Intrigue Swirls Around Missing Mexican Diva

Hurtling onstage in ripped tights and a tidal wave of streaked hair, pop star Gloria Trevi has for more than a decade titillated Mexican audiences more accustomed to pasteurized divas with glossed lips and blank eyes. Now, Trevi has shocked Mexico in an entirely new fashion: staring down from “wanted” posters in post offices from Mexico City to the U.S. border.

Mexican authorities have been seeking the singer and her manager and reported lover, Sergio Andrade, for questioning about allegations of kidnapping and sexually abusing teenage girls. A spokesman for the prosecutor’s office in Chihuahua, Mexico, said Friday that the office planned to request a criminal search warrant for the pair within days.

But Trevi, 29, whose “soft heavy metal” albums have sold millions of copies, now seemingly has vanished.

The allegations by five young women against the pair have prompted fevered analysis by Mexican gossip columnists, literati and fans on both sides of the border. Is “la Trevi” being persecuted for her money and liberated persona, they wonder? Or did her sexual stage image hide a true darkness?

“I don’t think anything similar has ever happened here. This is completely unprecedented,” prominent Mexico City painter Jose Luis Cuevas, a longtime Trevi defender, said of the scandal.

With her raspy voice, audacious songs and impudent habit of stripping male fans down to their skivvies, Trevi was adored by both kids and the intelligentsia. A child of the Mexican middle class who left home at 14, Trevi belted out songs about free love, prostitution and high school rebellion, in between creating wildly successful semi-nude calendars. Her popularity peaked in the mid-1990s.

Notorious for posing as a nude presidential candidate, a Betty Crocker hausfrau wearing only an apron and a naked version of Adelita--an iconic figure from the Mexican Revolution--Trevi added astringent parody to her sex kitten persona. Though the comparison was obvious, she didn’t relish being likened to Madonna. “Madonna is very intelligent, but that’s not so important for artists,” she once told a reporter. “I prefer honesty.”

In a testament to Trevi’s appeal to Mexico’s intelligentsia, Cuevas recently hosted a discussion at his gallery concerning the Trevi affair and its social and cultural implications. Stressing that he had no idea whether Trevi had committed any crime, he termed the entire drama surreal.

“It all seems very deplorable, of course, in the event they judge her guilty, because there are still no [formal] accusations against her,” Cuevas said. “It reminds me of that cult movie, ‘The Honeymoon Killers.’ It was about this couple who travel around the highways committing these terrible crimes. . . . They had this amor loco.”

But essayist Carlos Monsivais, who once admiringly termed Trevi “the serpent in the Garden of Eden dressed in a thong,” said he is deeply troubled by the scandal.

“Gloria Trevi represented a liberal, straightforward and very free attitude,” Monsivais said in Mexico City. “But sadly, it’s exactly the contrary. She’s a youth idol who thinks she has impunity. . . . She’s given credence to the charges by not presenting herself.”

Trevi and Andrade had maintained low profiles ever since Andrade’s ex-wife, 23-year-old Aline Hernandez, published a book last year and filed a criminal complaint against the pop manager.

Andrade, who helped guide Trevi to fame in the 1980s, also managed a stable of other aspiring pop starlets, some in their early teens. Hernandez alleged that Trevi, once her best friend, had lured her to join Andrade’s entourage, after which Andrade coerced her into sex before she married him when she was just 15. The book led to no formal charges, and some who follow the entertainment industry questioned the allegations, because Hernandez and her onetime friend Trevi had contracts with fiercely competing TV networks.

Then, in March, another Andrade protege accused him of exploiting her sexually after she joined his circle at age 12. Her parents, who had entrusted their daughter to Andrade’s star-making regimen, reportedly first became concerned when Yapor stopped calling home to Chihuahua.

They next heard that their daughter, now 17, had abandoned an 18-month-old child at an orphanage while traveling in Spain with Andrade. This spring, before dropping from sight again, Trevi appeared on the Miami-based Spanish language talk show “Cristina,” tearfully denying what she termed ugly gossip and rumors. Neither she nor Andrade has been heard from, however, since the Yapor allegations.

In the months since, at least three more women have come forward with similar allegations against Andrade, said Gloria Covos, a spokeswoman for the Chihuahua state prosecutor’s office. At least one, who said Andrade raped her nine years go in a Glendale, Calif., hotel room, accused Trevi of being an accomplice, said Mission, Texas, Police Det. Raul Gonzalez. Because the statute of limitations had run out on that allegation, U.S. authorities did not pursue it, Gonzalez said.

A small border town near Reynosa, Mexico, Mission briefly was besieged by Mexican TV reporters last week after anonymous tipsters reported Trevi was staying at a tony nearby golf resort.

But the singer never appeared, triggering new speculation as to her whereabouts. Mexican authorities, who have pasted Trevi’s wanted poster across the country and established tip hotlines for the case, say the two may have fled to Chile, Argentina or Germany.

Because Mexican authorities have not formally asked U.S. law enforcers for help, police in this country won’t go any further with the case for now, Gonzalez said. But in U.S. border towns as much as in Mexico, Trevi fans are following the case closely.

“You’ve got to understand that a lot of people in the Rio Grande Valley live in Mexico too. So Gloria Trevi is recognized by the majority of people here,” Gonzalez said. “This is the way they see it: If she has really done something wrong, how come Mexican authorities haven’t issued a warrant yet?”

In Mexico, even some who are uncertain about Trevi’s innocence maintain a basic belief in her fizzy, childlike persona while denouncing Andrade.

Telenovela star and producer Veronica Castro had run-ins with both personalities over the years. When Trevi visited Castro’s show in 1995, the 24-year-old singer scandalized Castro by declaiming, “Long live prostitution.”

The normally amiable Castro scolded her on the air, unleashing a tabloid fiesta. But not long afterward, Castro said, Trevi sat near her on a plane and burst into tears, begging her pardon for the episode.

Years before, Castro added, she too had worked with Andrade. When she heard during the 1980s that he was managing Trevi, Castro said she warned the young singer, “Gloria, be careful of him. . . . One day, you could have problems.”

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Sam Quinones in Mexico City contributed to this story.