Mexican prosecutors charge that Andrade–with help from Trevi–persuaded numerous parents to turn over their daughters. Then, they allege, he gained psychological control over the girls and forced them to have sex with him. Criminal complaints have been filed by Karina’s parents and by two women in Mexico City who describe themselves as victims. Last fall, Trevi denied any wrongdoing and dropped out of sight. Andrade, who hasn’t been seen in public since 1997, has never responded to the charges. Prosecutors believe they are on the run with at least nine girls, including Karina. Interpol, the international police agency, has issued a warrant for the pair.
If anybody in Mexico could promise stardom, it was Andrade. In the early 1980s, his songs launched the careers of several female pop stars. Trevi was his biggest success. More than a rock star and actress, she became an icon for lower-class youth and the bane of Mexican conservatives–a cross between Madonna and Murphy Brown. She spoke out in favor of abortion, vowed that she would someday be president and raffled off her panties at concerts.
The Trevi legend began to crumble in March 1998, when Andrade’s ex-wife, Aline Hernandez, published a book claiming that he recruited her off the street in 1989, subjected her to abuse, including floggings, and married her when she was 15; she ran away and eventually divorced him. The book was widely regarded as the work of a bitter ex-wife who was also a showbiz rival of Trevi’s. That’s what Karina told her parents the last time they saw her, when she went home for a few days in September 1998. Her family believed her–until last December, when they learned that Karina had given birth to a baby boy in Spain and then abandoned him. Last May the child was given to Karina’s parents.
In Spain, police discovered that Andrade, Trevi and several young girls had been living in San Agustin del Guadalix, a village of 6,000 just outside Madrid. “They were very strange people, very secretive,” recalls neighbor Jesus Martin. The group abandoned the house in July 1998, leaving behind videotapes and other evidence. According to an Interpol official, investigators suspect the girls were being supplied to local hotels as prostitutes.
The women who have denounced Andrade and Trevi describe a cultlike system of control that may have gone on for at least a decade. The girls were rarely allowed to talk with each other. They needed permission to leave their rooms, and when they made phone calls, Andrade’s most trusted girls listened in. In her criminal complaint to Mexico City prosecutors, Guadalupe Carrasco, who spent 14 months in the group, charges that Andrade forced her to have sex with him–in front of other girls, on two occasions. She told NEWSWEEK: “I don’t know how he does it, but he makes you admire him. You really think he is a good person, and you admire him so much that you start thinking he has the right to possess you sexually.” Carrasco said Trevi often slept on the floor next to Andrade’s bed. “Gloria sang feminist songs,” said Carrasco, “so it was so strange to see her like that, blindly obeying a womanizer.”
The search for Andrade and Trevi has intensified recently. Authorities say the two were seen in Texas in April and may have returned briefly to Mexico last month. Delia Gonzalez, who once spent nine months in Andrade’s group and testified in the case involving Karina, says a lawyer for Trevi arranged for her to meet the fugitive in Cuernavaca on July 19. Trevi wanted her to “change my testimony in her favor,” Gonzalez says. “She was crying. She looked very bad, very sad, very upset, nervous. She had lost a lot of weight. She was very thin.” Gonzalez says she refused to change her story, and Trevi again disappeared. Millions of Mexicans are still riveted by the hunt for the pair–and by the thought that more dark secrets may yet emerge.
Within Mexico City andin San Agustin del Guadalix
