed to pursue such methods as nationwide safety coverage, their declare to be making life safer for girls in Mexico is very doubtful.
