Profile : ‘The Tigress’ Sharpens Her Claws for Parliament Battle in Mexico : Ex-presidents’ paramour vows ‘total war’ against ruling party in the Senate.

When Irma Serrano, this country’s answer to Marilyn Monroe, published her kiss-and-tell autobiography several years ago, sweat ran through the corridors of political power.

Former presidents squirmed. Their wives fumed. And the onetime torch singer turned actress, known universally here as “The Tigress,” held millions of Mexicans spellbound by her intimate, sometimes vicious accounts of Mexico’s political kingpins.

Now, La Tigresa, the lover of former presidents who modeled nude for muralist Diego Rivera, is about to enter big-time politics herself.

Serrano will be a distinguished member of the opposition in the new Mexican Senate, which takes office Nov. 1.

The result is apt to be a bit more than the free-wheeling democracy promised by the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), which has ruled this nation without challenge for 65 years.

Serrano’s Senate strategy, after all, is simple.

“Total war,” she said, speaking of the ruling PRI and the new president, Ernesto Zedillo. Here, in fact, is just a sample of what the ruling party has in store from the Tigress when she takes her seat with fellow members of the Democratic Revolutionary Party (PRD), in the 128-member Senate:

“Look, I’m totally at war with them,” she said in an interview in the salon of a Mexico City mansion choked with gold-leafed Louis XIV furniture, carved ivory tusks from China and other lavish bric-a-brac from around the world. “I am not a passive person. I am a rare woman in Mexico. I have based my entire life on aggression and rebuttal. To fight the fight. I am a warrior. And this is war.”

It is just such forceful opposition that the government of President Carlos Salinas de Gortari and Zedillo, his presidential heir, said they hoped would come with a package of reforms that made Serrano’s presence in the Senate possible.

Serrano did not win her Senate seat from the troubled southern state of Chiapas outright in a hard-fought campaign. She came in a close second in the Aug. 21 federal elections in which the PRI swept to victory. But under a new, proportional representation system designed to strengthen the opposition voice in the legislature--traditionally a rubber stamp for the president that Serrano and others have called “a joke”--she and dozens of other opposition second-place finishers were awarded seats in the Senate and House of Deputies.

Although PRI legislators will maintain a comfortable majority in both houses of Congress, they and Zedillo will lack the two-thirds majority needed to alter the Mexican constitution with impunity. Further, the new face of Congress is likely to change this nation’s staid, predictable political landscape forever.

Serrano will likely be just one of the permanent--and outrageous--fixtures in a new era of congressional confrontation.

Sitting near her will be opposition PRD member Herberto Castillo, who is best known for a proposal to carve mammoth tunnels and install giant fans in the mountains south of the capital to suck out the city’s notorious pollution.

The Senate will also include 24 members of the opposition National Action Party, among them veterans such as Juan de Dios Castro Lozano. He has pledged to revolutionize the Congress into an aggressive, presidential watchdog overnight.

But in the days since the elections, it has been the Tigress who has spoken out loudest and most boldly against the PRI, its new president and governor-elect in Chiapas, where opposition protest to that election result is threatening to rekindle a peasant-guerrilla uprising that left 150 dead in January.

The Tigress already has vowed to put 4,000 women on guard outside the governor’s mansion in the state capital of Tuxtla Gutierrez to prevent the PRI’s governor-elect, Eduardo Robledo Rincon, from entering the building, let alone taking office--an event, she said, that will happen “only over my dead body.”

She has called Robledo “an assassin” and “a man responsible for the slaughter of thousands of indigenous Mexicans.” She has accused him of trying to kidnap her and asserted that the PRI was behind a road accident in Chiapas that left her injured during her first Senate bid there three years ago.

Privately, even Serrano’s own party ideologues have expressed concern. Some said they are worried the Tigress will go so far and outrage so many that she will become an embarrassment to them too.

None of this seemed to concern Serrano as she reflected recently on her past, her future and the future of Mexican democracy.

Her face thick with makeup, eyebrows painted with her trademark cat lines, the Tigress was the picture of poise and principle as she responded to the suggestion that she may not be taken with sufficient gravity in the Senate.

“They must take me seriously,” she said. “I am very strong. I am not a woman who has gotten a single thing through favoritism, or through help of any kind. I have fought for each one of my positions. And I swear, if someone must be respected, it’s going to be me.

“I am not gentle,” she insisted. “I am fearsome.”

These are qualities that Serrano and independent political analysts conceded do make the Tigress well-qualified for Mexico’s rough-and-tumble politics.

“I think she’s going to be a great senator--a fresh and forceful voice for change,” one prominent Mexico City analyst said.

But Serrano said she is qualified in other ways, as well. She has college degrees in philosophy and literature and a doctorate in law, none of which, she said, served her well through her acting and singing careers.

“To have fallen into the artistic environment was not my choice,” she said. “It was part of a game of destiny. Now, I believe it was time lost. I never liked it. I began singing because I like poetry--many of my poems were put to music--then a friend came to me and said, ‘You sing awful, but you sing different.’ In six months, I was the star of Mexico. It all happened so fast. It attacked me.”

Now, she said, it’s her turn.

Asked how it will be possible to change an authoritarian, often corrupt system, she answers: “Only by fighting.”

True, she said, war is not democracy, “but that is the view only of one who has a good life. For half of Mexico, which has no work, which has no pants for their children, which has no vitamins, which doesn’t even have a quarter of a bottle of antiseptic for wounds, for them, war is worth it. What value is life? They have nothing. And he who has nothing is very dangerous.”

The Tigress paused, trying to justify such populist rhetoric from one of Mexico’s wealthiest women.

“Look, I am not a liar,” she said. “I am not going and telling the people, ‘I am poor. I am dying of hunger because I am like you.’ No. They don’t want me like this. I am myself. If someone takes away everything today or tomorrow, it doesn’t matter to me. I am not attached to material things.

“I tell the people, ‘I am rich--but what I have is yours,’ ” she said, adding: “Because I have no children. I have no relatives any more.”

Serrano never did marry.

“I don’t believe anyone ever proposed to me,” she said with a laugh, although there is, perhaps, a deeper reason. Her mother, she explained, divorced her father when she learned he was a pure Indian.

“I remember,” she said, “my mother saying the Indians have learned only how to be slaves, not her husband.”

But such roots, she said, taught her a great deal.

Serrano claims to have learned dozens of Mexico’s indigenous Indian dialects, which she used extensively during her campaign in the jungle villages and underdeveloped towns that characterize the poor state she now represents.

They also taught her what she said she considers her most valuable character trait: “To be aggressive--all the time.”

It was only when the subject turned to her age that Serrano offered a vague response.

“I never have counted the years. But I was born on Dec. 9, 1945. In my passport it says 1946 because I lied,” she said with a hearty laugh, though clearly looking a bit older than both dates would testify.

“I believe that for a thoughtful person, time is not served by growing old, without growing wise,” she added. “To learn every day something that takes you a step forward, that is what leaves beautiful memories. This (new career is) like that. And it is not going to kill me, nor measure me for the coffin.

“Still, I feel like my body is filled with youth, with the power to win the struggle. On the day that I feel I don’t want to fight, or to defend a cause, on that day it will mean I have begun to rot.”

Biography

Name: Irma Serrano

Title: Mexican senator-elect

Age: 48

Personal: Holds degrees in philosophy and literature and a doctorate in law. Actress and singer. Outspoken critic of Mexico’s ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party. Unmarried.

Quote: ‘I am very strong. I am not a woman who has gotten a single thing through favoritism, or through help of any kind. I have fought for each one of my positions. And I swear, if someone must be respected, it’s going to be me.”