Sao Paulo, Brazil ? Pop diva Gloria Trevi was extradited Friday to Mexico, where she faces charges of kidnapping and corruption of minors.

Trevi has been jailed in Brazil since her January 2000 arrest in Rio de Janeiro, where she had lived in hiding for about a year after fleeing Mexico.

“It will be better in Mexico than in Brazil,” Trevi said after leaving her jail cell in Brasilia, the nation’s capital. “I have faith in God, in my lawyers, in my family and in justice.”

Police in Sao Paulo said the singer asked to meet with a priest before her flight to Mexico.

“She’s a strong and courageous woman,” said Rev. Ubaldo Steri, who said he had met with Trevi several times when she was in jail.

Prosecutors in Mexico’s Chihuahua state accuse Trevi, her manager Sergio Andrade and choreographer Maria Raquenel Portillo of corrupting a 17-year-old girl whose parents turned her over to their care when she was 12 for musical training. The girl abandoned a baby in Spain in 1998, saying Andrade was the father.

Trevi, Andrade and Portillo have denied the charges.

Brazil’s Supreme Court authorized extradition of the three in December 2000, but their lawyers fought to keep them in Brazil. Trevi’s applications for political refugee status were denied.

In late November, Trevi said she would no longer fight extradition and asked to be allowed to return to Mexico to defend herself.