Women face such extreme violence even the president of Mexico couldn’t avoid public assault

When Claudia Sheinbaum – Mexico’s first woman president — was publicly groped during a walkabout recently, her response was striking in its restraint: “If this happens to the president, where does that leave all the young women in our country?”

The phrase ricocheted across Mexico and beyond. It captured both the routine nature of gendered harassment and the profound political implications of a society in which even the country’s most powerful woman can be violated in full public view.

The incident was trivialised by some as a momentary lapse of security. But it was emblematic of the deeper structures of machismo and misogyny that continue to shape political life across Latin America.

Viewed through a narrow lens, Latin America appears increasingly progressive on gender equality. Over the past two decades, the region has implemented some of the world’s most ambitious gender-parity laws. Countries including Mexico, Costa Rica, and Argentina have introduced sweeping legislative reforms requiring equal representation in party lists and public office.

As a result, Latin America consistently ranks among the regions with the highest proportions of women in national legislatures. The region has also produced several high-profile female heads of state.

In addition to Sheinbaum, there’s been Michelle Bachelet in Chile, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner in Argentina and Dilma Rousseff in Brazil. And were it not for some distinctly questionable electoral practices, we might be talking about this year’s Nobel peace laureate, Maria Corina Machado, as president of Venezuela.

Yet these advances in representation coexist with and often provoke virulent misogynistic backlash. The presence of women in power has not dismantled the patriarchal norms underpinning political life. Instead it has exposed how resilient they are.

Feminist scholars describe this phenomenon as “gendered political violence”. It’s a spectrum of practices aimed at punishing women who assume roles historically reserved for men.

Such violence is not confined to physical assault. It also manifests in smear campaigns, sexualised caricature, digital harassment and threats targeting both female politicians and their families. Misogyny here operates not simply as a cultural residue but as a political technology. It’s a way of disciplining women who disrupt established hierarchies.

Sheinbaum’s encounter illustrates this dynamic with unusual clarity. The groping was not merely an act of individual misconduct but a symbolic assertion of power over a woman whose very position challenges longstanding gendered expectations.

Public space across Latin America has long been shaped by the logic of machismo. Research conducted in Quito (Ecuador), Buenos Aires (Argentina) and Santiago (Chile) suggests that street harassment is a pervasive facet of everyday life for women in the region’s cities.

But when the president herself is subjected to unwanted touching, the incident becomes more than a breach of protocol. It becomes a fleeting but potent reminder of the gendered vulnerability deeply embedded in public life.

Sheinbaum’s remark distils a troubling truth: if the nation’s most protected woman can be violated in plain sight, what protections exist for those without status, visibility, or security personnel? In Mexico, this question is particularly acute. The country continues to record some of the world’s highest rates of femicide (the killing of women or girls because of their gender), and gender-based violence is frequently met with institutional inertia.

Against this backdrop, the symbolic violation of a female president cannot be dismissed as trivial. It speaks to a continuum of violence in which women’s bodies remain contested terrain, regardless of their political authority.

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