Ropa Usada Smugglers Face Border Press

Like generations of smugglers along the Rio Grande, the gray-haired man with the droopy right eye specializes in exploiting the laws of supply and demand.

As he prepared to slip a 20-kilo load across the U.S.-Mexico border, molding it into a tight wad with packing tape, he rationalized his illicit trade as an act of desperation, the sort of thing decent people turn to when poverty and unemployment cut their options short.

“It’s all about necessity, my son,” he said on a recent December day, tossing his cargo into a pickup truck in the shadows of a Brownsville alley.

Yet while other traffickers make millions moving narcotics north, he will earn only a few pesos transporting this shipment south. The contraband will be washed, distributed at swap meets and resold across the country to appreciative Mexican families. The gray-haired man with the droopy right eye is a smuggler of used clothes.

“You have your work and I have mine,” he said. “God help each one of us.”

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For decades, Mexicans have come here, to America’s southernmost border town, for bargains on ropa usada--the secondhand shirts and pants and jackets and skirts that prove one nation’s trash is never too unfashionable to become another nation’s treasure.

Nearly two dozen merchants in downtown Brownsville cater to this market, their shops brimming with literally tons of used clothing, all piled like psychedelic snowdrifts in a wrinkled jumble from floor to ceiling. Everything from polyester leisure suits to frilly silk underwear is sold in bulk--usually at about $1.25 a pound.

It’s never been a great secret that these U.S. discards ended up in Mexico, waved across the international bridge by inspectors alternately nonchalant and corrupt. But as Mexico struggles to rebound from its most recent economic crisis, authorities have begun to crack down on freelance commerce, forcing many used-clothing vendors to smuggle in their cargo like drug traffickers smuggling theirs out.

“They say it’s contraband, but I say it’s a pretty upstanding way to earn a living, at least compared to what other people do,” said Gloria Guzman, 78, as she and her 83-year-old husband, Tano, loaded the trunk of their Chrysler LeBaron for the short cross-border trip home to Matamoros.

Many mom-and-pop merchants, like Guzman, try to skirt the law by transporting only a small bundle at a time. If questioned by Mexican officials, they can say the clothing is for personal use--not for resale on the black market. Others pose as vacationers, their wares stuffed into old suitcases. Some carry detergent and bleach, suggesting nothing more nefarious than a trip to the Laundromat.

For major racketeers, the kind who deal in multiton loads, subterfuge is just another cost of doing business. With the right connections, according to insiders, counterfeit shipping permits can be purchased. Bribes remain commonplace. In a few cases, smugglers have been known to wrap bales of used clothing in trash bags and strap them atop inner-tubes, ferrying their cargo across the Rio Grande under cover of night.

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“Market forces,” said Charles Ellard, an economist at the University of Texas-Pan American, “don’t recognize political boundaries.”

The North American Free Trade Agreement was an acknowledgment of that truth, an effort to bring trade policies into accord with economic reality. The free flow of goods, at least in theory, ultimately benefits consumers and manufacturers in both Mexico and the United States.

But after Mexico’s devastating currency devaluation two years ago, retailers and textile producers circled the wagons, calling on the government to staunch “the flood of ropa usada,” as Jorge Rangel, a spokesman for the Mexican Chamber of Commerce, put it.

“It’s no different from trafficking in stolen goods,” said Rangel, whose group plans to release a study next year on the used-clothing trade’s impact. “Our national industries, which pay taxes and wages and utilities, shouldn’t have to compete with freelance merchants who don’t pay any of that.”

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The head of customs at the Matamoros border-crossing, Claudio Manuel Gonzalez Quezada, said his agents are responding to those concerns by keeping a closer eye out for garment smugglers. If they intercept a shipment, officials can deny entry, confiscate merchandise or impose criminal sanctions.

But in business circles on both sides of the Rio Grande, skeptics contend that vigilance is sometimes indistinguishable from la mordida--the legendary bribes that grease the wheels of Mexican bureaucracy. With the Christmas season in full swing, and thousands of expatriates returning home for the holidays, Mexican authorities are “shaking down a lot of people at the border,” according to Hector Farias, a customs broker in Lardeo.

Nobody knows that ritual better than Enrique Landaverde, a 28-year-old merchant from the ranchos of San Luis Potosi.

As he sifted through mountains of hand-me-downs in the cluster of shops on Brownsville’s East Adams Street, he explained that his mission was to buy $300 in used apparel and deliver it to his mother’s secondhand store back home.

“Everything can be arranged,” he said, measuring an imaginary wad of cash with his forefinger and thumb.

To improve his odds, he will hire a pasador--a runner, like the gray-haired man with the droopy right eye--to smuggle his haul across the international bridge. That will cost about $25.

Then he will load the packages on a bus, an eight-hour journey south. Along the way, he will have to clear four checkpoints--”two of them official, two of them irregular”--at which he expects authorities to hit him up for cash. That will cost about $150.

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“It really varies, but that’s what I budget for,” said Landaverde, who makes the trip several times a month. “This whole thing isn’t about contraband. It’s about extortion.”

Brownsville, of course, isn’t the only U.S. border town feeding Mexico’s appetite for affordable, if often dowdy, garb. But it is home to Jim Johnson, the 68-year-old Texas entrepreneur known affectionately as the “King of Used Clothes.”

A former tire salesman, he bought his first ropa usada shop here in 1964 on a $400 investment. Today, he oversees a multimillion-dollar empire that employs 350 people and processes more than 50 tons of used clothing from around the U.S. every day.

“We call it recycling,” said Johnson, who buys trailer-loads of Goodwill and Salvation Army rejects for pennies a pound.

He made his fortune by devising a sophisticated sorting and grading system that allows him to tailor secondhand goods to the needs of a worldwide market: vintage clothes for Italy and Japan; cool cotton outfits for Nigeria and Kenya; polyester togs for Pakistan and India; rags for oil field crews in the Gulf of Mexico and the Persian Gulf.

The clothing is then divided into even more specialized categories--silk blouses, tweed jackets, plastic raincoats, nylon jogging suits, khaki pants, corduroy shirts, women’s swimsuits--that are compressed into half-ton bales and stacked high in a 170,000-square-foot warehouse.

“You’d think we’d run out of clothes,” said Johnson, surveying his wares from behind a surgical dust mask. “But we never do.”

Although his business is truly global, Johnson still runs six retail shops in downtown Brownsville, supplying them with dozens of bales of mixed clothing, all bundled tight with metal straps.

To open a bale--and be the first to comb for whatever gems may lie inside--usually requires a $300 down payment. That’s how Landaverde did it, pulling out the best items--about one-third of a $1,000 bale--and tossing the rest into an expanding pile on the floor.

For merchants without those kind of resources, like 60-year-old Antonia Garcia, the real work begins at the bottom of that mound.

She is what used-clothing aficionados refer to, somewhat derisively, as a chivero--rummaging for scraps like a goat. Slumped against a glacier of clothes that threatens to engulf her, she sifts for hours on end, pausing only to mop her brow or rub her swelling knees. On a good day, she will fill up one shopping bag with garments--”whatever’s not ripped or dirty,” she said.

Then she will pick up her cane and walk back toward Mexico, hoping for the best.