Mary Boquitas
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María Raquenel Portillo (born January 5, 1970) is an infamous Mexican woman, who is much better known for her nickname of Mary Boquitas.
In 1985, she auditioned for a music group. This group, managed by powerful Mexican producer Sergio Andrade. Portillo was chosen for the group; the girls picked the name "Boquitas Pintadas" because it sounded very different from the names of other typical teenaged bands of the era, many of which tried to copy Menudo with their name. Because of the band's name, Mary Raquenel Portillo would later become known as "Mary Boquitas".
Gloria Trevi was another member of the band. "Boquitas Pintadas" had five members in total; however, it was Trevi and Portillo who were able to forge a friendship that went beyond their days at "Boquitas Pintadas".
As Trevi became a top selling singer during the early 1990s, Mary Boquitas went on to sing as Trevi's back-up while on tour. She would continue singing as one of Trevi's back-up singers until a big scandal began to unravel during the middle 1990s.
In 1995, Andrade's former wife published a book in which she alleged that Andrade sexually abused teenaged girls, sometimes submitting them to torture and even into having lesbian sex with some of Andrade's singers. The book specifically pointed at Trevi and Portillo being involved in these acts, among other people. It also mentioned Karina Yapor.
Andrade, Trevi, Portillo, Yapor and, it is believed, a number of young girls fled Mexico soon after the book was published, and, according to police investigations, they lived at various countries for periods of time, including Spain, Chile, Argentina and Brazil. In 1997, they were declared fugitives by the Mexican police.
News about this case reached the United States, being widespread on a daily basis by such television shows as "El Gordo y la Flaca" with Lily Estefan and Raul De Molina, "Cotorreando" with Mauricio Zeilic and Sábado Gigante, with Don Francisco, among others.
Soon after the Mexican police declared them fugitives, Brazilian police arrested them. Among the charges was the alleged killing of an infant girl that Trevi had supposedly borne. Trevi herself has admitted, through a comics series she draws for a Spanish magazine and which is based on her experiences in Brazil, that she indeed had a baby girl, but that she does not know what happened to her daughter. Brazilian police pointed at Portillo and Andrade as top suspects in the murder of the baby, but the baby's corpse was never found, and the murder charges were later dropped.
Brazilian police also accused the group of kidnapping minors and of sexual conduct with them.
The Brazilians faced one technical problem: Mexico's law also wanted the group, based on the fact that the crimes in which the group was allegedly involved (not counting the baby's case, of course) happened in Mexico. A long, legal battle between lawyers and lawmen from both countries ensued. Meanwhile, the Andrade-Trevi-Boquitas-Yapor case was so widespread that, in 1998, when female inmates had to be transported from Trevi and Portillo's jail due to overcrowding, a special Boeing 737 of Varig had to be chartered for the accused in the famous case, so that they would travel under better protection measures.
In 1999, the women were extradited to Mexico. Yapor had voluntarily returned before, and she was spared from jail time.
After four years and a half in a Mexican jail, the women were acquitted of all charges in 2004.
