Will the public sexual assault of the president mark a turning point for women in Mexico?

0:00This is The Guardian.

0:10Today, will a sexual assault caught on camera mark a turning point for Mexico's women?

0:23It's the middle of the day on a street in downtown Mexico City, and a woman is standing chatting to a group of people. Suddenly, out of nowhere, a man stumbles up to her. Without saying a word, he starts grabbing at her from behind, trying to kiss her neck, his hands on her body and chest.

0:48The whole thing is so casual, it's gross. But it's a scene that will be familiar to a lot of women listening.

1:01Yet what's also shocking is that this woman is one of the most powerful people in the world. The woman being assaulted is Claudia Sheinbaum, Mexico's president. You can actually see the video of those three seconds where the guy is trying to kiss the president and how she reacts quite gracefully. Quite strongly but gracefully, she just removes his hands. Estefania Vela Barba is an activist for women's rights based in Mexico. A few seconds where your body isn't yours. What you think, what you want, it doesn't matter. If this is happening to the president, can you imagine the types of things that are happening to women with less power?

1:53Mexico is one of the most dangerous countries in the world to be a woman. Ten women are killed every day in the country. President Sheinbaum has faced criticism for not doing enough to end this violence. But now, like millions of other women across Mexico, Estefanía hopes that this moment will mark a turning point. Even when we critique some of her policies, it's critique to make sure it gets better, because if she triumphs in this arena, we all win. From The Guardian, I'm Annie Kelly. Today in Focus. Can Claudia Sheinbaum make life safer for women in Mexico?

2:41Estefania Villababa, you're an activist for women's rights in Mexico. Can you tell me a bit about yourself and what you do? Hi, my name is Estefania. I'm originally from Monterrey, up in the north of Mexico, but right now I'm based in Mexico City and I work at Intersecta. We're a feminist NGO, so the question we are constantly trying to ask is, what type of laws do we need to actually guarantee rights? In a lot of ways, the problems women face in Mexico can be similar to the problems other women face in other countries. Misogyny is not exclusive of Mexico. What is particular to Mexico, though, is I would say the level of violence, particularly certain forms of violence.

3:25So we are a country in which today, on average, 90 people are killed every day. Of those, about 10 are women. So we do live in a country where losing your life is not something that's an abstract. It's a day-to-day life. There's also an important crisis of people being disappeared. Today, there's about 100 ,000 people that are disappeared. Of those, approximately 40 % are women. And on top of that, we have regular everyday harassment every time women get on the subway, women walking in the street, women dealing in the workplace, and particularly sexual violence. means public surveys show that generally women tend to be, in this case, eight out of every 10 victims.

4:19Right. And yeah, I believe last year it was reported that 70 % of all women in the country have experienced some kind of sexual assault. And the number of women killed in Mexico is really shocking. One case that really stuck with me when I was reading up on this was from earlier this year when Valeria Marquez, who was a 23-year-old social media influencer, was shot and killed while she was live streaming on her TikTok channel. The murder of a Mexican beauty influencer has sent shockwaves across the country. 23-year-old Valeria Marquez shot to death during a TikTok live stream on Tuesday. I think according to the most recent data, there have been over 500 femicides up to the end of September this year, which is just astonishing.

5:05If you are a victim of sexual violence in Mexico, are you likely to get any kind of justice? The other big problem in the country has been, if you do suffer some form of violence, what is authorities' response? And I use the case of people being disappeared, including women, in the 1990s in Juarez. They would go to the police and the police would come out with a series of excuses to not do anything. This continues to this day. So what we have is, for example, collectives of generally mothers looking for those that are disappeared. Why do we search for them, chant the families of the disappeared, because we love them.

5:49We won't stop until they're found. They become forensic experts because authorities don't have the proper tools and resources to actually look for people that are disappeared. So you have mothers digging up mass graves to find their loved ones. And you have that on one extreme all the way to, for example, a collective of students in universities demanding that their universities properly respond to the day-to-day harassment that they live both in and outside the classroom. Dozens of students demonstrated in Guadalajara, capital of the western Mexican state of Jalisco, in defense of a minor who suffered an attempted sexual abuse and against the harassment of students outside of school classrooms.

6:33So there's a diversity of tools and strategies that women in this case are deploying, and it's the type of activism that inspires us at Intersecta in our day-to-day.

6:52Andes Lanz, you're a journalist who's been living in Mexico for the last 10 years. We've just been hearing about the serious situation for women in the country. And it was into this context that Claudia Sheinbaum was elected the country's first female president in 2024. Could you tell me a bit about her path to power? Sheinbaum has had a long political career. She was a student activist in her university days, and that's how she got involved in politics. Shane Baum is on Mexico's left politically, electorally. She's particularly well known now as being an incredibly loyal colleague of Andres Manuel López Obrador, who was the president for the six years preceding her election.

7:38Really, her pitch was that she would continue the legacy of López Obrador. She would continue to, in their words, stamp out corruption, continue to crack down on organized crime or armed criminal violence. the main strategy there is to expand the military her pitch to the Mexican people is like you know get on board she didn't make either being a woman or advocating for women's rights a key part of her campaign promise did she it was more about security issues absolutely and I think the critical part there is that she really couldn't make claims that were too big around that because of the way that She responded particularly as the mayor of Mexico City, which was her role that, you know, really kind of put her on the national political scene, where, for example, she deployed riot police to repress the massive feminist mobilisations.

8:30Tens of thousands marched in Mexico City with one clear message, an end to the systematic violence against women in the country.

8:42She has expanded and supported the previous president in an unprecedented expansion of military personnel and arsenal and power, all of which affects women in a particularly negative way. And so I think that it would be difficult to make big feminist claims and to make that front and centre of her platform because the feminist movement in Mexico, generally speaking, doesn't necessarily see her as a friend of feminism or as the advance of feminism. Another really critical aspect of that is that she supported and campaigned with a candidate for the governor of the state of Guerrero, which experiences some of the worst, what we might call cartel violence, a level of violence and insecurity that has only gotten worse under both López Obrador and Sheinbaum.

9:28Félix Salgado was a candidate for governor who is the subject of claims of sexual assault, rape and other actions that would demonstrate extreme violence towards women in one way or another. She campaigned with him. She did not petition, as some feminist activists did, to have him to be withdrawn from the candidacy, effectively protecting him. He did eventually have to be removed from the candidacy and his daughter was installed in his place. And she's now the governor of Guerrero, but it's genuinely understood that he controls the government still through this kind of, you know, family-based exercise of power.

10:06And I think that was a really huge black mark in terms of feminist movements in Mexico and what their evaluation of her as a woman president would be. I mean, we should say here that Salgado has denied all of these allegations, but it does sound like this whole affair has been disappointing for feminist movements. Absolutely. I mean, I remember there was a feminist broadcaster who is well-respected and investigative journalist in other parts of her career saying very powerfully at the time of Shane Bound's election. Obviously, this is a wonderful moment for us to have achieved this moment of our first woman president, but I wish it hadn't been her.

10:49So Shane Bound ran on a campaign of making Mexico safe, but just this weekend we've seen protests erupting in Mexico City and across the country about the failure to do just that. These protests were sparked by the murder of a mayor earlier this month. Can you tell me about that? Carlos Manso was the mayor of Uruapan, which is a municipality of Michoacán, which is a southeastern state in Mexico. Michoacán is, importantly, a massive provider of limes and avocados to the United States. Because of the value of that product, it is highly conflictive and highly contested by organized crime groups who want to control that trade.

11:30And so this mayor of this municipality was shot dead in public at a Day of the Dead event on November the 1st. Mayor Carlos Manzo mingles with the crowd at a Day of the Dead festival in Uruwapan's historic plaza, moments before he is shot. Surrounded by his security detail, the mayor was struck seven times and died of his wounds in hospital. He had been photographed just moments before he was shot with his young child on his shoulders. Absolutely shocking and also, unfortunately, not uncommon. Just over a year ago, a mayor of a municipality in Guerrero, another southeastern state, he was beheaded and his head and body were displayed in his car in public.

12:18Oh my God. In Michoacán, Carlos Manso is, I believe, the seventh mayor to have been assassinated since 2022. Seven since 2022. What's more horrific is that it's, in some parts of Mexico in particular, it's just yesterday's news, you know. It's a systematic reality. You can expect as a politician, particularly a local politician in Mexico, to face this risk and it may well happen to you as it did with this mayor. And it sounds like organised crime and politics are very intertwined. We really can't separate them. For all of the maybe many failings of a lot of our elected officials here in Mexico, it is not a job I would want.

12:56And Shane Bound did run on a promise that she would deal with the security situation rather than women's rights. And she has, with pressure from Donald Trump, adopted this much more militarized approach to security and the cartels. Civilian policing has been pulled in under the military. She has intensified high profile arrests and military operation against the cartels with some success. They are calling in soldiers, National Guardsmen and Marines to help police their towns. An example of this is the city of Celaya in central Mexico. That is where about 600 National Guard troops arrived earlier this year to try to bring crime and violence down.

13:38And yet the killings are still continuing. How does this atmosphere of cartel violence make women's lives harder? As we would probably expect, in any environment like this, it is harder for women. It creates conservatism in society that tends to skew things back to patriarchal and authoritarian. ways of interacting in the world. And so women are therefore increasingly, for want of a better word, pushed back into the home. So there is this really strong cultural skew towards authoritarianism, patriarchal systems of family, society, workplace, which is not to say it isn't being actively resisted by women and gender diverse people at all levels of society and government, but it creates an extremely difficult environment to advance our rights, protections, independence, safety from daily sexual assault, the expectation of discrimination and the expectation of violation.

14:42Estefania, there's been a lot of coverage of what happened to President Sheinbaum in the international press, but how have people inside Mexico reacted to this incident? Days before the incident, a politician in Mexico was killed. We have a huge problem of political violence and particularly in elections, many candidates are killed, including women. Right, you're talking about the killing of the mayor, Carlos Manzo, aren't you? This guy had asked for help, but according to some, the government failed to do so. So when the incident happened, and in spite of the video, many people were saying that they had faked the whole incident to distract attention from the critiques being made to the president.

15:30There was a video, so all the evidence was there, but there was still men and women critical of the government saying that, of course, this did not happen. It's all fake. It was the idea that she's so desperate to have attention switched from her fault that she staged harassment. And then the idea was that she's so cool, a true victim would respond differently. Oh, that's so depressing. So Shane Bowne gave a press conference after the assault where she said that she was going to press charges and that if it could happen to the president, it could happen to anyone.

16:11What's going to happen with all the young women in our country? And then afterwards the government announced it was going to be also making some legal changes because of what happened to her. Can you tell me what those are? The first point is to make sure that sexual violence is regulated in the same way, so the protections women have in one state are not different to the protections that women have in another. She talked about making sexual abuse a grave offence. She's also going to work with prosecutors and criminal judges and police to make sure they have proper trainings to properly address these cases.

16:48They are going to work with a campaign to make sure that women know it is their right to denounce the violence. And they're going to make sure that these campaigns are everywhere from schools, the workplace, public transportation. They're also going to work with folks that work in public transportation. So if they experience violence, they know what to do and what to recommend that women do. In hearing her speak as to why what happened to her is wrong, you can really see just her understanding of the problem. This is a president that with every single word, she's like, they need to respect our bodies.

17:26This has happened to me before, ever since I was a student. And this needs to stop. So it sounds like having not really campaigned on a platform of women's safety, Shane Bowne is now making women's rights an important part of her presidency. Do you think these legal reforms that she's launching are going to make a difference on the ground? The way I think it falls short, not all women and not all victims want to go to criminal law. This is not new. Feminists have been dealing with this, for example, in the domestic violence context, where a lot of women might be experiencing intimate partner abuse, but they don't necessarily want their spouses to be in prison.

18:03They want the violence to stop. They want him to get support, but they don't necessarily want prison. Yeah, and I guess it's a cultural shift that's needed too. Shane Bounds, the caretaker of a country with really strong patriarchal values, with this machismo culture, even if there are feminist movements that are strongly fighting back, what do you think is needed to address all of that? I believe the state has a role in pushing cultural change. How would cultural change happen if the government actually took its job seriously when it comes to sexual education? What are you doing to make sure that kids from four to 20 or 25 are actually taught in a matter according to their age about the importance of people respecting your body and you respecting other people's body?

18:56Because you talk about, you know, men in this particular case disproportionately being prone to violence. How would men change if since you're four, schools are constantly reinforcing the message that we need to respect each other and not do things that others don't want? So in my ideal view, the president wouldn't just announce, I'm going to look at criminal codes, but make sure that all authorities, not just criminal authorities, have the proper tools and the proper resources to actually address violence.

19:35Coming up, can Shamebound make life safer for women without dealing with the cartels?

19:50So Anne, there's a lot of pressure on Shane Bowne at the moment to resolve inequalities for women in Mexico, but her main promise to the people has always been about taking control of the spiralling security situation. Can she find a way to do both? I think it is an extraordinary opportunity for her to really demonstrate that personalist political piece that feminist activists in Mexico and all over the world, you know, that point that they make, what is difficult to hold at the same time, but important to hold at the same time, is her continued strategy and continued commitment to policies like the militarization of the country to quote unquote fight cartels, which we know just brings more insecurity.

20:32Militarization has been a really controversial idea in Mexico because a lot of Mexicans don't want soldiers who are trained for war to be in their streets. Soldiers are not trained to conduct police investigations. And so there's a lot of concern in Mexico that they are actually making violence worse. Yes, in some ways, Shamebound is between a rock and a hard place because she's promised to get rid of the cartels, but the police are seemingly not up to the job. And bringing in the military to do this is also problematic in many ways. Is there anything you can point to, to illustrate that this militarisation policy of Shane Bounds is making things more dangerous for women.

21:11The number of disappeared people, the latest figure I believe is over 130 ,000. So it's a significant humanitarian crisis. The majority of cases have occurred since 2007 following the announcement of the war on drugs, a strategy that Shane Bauman and López Obrador have pursued. It is something that everybody fears for themselves, for their loved ones. I think it is possible to judge Shane Baum as a head of state, as a commander in chief of the armed forces because of the pursuance of a strategy that simply has failed so badly and so catastrophically. And I think that contrast is just really difficult for a lot of people to pass.

21:51the contrast between Shane Baum taking a stand on increasing security for women and the pursuit of policies that only increase insecurity for everyone and make it worse for women. Thank you, Anne. Thank you, Annie.

22:13That was Anne des Landes and Estefania Villababa. My thanks to them.

22:23That's it for today. Your presenter has been me, Annie Kelly. The producers are Eleanor Biggs, Cass Denton and Priya Baradia. The sound design is by Joel Cox and the executive producer is Courtney Youssef. We'll be back tomorrow. This is The Guardian.