Singer Returns to Mexico to Face Charges

MEXICO CITY — MEXICO CITY -- One of Latin America’s trashiest real-life soap operas came full circle Saturday when disgraced Mexican pop idol Gloria Trevi flew home from Brazil, with the baby she had in prison, to face charges of kidnapping young girls and forcing them to have sex with her manager.

After nearly three years behind bars, Trevi, 34, gave up fighting extradition last month, saying she feared losing custody of her 10-month-old son, Angel Gabriel, who was conceived under unexplained circumstances in an all-woman cellblock. The singer known as Mexico’s Madonna has denied the charges against her.

“I miss my country,” she told reporters before boarding a commercial airliner in Sao Paulo under Mexican police escort. “I have confidence in God, in my lawyers, in my family and in justice.”

Mexicans dwelt on the diva’s homecoming with macabre fascination, predicting a blockbuster trial and, eventually, her return to the pop music scene she once dominated with her untamed red hair, she-devil stage antics and gritty lyrics about female empowerment that sold millions of albums.

For weeks, her long-awaited extradition has prompted breathless media coverage and a proliferation of pro-Gloria Web sites. The jail awaiting her in the northern city of Chihuahua was repainted for her arrival, and a leading Mexican producer announced plans to serialize her travails for television.

A swarm of federal agents kept Trevi fans at bay as their idol landed in the Caribbean resort city of Cancun and was led to a Mexican government jet bound for Chihuahua.

Trevi faces charges there of being an accomplice to rape, kidnapping with intent to have sex and corrupting minors. If convicted, she could be sentenced to up to 20 years in prison.

The accusations are based on claims by Karina Yapor, now 20, whose parents sent her from Chihuahua to Mexico City for musical training in the care of Trevi and her manager, Sergio Andrade, eight years ago. The girl abandoned a baby in Spain in 1999, saying Andrade was the father.

Yapor told reporters Saturday that she had forgiven Trevi but was ready to testify that she “suffered horrible physical and psychological torture” while living with the singer and her manager.

Trevi was the 14-year-old child of an abusive father when she met Andrade, then twice her age. He guided her to a string of platinum albums, hit movies, nude-pinup calendars and a lucrative contract with Televisa, Mexico’s leading television network.

Her in-your-face sexuality made her one of Latin America’s hottest stars of the 1990s, a trash-talking icon who defied traditional Latino ideas about the role of women.

During concerts, she would summon a young man from the audience to the stage and strip him to his underwear. Wearing bandoleers of condoms across her bare chest, she sang about unwed pregnancies and abortion rights. She flashed her pantied crotch and said she wanted to run for president.

In recent years, however, some of Trevi’s former fans, including Yapor and Andrade’s ex-wife, wrote books challenging the singer’s public persona. They depicted Andrade as the head of a sex cult that abducted star-struck teenage girls, with Trevi as his submissive henchwoman.

As Mexican police started to investigate those stories in 1999, the couple vanished, prompting a hunt across Latin America.

In January 2000, Brazilian police found Trevi and Andrade in a beachfront apartment on Rio de Janeiro’s Copacabana, along with three teenage sisters and Maria Raquenel Portillo, a bandmate of Trevi’s known as Mary Boquitas. The teenagers were sent home to Mexico, the others arrested.

Brazil’s Supreme Court authorized the trio’s extradition in December 2000. Five months later, Trevi became pregnant -- a fact used by her lawyers to try to keep her in Brazil, because that country traditionally refuses to send home foreigners with Brazilian-born children.

Trevi’s lawyers said she was raped by a Brazilian police officer. The police at first said she managed to impregnate herself with the sperm of a Brazilian gangster imprisoned in a nearby cellblock.

After the baby was born, Brazilian authorities took DNA samples and declared that Andrade had fathered it, allegedly after Trevi bribed guards for time alone with him in an attorney-client conference room. Her lawyers have demanded independent DNA tests.

Andrade and Raquenel remain imprisoned in Brazil, also facing extradition. The Supreme Court turned down their bids for political asylum, along with Trevi’s, last month.

Trevi told the Mexican newspaper Reforma last week that the scandalous claims against her “are all false,” nothing more than a conspiracy by her enemies in Mexico’s television industry and young women who write “truculent stories to get rich at my expense.”

She also said she feared for her life. For that reason, her lawyers insisted that she return home on a commercial flight, even though Mexico sent a government plane to pick her up. The dispute delayed her extradition by a day, and she won.

A fan club in her native Monterrey has gathered 5,000 signatures on a petition saying she cannot get a fair trial in Chihuahua and demanding a change of venue.

Public opinion, however, may have turned against her. Her fans were mostly young girls, and they have grown up. Nearly two-thirds of Mexicans polled nationwide by Reforma said Trevi is guilty. Yet many Mexicans believe her celebrity status will get her off the hook.