In her article, Dr Adriana Marin argues that the public groping of Mexican president Claudia Sheinbaum was not merely a personal violation but a symbolic act that exposes the depth of entrenched machismo in Latin American political life.
Adriana Marin, Lecturer in International Relations, Coventry University
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. https://www.youtube.com/embed/qPhH5Li-ibo?wmode=transparent&start=0 How the incident was reported.
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.
Systemic machismo
Machismo, far from being a casual label for male bravado, is a wider ideological system that normalises male dominance in public and private life. It seeks to shape who is seen as credible, rational and fit to lead. It sets expectations that political authority should look and sound masculine.
This means that traits praised in men – decisiveness, assertiveness, toughness – are often judged as inappropriate in women. Within this logic, women entering politics do not simply take up official positions, but rather challenge a symbolic order built on the assumption that power belongs to men.
This helps explain why female leaders attract forms of scrutiny fundamentally different in tone and tenor from those directed at their male counterparts. This includes the policing of their appearance, voice, emotional expression and personal morality, reinforcing the ideological boundaries that machismo seeks to maintain.
Dilma Rousseff, for instance, experienced sustained misogynistic vitriol during and after her presidency. She had to put up with sexualised imagery, accusations of emotional instability and incessant commentary on her appearance — all documented by journalists and human rights organisations.
In Bolivia, women politicians have faced psychological, economic and symbolic aggressions, culminating in extreme cases such as the unsolved 2012 murder of councillor Juana Quispe .
The list is long and unedifying. And it reveals the limitations of formal gender parity. Legal frameworks have succeeded in bringing more women into public institutions, but they have not transformed the cultural logic that determines whose authority is respected and whose is contested.
In many cases, increased representation has heightened hostility, as women’s visibility exposes the fragility of entrenched patriarchal structures. Misogyny, in this sense, becomes a reaction to perceived disruption. It acts as a reassertion of dominance where male authority no longer appears guaranteed.
Ultimately, the episode underscores the gap between representation and transformation. Latin America has made significant strides in bringing women into positions of formal power, but the cultural and political structures that underpin misogyny remain deeply entrenched.
The groping of a sitting president encapsulates this contradiction. A woman can symbolise national authority and still be reduced, in an instant, to an object of public violation.
The future of gender equality in the region will depend not merely on increasing the number of women in political office but on confronting the cultural and political systems that enable misogyny to flourish.
Until machismo is challenged in legislation, public discourse, political culture and everyday life, women in power will continue to face the paradox embodied in Sheinbaum’s remark. Even at the highest level, authority does not guarantee respect, and visibility does not guarantee safety.
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.