MEXICAN NURSES attacked as virus-spreaders.

MEXICO CITY — Esther Garcia was walking toward a bus stop after completing her shift when a young man approached her. Then he tossed a plastic bag filled with liquid at her.

The bag struck the left side of her head, splashing her face with its caustic contents — a mixture of water and bleach. The attacker ran off as Garcia felt burning in her eye and her vision went blurry.

“I was filled with fear,” she recalled. “I started to cry. I didn’t understand what was going on.”

This wasn’t a revenge attack, a crime of passion or some kind of message from Mexican organized crime: Garcia is a nurse at a public clinic outside Mexico City.

Health workers, especially nurses, have been targeted across the country in recent weeks by assailants accusing them of spreading coronavirus, according to health professionals and authorities.

They have also faced verbal assaults, been denied seats in public transport and been blocked from entering their own communities.

“You are spreading covid!” is a common slur.

Mexican authorities, including President Andres

Manuel Lopez Obrador, have condemned the mistreatment and stressed that it has been perpetrated by a scattered minority in a country where most citizens have lauded the workers on the front lines of the pandemic.

“It is truly outrageous that anyone would attack health personnel because of fear of Covid-19,” Dr. Hugo Lopez-Gatell, who heads the government’s coronavirus-response team, tweeted last week. “They are here to protect us. Our total gratitude.”

In the southern state of Oaxaca, lawmakers passed a statute mandating nine-year prison terms for assaults on medical professionals.

The medical workers are already risking their lives to care for covid-19 patients. Across Mexico, doctors, nurses and others have staged protests against a lack of protective gear, supplies and medicines.

More than 500 health workers have already been infected, authorities say, and at least nine have died. Outbreaks have been reported in at least four public hospitals.

The reports of infected health workers have left a stigma, stoking fears on social media and elsewhere that they are vectors of contagion.

In western Jalisco state, at least six nurses have been victimized, including another who was showered with water and bleach, according to the state nursing association there.

“As health workers we have confronted disinformation and panic — even physical and verbal aggression,” said Edith Mujica, president of the group. “We are not enemies. … People should know that just because we are nurses, that is not to say that we are contaminated.”

Across Mexico, townsfolk have thrown up “sanitary” roadblocks — staffed with selfstyled health vigilantes — to prevent entry of outsiders and other potential virus carriers. The barriers have meant some health workers cannot get home, forcing them to move.

In one case, reported by Mexico’s Reforma newspaper, residents denied a nurse entry to her neighborhood in the Pacific coast town of Bahia de Balderas, in western Nayarit state.

“We don’t deserve this,” said the nurse, Melody Rodriguez Navarrete. “We are not asking them to praise us, only that they understand that we are here to help them. It’s our work, and everyone is taking the appropriate measures not only to avoid becoming infected, but to avoid infecting others.”

Along with public anger, the assaults on health workers have prompted considerable national soul-searching about the collective mentality behind such misguided behavior.

“The assaults demonstrate an accumulation of contradictions in our society,” columnist Javier Solorzano Zinser wrote Friday in La Razon newspaper. “Those who are being attacked put all their determination and knowledge into resolving problems, not into provoking them.” Information for this article was contributed by Jose Maria Alvarez of the Los Angeles Times.