The shaming of a she-devil

With her raunchy stage show, risqué song lyrics and soft-porn modelling, Gloria Trevi outraged Catholic Mexico. Then came allegations that she procured underage girls for her manager's sexual gratification. So the two went on the run. Duncan Campbell on the Latin Madonna and the 'Academy of Lolitas'

She is the "Latin Madonna", the "Serpent in a Thong", a Mexican Marilyn Manson and a she-devil for the Catholic establishment. And now, in a case that is being seen throughout Latin America as a battle between cultures and moralities, she is accused of corrupting young girls.

Gloria de los Angeles Trevino Ruiz - or Gloria Trevi, as she is better known - spent her 30th birthday behind bars in Brazil last week, where she has been since her arrest on January 12. She had been on the run for more than three months, rumoured to be in Los Angeles, Santiago, Texas and Germany. This week she is facing extradition proceedings which could return her to Mexico, where she is due to stand trial.

Trevi's story starts more than 15 years ago, when a feisty 14-year-old from a middle-class Mexican family left home and started on her career as a performer. She could dance, sing, compose, drum and play the piano, and she soon set about showing that she could shock, too. In a country where performers still tended to be dutiful and conventional, the time was ripe for someone who was ready to kick over the traces.

She burst on the scene with an exotic stage persona - all torn fishnets, striptease and punky hair, with songs to match. She found a manager, Sergio Andrade, who, at a time when Madonna was conquering the world, quickly realised Trevi's potential. Andrade, the brother of a Mexican senator, was already a successful songwriter and had managed a number of other young women singers, although none had achieved the fame his new charge would attain.

Trevi's first three CDs sold more than 5m copies and she could pack stadiums with 20,000 fans, delighted to see and hear someone so naughty and dangerous. One album was entitled Mas Turbata Que Nunca (More Disturbed Than Ever), its subliminal message easily found by rolling the first two words together. No wonder she became known as La Atrenida - the insolent one.

Just as important as the medium she chose to reach her audience were the ideas she delivered through it: in a staunchly Catholic country, she spoke and sang about abortion, unwed motherhood, prostitution, drugs and politics. She became a symbol of fearless feminism, and both her teenage fans and many older, Mexican intellectuals admired her for her libertarian stance and her daring.

While her message was sometimes deadly serious, Trevi's performances were full-on rock: she interspersed her own material with that of Led Zeppelin and The Doors. The shows were sensational, whether she was beating out a rhythm with flaming drumsticks or pulling young men on to the stage and stripping them. As her fame and success on stage grew, she capitalised on her notoriety by posing nude for calendars - the last one showed her wearing nothing but a devil's forked tail - and as a naked version of Adelita, one of the heroines of the Mexican revolution. The Catholic hierarchy denounced her godlessness, which only added to her mystique.

In 1998, Andrade's young ex-wife, Aline Hernandez, published a book in which she claimed that Andrade lured her into a relationship when she was just 13. She married him at the age of 15. Hernandez portrayed Trevi and Andrade as sinister and manipulative. The book made waves, but its meatier allegations were dismissed as the product of Mexico's generally venomous showbusiness world. Then, gradually, the parents of other teenage girls who had also been part of Andrade's stable of young performers started to make the same allegations: that Trevi had helped to procure them for Andrade's sexual gratification.

Last November, after specific allegations made by the parents of one of the girls, Karina Yapor, the state of Chihuahua issued a wanted poster for Trevi and Andrade. Yapor's parents claimed that Andrade had seduced their daughter, who had gone to him for music lessons when she was 12. It was claimed that she had had a child by Andrade in Spain when she was 15 and the baby had been left in a Spanish orphanage. By the time the Mexican authorities went looking for them, Andrade and Trevi had slipped from view. He had apparently left Mexico more than two years ago; she had last been heard of giving an interview to a Miami-based television station in spring of last year.

Speculation on the streets and in the press was rife. Were the allegations simply part of an internal showbusiness feud? Was Trevi an innocent party? Would they ever return to Mexico? Then, just when it was rumoured that they were hiding out in the US, news came of their arrest in a Rio de Janeiro apartment one block from the Copacabana beach; the porter at their apartment building had thought they were just a bunch of "dirty hippies". Trevi has now been moved from jail in Rio to Brasilia, and the extradition proceedings could be completed this week.

In Mexico, Trevi's case is the subject of heated debate. Her mother appeared on television last week saying that her daughter was a "good girl" and that Andrade had always seemed like a "caballero" - a gentleman - to her. But elsewhere, the attacks were growing. One weekly magazine suggested Trevi and Andrade had been involved in black magic and had run what was essentially an "academy of Lolitas" in Cuernavaca.

Yapor is seen as the prosecution's key witness, but she has so far been supportive of Trevi and Andrade, saying initially that another man was the father of her baby. She has since changed the story, saying that the child was the result of a consensual relationship with Andrade. Last week, she refused to take a lie detector test requested by the prosecution.

Trevi, for her part, is clearly deter mined not to submit without a fight, and it seems that she will not take what might be the safer route of blaming Andrade for everything. The mug shots taken after her arrest show her with her trademark self-confident grin. She told Mexican journalists on the plane between Rio de Janeiro and Brasilia when she was being moved last week: "I am not going to play the victim. I support Sergio, I am with him." Andrade has taken the brunt of the public's outrage, but, judging from radio phone-in programmes, Mexicans are also angry with the girls' parents, who seem to have virtually signed over their daughters in the search for fame and fortune.

Feminist organisations in Chihuahua, the state that is pursuing the couple, have also pointed the finger at the attorney general's office, suggesting that the prosecution of Trevi and Andrade is a way of diverting attention from their inaction over the rape and murder of nearly 200 women in the border area of Juarez. "It is as if they want to show that they are concerned about the problems faced by women and sexual crime," said Irma Campos, a Chihuahua attorney and member of the women's group called March 8.

Mariana Martinez, an editor of the book written by Aline Hernandez that was the starting point for the scandal, said of the affair this week that "rebel lion is part of life, but the need to find a symbol for it can be manipulated so that it turns into the exact opposite. Trevi was similar to subcomandante Marcos [the leader of the Chiapas rebellion] in the way that she was an emblem in Mexico. In one way or another, Mexico needs heroes."

Guadalupe Loeza, the Mexican writer and cultural commentator, sees Trevi as a tragic victim three times over - of Andrade, of the star system and of the notoriously corrupt entertainment business. "Everyone knew about the kind of things that went on in Televisa [the television station that creates most Mexican stars]," said Loeza, "but no one said so openly. This is the first time the dirty linen is being washed in public. This is like a Pandora's box. There is now the space for lots of stories to come out. Trevi is a product of her time, of the disillusionment and the disappointment and the confusion of it."

Loeza said that it was clear why Trevi was so successful: "She was a seducer, she was not a fake. She appealed to everyone: eight-year-old girls who wanted to be like her, adolescents who thought they were her, adults who became fans of her calendars. I wrote at the time and I still believe that every Mexican woman has a Gloria Trevi inside her but is frightened to give it expression."

Other writers, such as Jorge Caballeros of the left-of-centre daily La Jornada, pay tribute to her for breaking taboos with her lyrics and for singing about politics: "She was a social and cultural phenomenon."

Last summer, the well-known talk-show host and comedian Paco Stanley was shot dead in broad daylight outside a Mexico City restaurant. Initially, the country mourned what appeared to be yet another random act of violence, but then it emerged that Stanley was a cocaine addict, and his sidekick on the show was alleged to have been behind the plot to kill him. The cynicism this case engendered about the entertainment industry has helped to fuel the charges against Trevi and Andrade. At the same time, there are many within the business who must know that if the dirty laundry is going to be washed, they will be hung out to dry along with Trevi and Andrade.

One of Trevi's hit CDs was entitled Why Am I Here? It's a question she may well be pondering in jail as she waits to see what the judicial process will do to her. She may also be wondering if it was inevitable that she would be punished for so openly flaunting the conventions of Mexican culture.

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