Responsibility-free ports encourage financial exercise, as items are imported and infrequently reexported with out the same old taxes and charges. The duty-free port was established in Iquique in 1975 to assist generate jobs and enhance an ailing native economic system. Chile grew to become one of many world’s largest importers of used garments, which remodeled Iquique. As quick trend exploded, so did imports.
“The zona franca [free zone] was a real revolution” for the town’s residents, says Bernardo Guerrero, a sociologist at Fundación Crear, a company that research Iquique’s historical past and tradition. “They out of the blue had entry to issues they may by no means have imagined, like their very own automobile.” Attire started washing out and in of Iquique like waves as world fashions modified. Guerrero recollects a time within the Nineteen Nineties when virtually everyone within the metropolis wore the identical fashion of puffer jacket after giant shipments of them arrived. It was an indication of what was to return.
About 2,000 companies of every type now function within the duty-free zone; greater than half are international. Hand-painted model logos adorn warehouse doorways, and stacks of used vehicles—one other main import—tower over the slender streets. The free zone has additionally developed right into a sorting depot for textile waste.
“In essence, we’re simply recycling the world’s garments,” says Mehmet Yildiz, who arrived in Chile from his native Turkey 20 years in the past and operates a clothes import enterprise named Dilara. Yildiz brings in garments from the US and Europe, most of them from thrift shops akin to Goodwill. As soon as the clothes attain Iquique, employees separate them into 4 classes, starting from premium to poor high quality. Yildiz then exports one of the best to the Dominican Republic, Panama, Asia, Africa—and even again to the U.S. for resale.
Manuela Medina, 70, is credited with beginning the use clothes commerce in Alto Hospicio, a hardscrabble metropolis of 130,000 residents, virtually 20 years in the past after shopping for a bale of used garments. She lives at this time in a wood and field home close to the rising accumulation of dumped garments.