Pop Star's Story Rivets Latin America

By Anthony Faiola
Washington Post Foreign Service

RIO DE JANIERO -- Over the course of the last three years, Gloria Trevi went from being Mexico's hottest pop star to Brazil's most famous female prisoner, a
woman whose life, like a Latin American soap opera, seemed to become more unbelievable -- yet tragically gripping -- at every turn.

The latest episode of the "Mexican Madonna" is perhaps the most bizarre: the Incarcerated Conception of Gloria Trevi.

Twenty-two months after Trevi was arrested in Rio with her manager-boyfriend on a warrant from Mexico, where she is charged with helping her manager to
sexually abuse her young female fans, her extradition procedure suddenly has become complicated by the onetime Latin pop goddess's mysterious pregnancy. While
fighting extradition back home, she supposedly was being kept with a female cellmate and allowed no conjugal visits.

Though she did a nationally televised interview from prison with Brazil's largest broadcast network early last month to announce her pregnancy, Trevi, 29, was mum
on how it happened until Tuesday. In a complaint filed with the Brazilian courts asking for more flexible prison conditions, she said her unborn child was the result of
repeated rapes by prison guards.

Brazil's federal police -- who claim they learned of her pregnancy, now seven months advanced, only after her interview with O Globo news agency last month --
have denied the allegations, but promised this week to reopen the investigation. So far they have offered up only this novel theory: Trevi secretly inseminated herself,
perhaps with sperm-in-a-bag from her manager, who was being kept in a different wing of the same federal penitentiary.

A series of local news reports -- quoting prison inmates -- have also suggested that she may have become pregnant after having sex with the two federal agents in
charge of her case, her manager or other male inmates.

Though the circumstances of Trevi's pregnancy may indeed have been tragic, her unborn child seems likely, at least for now, to spare her a return to Mexico, where
she insists her life would be put in danger by "powerful enemies."

Having a child on Brazilian soil has long been a way for foreign convicts to avoid extradition while "running away to Rio." Notorious thief Ronald Biggs, who took
part in Britain's "Great Train Robbery" of the Glasgow-to-London mail coach that netted $75 million worth of booty in 1963, fathered a son here and was rewarded
with more than three decades of sanctuary before giving himself up this year.

Trevi's application for refugee status in Brazil is still pending, but even if she is denied official permission to stay here, the decision essentially would be meaningless.
Women who are seven or more months pregnant in Brazil are not allowed on planes. So Trevi is almost certain to give birth here.

And though Brazilian laws have become somewhat more strict in recent years on using childbirth to avoid extradition or expulsion, legal experts say she will have a
strong argument in Brazil that mother and child cannot be separated -- and that her tiny Brazilian citizen would be at risk inside a Mexican jail.

"The only certainties are these: There was obviously a failure in police procedures, and now it will be much more complicated to extradite her," said Djalma
Nascimento Jr., spokesman for Brazil's justice ministry. "The child will be a Brazilian citizen and therefore cannot be extradited. And it is difficult to imagine
extraditing the parent without her child."

Trevi's well-documented undoing stems to the late 1990s, when a number of young girls told Mexican authorities that Sergio Andrade, 45, Trevi's manager and one
of Mexico's leading record producers, had sexually abused them. They went on to say that Trevi had assisted in luring them into Andrade's arms; Trevi and Andrade
vigorously deny the charges.

In an interview with The Washington Post last year, Andrade insisted the two had left Mexico without even knowing they were wanted by authorities. They spent six
months in Rio, living relatively low-profile lives, before their arrest in January 2000.

In Latin America's gossipy entertainment industry, the Trevi scandal sizzled. She was huge in her day, Mexico's sexy rebel with a song. A strawberry blond teenage
girl with a dream to be a singing star, Trevi, with Andrade's help, rose to become Mexico's biggest and most controversial pop phenomenon. The Catholic Church
condemned her for sexual explicitness -- she posed nude for an erotic calendar, and her second-skin short-shorts became vogue with her young fans.

Now, her surprise pregnancy has the Latin American press in a frenzy. Trevi's trials have become obsessions in Brazil and Mexico, the region's two most populous
countries. People want to know the details of the incarcerated conception.

Many have cast doubt on the artificial insemination theory. Though authorities say they have proof that Trevi was taking fertility pills, even with a trained accomplice
-- say, a bribed doctor or nurse -- medical experts doubt such insemination in prison would have been possible.

"Look, this is a bad joke," said Isaac Adid, one of Brazil's leading fertility experts. "Even in a lab it's hard; maybe you'd have a 16 to 18 percent success rate. But in
the conditions she is in at the jail, the idea that someone just passed her some semen in a bag and she got herself pregnant is pretty preposterous."

This week the Brazilian magazine Istoe published letters from inmates at the federal penitentiary in Brasilia where Trevi was being held before she was moved to an
all-female, high-security prison after the announcement of her pregnancy.

The story stated that Trevi had had sex with two federal police officers charged with her case, but it was unclear whether it had been consensual or forced.

The notorious Brazilian criminal Marcelo Borelli, accused of the torture and rape of a 3-year-old girl and the hijacking last year of a Boeing 737 carrying $2 million in
gold, has also claimed fatherhood of Trevi's child. Borelli was being kept in the same federal penitentiary at the time of Trevi's estimated conception in early May. In
his published letters to a girlfriend, however, Borelli also seemed to indicate that Andrade could have been the father.

In her interview with O Globo, Trevi denied getting pregnant just to stay in Brazil, insisting it was not "planned." But she has hinted from the beginning that she feared
retribution from the police if she told her story in full. And in her formal complaint filed this week, she indeed asks for special protection from police.

"I never planned to get pregnant in jail," Trevi told O Globo last month. "They say that I got pregnant to avoid extradition, but I want to make it clear that I don't want
to use my pregnancy."

She went on to say: "I have great risk if I go back to Mexico. I could be murdered. I was very probing in Mexico, I even sang songs about the government. In
Mexico, they say a woman only has value if she is a virgin. But that is hypocrisy."

More than anything else, Trevi said, she is determined to be a good mother, calling her unborn child "a soul granted to me by God."

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