I don't even know where to start here--this will come as a suprise for many people here.
I was living in Bonao, circa 1993-2004, i was playing poker at a family member's house when someone came over to look at some cars he was selling. we stopped the poker game so that he could go outisde and show the cars he just imported; every one sitting around the poker table immediately got up and ran to the bathroom, because, as many people already know, when playing poker, no one wants to leave the poker table to go and pee, even it means death by drowning. As a result, we all sit around suffering for hours..sometimes days before our bladders explode and we're carried off to ake room for someone other idiot that wants to punish himself.
My cousin--who's not really a cousin--we just call each other cousin because we're all related somehow through other distant dominican cousins--was outside showing a round 5 or 6 cars that he had just picked up in the Santo Domingo port the day before. he imports around 9 or 10 cars a month, sometimes more.
anyway, i was doing nothing so, after peeing for what seemed like 30 minutes--and nearly passing out from the ecstasy of bladder relief--i walked over and looked at the cars. he had mini-vans, Honda CRV's, toyotas, etc. i've seen so many cars pass through his house that, i've seen nearly every make and model over 20 years. anyway, I was looking at a beautiful, nearly new Honda mini-van. it was maybe a year old. it was beautiful and smelled great and it didn't have a dent anywhere. in fact, there was still plastic on the seats. it looked as if it had never never been sat in. it had few miles, and did i mention...it was new looking?
there were a couple guys looking at the engine bay. you could have eaten off the engine. it was that clean! it was easy to see this was hardly ever driven. the stickers on the radiator and water hoses were as clear and new as they could get. did i mention the engine looked new? Well, it looked new becuase it turned out that it was in fact new. however, after some further inspection i noticed something odd. i didn't bring it up right there because, honestly, i kind of forgot about it becuase i was still swimming in my bladder relief and feelings of ecstacy.
Then, sometime during the poker game, i turned asked him, "How much you asking for the Honda mini-van?" he thought about it and said, "well the blue book value is around $30,000. But in santo domingo, the same van would cost you "new" $48,000. However, i'm only asking $18,000." I thought to myself, man, thats a very good deal for a fully loaded mini-van, especially one that was only a year old! but then i remembered what i noticed while i was looking inside the engine bay, and said, "Oh yeah, i almost forgot, when i was looking in the engine bay, although i could see that the engine was clearly new, i noticed that the bolts on top of the struts, and the bolts surrounding the engine bay were all very rusty. why is that? Everyone at the poker table laughed. I laughed with them! I had no idea why? And then he told me something as if it was such common knowledge that i must be an idiot not to know about it..."All those cars out there, Frank, are from the Katrina hurricane that rolled through New Orleans. they were all flooded. We purchase all our cars from car dealers auctions (You must have a dealers license to both enter or purchase a vehicle at a "dealer" auction.) Then we clean them up and then send him to different central and south american countries. Although they all had salvage titles when we bought them, once the vehicles enter another country (any central or south american country), a new Matricula (Title) is issued and the salvage title is replaced."
Then he proceeded to explained why this is neccessary. "Think about this for a second," he said, "how could I purchase a nearly new mini van for $30,000, then pay to have it transported to a shipping port, then prepped (draining of all fluids in the vehicle) put inside a container, pay the aduana taxes for the new country, pay the "first time registration" taxes (for the license plate) for the new country, pay for the handling and transporting to different dealerships, and then make any kind of profit that would justify the financial investment and logistics involved? after everything is paid for, the profit margin would be so slim that the only way to make it worthwhile is to buy the vehicle (at a dealer's auction) with either high mileage (which gets rolled back) or with a salvage title (which gets replaced with a new title)."
Frank