Peru has declared Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum a “persona non grata” who is unable to enter the country, days after severing ties with Mexico amid an escalating diplomatic dispute.
Peru’s Congress voted 63 to 34 on Thursday in favour of symbolically barring Sheinbaum from the country after her government granted asylum to former Peruvian Prime Minister Betssy Chavez, after she fled to the Mexican embassy in Peru’s capital Lima.
The designation of “persona non grata” is typically reserved for foreign diplomats and compels them to leave a host country, and is seen as a rebuke to their government.
President of Peru’s Congress Fernando Rospigliosi said the move was a show of support for the government and its decision to break off relations with Mexico, according to Mexico’s El Pais newspaper.
During a debate on Thursday, Ernesto Bustamante, an MP who sits on Peru’s Congressional Foreign Relations Committee, also accused Sheinbaum of having ties to drug traffickers.
“We cannot allow someone like that, who is in cahoots with drug traffickers and who distracts her people from the real problems they should be addressing, to get involved in Peruvian affairs,” Bustamante said, according to El Pais.
Chavez, who is on trial for her participation in an alleged 2022 coup attempt, earlier this week fled to the Mexican embassy in Lima, where she was granted political asylum.
Peru’s Foreign Minister Hugo de Zela called the decision by Mexico City an “unfriendly act” that “interfered in the internal affairs of Peru”.
Mexico’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs has maintained that it was acting in accordance with international law, and the move in “no way constitutes an intervention in Peru’s internal affairs”.
Lima has yet to offer safe passage for Chavez to leave the embassy and travel to Mexico.
Chavez, a former culture minister, briefly served as prime minister to President Pedro Castillo from late November to December 2022.
Charges against the former minister stem from an attempt by President Castillo in December 2022 to dissolve the Peruvian Congress before he was quickly impeached and arrested.
Chavez, who faces up to 25 years in prison if found guilty, has denied involvement in the scheme. She was detained from June 2023 until September of this year, and then released on bail while facing trial.
Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum has called for sexual harassment to be made a crime nationwide after being groped on the street while greeting supporters near the presidential palace in Mexico City.
Sheinbaum, 63, said on Wednesday that she had pressed charges against the man and would review nationwide legislation on sexual harassment following the attack by a drunk man who put his arm around her shoulder, and with the other hand touched her hip and chest, while attempting to kiss her neck.
Mexico’s first woman president removed the man’s hands before a member of her staff stepped between them. The president’s security detail did not appear to be nearby at the moment of the attack, which was caught on camera.
The man was later arrested.
“My thinking is: If I don’t file a complaint, what becomes of other Mexican women? If this happens to the president, what will happen to all the women in our country?” Sheinbaum told her regular morning news conference on Wednesday.
In a post on social media, the president said the attack was “something that many women experience in the country and in the world”.
Translation: I filed a complaint for the harassment episode that I experienced yesterday in Mexico City. It must be clear that, beyond being president, this is something that many women experience in the country and in the world; no one can violate our body and personal space. We will review the legislation so that this crime is punishable in all 32 states.
Sheinbaum explained that the incident occurred when she and her team had decided to walk from the National Palace to the Education Ministry to save time. She said they could walk the route in five minutes, rather than taking a 20-minute car ride.
She also called on states across Mexico to look at their laws and procedures to make it easier for women to report such assaults and said Mexicans needed to hear a “loud and clear, no, women’s personal space must not be violated”.
Mexico’s 32 states and Mexico City, which is a federal entity, all have their own criminal codes, and not all states consider sexual harassment a crime.
“It should be a criminal offence, and we are going to launch a campaign,” Sheinbaum said, adding that she had suffered similar attacks in her youth.
The incident has put the focus on Mexico’s troubling record on women’s safety, with sexual harassment commonplace and rights groups warning of a femicide crisis, and the United Nations reporting that an average of 10 women are murdered every day in the country.
About 70 percent of Mexican women aged 15 and over will also experience at least one incident of sexual harassment in their lives, according to the UN.
The attack also focused criticism on Sheinbaum’s security detail and on her insistence on maintaining a degree of intimacy with the public, despite Mexican politicians regularly being a target of cartel violence.
But Sheinbaum dismissed any suggestion that she would increase her security or change how she interacts with people following the incident.
At nationwide rallies in September to mark her first year in power, the president allowed supporters to embrace her and take selfies.
MEXICO CITY — Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum was strolling through her city’s capital this week, heading from one government office to another, when she stopped to take selfies with a crowd of admirers.
A man approached from behind, slipped his arm around Sheinbaum’s shoulder, leaned in to plant a kiss on her neck and briefly grabbed her chest before an aide pushed him away.
The groping incident, which was captured on video by bystanders Tuesday, sparked outrage nationally and put renewed focus on the rampant sexual harassment faced by women here.
Sheinbaum, who last year was sworn in as Mexico’s first female leader, has seized the chance to raise awareness about the issue.
“If they do this to the president,” she asked Wednesday, “what must happen to all the young women in the country?”
Speaking at her daily news conference, Sheinbaum said that she had filed a criminal complaint against her aggressor, whom authorities reported was drunk at the time of the incident and had been detained.
Sheinbaum said her government will also review state laws to ensure that street harassment is categorized as a crime throughout Mexico and launch a campaign to combat the phenomenon.
“I decided to file a complaint because this is something … all women in our country experience,” Sheinbaum said. “I experienced it before I was president. It shouldn’t happen. No one should violate our personal space. No man has the right to violate that space.”
Sheinbaum leaves a rally in Mexico City in 2023 while campaigning for president.
(Eduardo Verdugo / Associated Press)
Like her populist predecessor, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, Sheinbaum often walks the streets without bodyguards, saying she likes to be close to the people.
But the practice has come under scrutiny given the dozens of killings each year of Mexican political candidates and elected leaders. Over the weekend, the outspoken mayor of Uruapan, a city in Michoácan state, was gunned down at a public event celebrating the Day of the Dead holiday despite being protected by armed police and members of the National Guard.
Tuesday’s incident in Mexico City provoked outrage across the country, with many women saying it embodied the street harassment that is commonplace in many parts of the country.
“If the most powerful woman in Mexico experienced harassment, what can women who travel on public transportation or walk alone every day expect?” Congresswoman Ivonne Ortega wrote on X. “This is the reality that millions of women and girls face daily.”
Feminist social movements have gained ground in Mexico in recent years, sparked by the #MeToo movement in the United States and Mexico’s high rates of violence against women. Each spring, hundreds of thousands of protesters take to the streets to demand gender parity and policies that protect women’s lives.
Sheinbaum’s landslide victory in the 2024 presidential election highlighted the vast strides made by women in Mexican politics, a phenomenon aided by a law requiring that at least 50% of all candidates in federal, state and municipal elections are female.
Sheinbaum has frequently described her win as a victory for all women. “I did not arrive alone,” she says. “We all arrived.”
Yet violence against women persists, with an average of 10 women or girls slain nationwide each day, according to the government.
And street harassment is still pervasive. A few years ago, the hashtag #MiPrimerAcoso — “my first harassment” — went viral, with tens of thousands of women sharing stories of the first time they were touched, stared at or verbally harassed in the streets.
Writer Brenda Lozano said on X that Tuesday’s incident wasn’t due to alcohol or Sheinbaum’s lack of security. “The reasons she was harassed are patriarchy and sexism.”
Women march in Mexico City in a 2020 protest against gender violence.
(Pedro Pardo /AFP via Getty Images)
A United Nations report found that nearly half of Mexican women have been subjected to rape, groping or other forms of sexual violence. A 2014 survey of female transit riders in 16 cities around the world by the Thompson Reuters Foundation found that Mexico City had the biggest problem with sexual harassment, with 64% of respondents reporting having been victimized.
The Mexico City government has long provided women-only subway cars, and has even sought to combat harassment by arming female commuters with rape whistles. Some feminists oppose those measures, saying it puts the onus on women to protect themselves instead of pushing men to change their behavior.
Mexico City Mayor Clara Brugada said on Wednesday that the man who groped the president would be prosecuted to the full extent of the law.
“‘We’ve all arrived’ is not a slogan,” said Brugada, a member of Sheinbaum’s Morena party. “It’s a commitment to not look the other way, to not allow misogyny to remain hidden in custom, to not accept one more humiliation, one more abuse, one more femicide.”
While there were widespread expressions of support for Sheinbaum, there were also some on social media who criticized her for making too much of the incident. Others slammed Sheinbaum for smiling as she tried to slip away from the man’s grip, and for not pushing him away herself.
At her news conference, Sheinbaum said she hadn’t realized the extent of the harassment until she saw a video of what had happened.
She had chosen to walk between meetings rather than take a car for a simple reason. “We were running late,” she said. “It was faster.”
Also on Wednesday, Sheinbaum voiced support for Mexico’s Miss Universe representative, Fátima Bosch, who made headlines when she walked out of the competition Tuesday after being publicly berated by a male pageant official, who called her “dumb.”
Sheinbaum referenced a sexist saying that was once common in Mexico: “She’s prettier when she’s quiet.”
“Women,” Sheinbaum said, “are prettier when we raise our voices.”
Times staff writer Patrick J. McDonnell and Cecilia Sánchez Vidal in Mexico City contributed to this report.
