The ugly road to beauty

NUEVO LAREDO, Mexico - The plastic surgeon had just peeled the skin down Lisa's forehead and face when a fly began buzzing over her bloody wounds.

Maybe it was the fly in the hot operating room — and the nurse chasing it with an unmarked bottle of red spray, that revealed the crudeness of the cosmetic surgery clinic. Or maybe it was Lisa's blood-soaked pillow and sheet the next morning, stained from the oozing wounds of multiple surgeries.

Lisa, 51, a twice-divorced mother of three, had looked up Centro de Ginecologia y Obstetricia in this border city after she was rejected for plastic surgery in San Antonio because of a heart condition.

Depressed and anxious
Premature wrinkling from sun damage had left her depressed and anxious. Without a total makeover — facelift, breast implants, tummy tuck and more — she thought men wouldn't give her a second look.

And without the means to pay $20,000 for the work on this side of the border, she followed the pitch from a marketer known as "Dr. Dave" and headed to a clinic across the Rio Grande.

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"When I saw him on TV, I thought, 'There's my answer,'" Lisa said.

Beckoned by the promise of better bodies at a third of the cost in the United States, thousands of patients have crossed the Texas border for trips to plastic surgery clinics that have flourished to serve the growing craze for makeovers.

New clinics boast their services on billboards, newspaper ads and TV commercials. Some are full service and offer American-style standards, with inviting waiting areas and scrubbed surgical suites. Their doctors post medical licenses on the walls and register with Mexico's health ministry.

Many patients come back satisfied with their results. Like walking testimonials in U.S. border towns, they boast larger breasts and flatter stomachs costing less than a down payment on a new car.

"I tell everyone who wants to look better that they should have it done," says Miriam Martinez, a Univision anchorwoman in McAllen who underwent cosmetic surgery in Reynosa.

Darkside of a booming industry
But fancy clinics are the exception, and such testimonials of professional-looking results mask the downside of a booming business that has littered northern Mexico with backward operations run by physicians with questionable credentials.

In more than two months of reporting on both sides of the border, the San Antonio Express-News found a largely unregulated system where patients can enter a dentist's office that also advertises plastic surgery and walk out with a nose job performed by an unlicensed doctor.

In interviews with doctors, patients, government regulators and families, the newspaper found patients left horribly scarred or fighting severe infections from botched surgeries. Because of poor record keeping, weak oversight and a system that discourages lawsuits, the number of injuries or deaths in Mexican clinics is unknown.

Yet U.S. doctors along the border are all too familiar with the problem. So many patients have required reconstruction that some Texas surgeons have begun to specialize in "secondary repair" to undo damage done in Mexico.

Some patients can't be saved. Plastic surgeons in Brownsville say they couldn't help two women who died from gangrene that developed from infections after their surgeries in Matamoros.

In one of the cases, the woman's skin peeled off when emergency room doctors lifted her from one bed to another.

"I have never seen a worse case of gangrene anywhere — not even in Mexico," said Dr. Rafael Arredondo, who was in the emergency room covering a shift when the woman's husband brought her in.

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