Mexico president's rivals cry foul as she uses groping incident to address gender violence

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MEXICO CITY (AP) — The groping of Mexico President Claudia Sheinbaum on a downtown street shone a bright light on the gender violence women face every day, but the country’s political polarization has tarnished what under other circumstances would seem a natural moment for national solidarity, analysts say.

The president has tried to use the assault to send a clear message that such behavior is not acceptable. She has explained why she decided to press charges against the drunk man; she used her bully pulpit to pressure the remaining states that don’t have sexual harassment on the books as a crime; and she talked about the need to make it easier for women to report such crimes.

But almost immediately political opponents accused her of using the incident to distract from another burning issue in Mexico: political violence. The previous weekend, a popular mayor in the western state of Michoacan was gunned down in public during Day of the Dead festivities. Protests against the violence were happening in several cities in the state and Sheinbaum was under pressure to offer new solutions for the state’s persistent violence.

Opposition politicians went so far as to suggest that her assault was “staged” to change the narrative.

Ceci Flores, the leader of a collective of relatives searching for disappeared loved ones, who has clashed before with the administration, wrote bitterly on X that “our president only needed a few meters outside the palace to become a victim. That’s the Mexico that we all walk every day: if we’re lucky it’s assault, if we’re not they kill or disappear us.”

Sen. Alejandro Moreno, leader of the opposition Institutional Revolutionary Party, condemned violence against women, but in the same breath accused Sheinbaum’s Morena party of using the incident as a “political distraction” from the mayor’s killing.

Uruapan Mayor Carlos Alberto Manzo Rodríguez was killed last Saturday, shot by a 17-year-old who died at the scene, in what authorities said was an organized crime plot. On Wednesday, his widow met with Sheinbaum at the National Palace and later was sworn in to finish out his term.

On Tuesday, Sheinbaum was walking from the National Palace to the Education Ministry for a meeting when she stopped to speak with some citizens. A video showed that with her back turned an obviously inebriated man put his arm around her, then touched her body with his hands and leaned in for kiss.

The morning before her assault, Sheinbaum had announced a new security plan for Michoacan that included sending more troops, but also doubling down on efforts to address the root causes of violence.

Moreno was suspicious and called for an “in-depth” analysis of Sheinbaum and said “it could be a big setup to generate a distraction and so public opinion doesn’t keep talking about what it’s talking about, the assassinations, the administration’s narco-politics, the pact with organized crime.”

Ricardo Anaya, former presidential candidate of the opposition National Action Party, did express his solidarity with Sheinbaum, but called on the government to study the protocols for protecting the president. “If they can’t take charge of the president’s security, how are they going to secure the country?” he asked.

Political consultant Javier Rosiles Salas said the opposition is trying “to fight this very strong narrative the administration has,” which is helping an already very popular president. “This country’s opposition is weak.”

María de la Luz Estrada, director of the National Citizen Observatory on Femicide, a nongovernmental organization fighting gender-based violence, saw the suggestions that Sheinbaum was using the assault for political purposes as a high-profile example of how women who suffer such assaults are revictimized by authorities. Frequently, the crimes are not reported because police and prosecutors dismiss the reports or interrogate the victims.

“It’s always about disparaging and not trying to understand what happened,” Estrada said.

With that in mind, Sheinbaum on Thursday presented a plan to make government more responsive to sexual abuse by trying to get states to line up their laws and sanctions for the crime and launching a campaign to urge women to report such assaults.

Sheinbaum said she wants Mexican women “to have a way to report that is agile, that is fast and that allows (authorities) to really do an investigation that leads to arrests.”