Obtaining the Safe Return Permit and Driving To Laredo Colombia Crossing

By Norm and Peg Wirkler

There are a lot of questions in regard to the rules, new and old, about the Residente Permanente visa and foreign plated cars so I thought I would pass on our experiences with both. Early this year my wife’s and my FM3s were in the 4th renewal and when we went to renew them we learned we were eligible for Residente Permanente and after a bit of research and attending several of the seminars we decided to do it. The primary reason for us was we never have to do it again! We had two Colorado plated cars in Mexico and we knew that we would have to do something with both of them as we weren’t permitted to drive foreign plated cars with our Permanente visas. We have nationalized and have Mexican plates on our 2008 Jeep Liberty and decided to drive our 2004 Dodge Grand Caravan back to Colorado. The Jeep Liberty is much easier drive and park and is much less susceptible to damage from pot holes and topes here in Mexico.

We decided not to take any chances driving the Caravan to the border and on to Colorado with the Colorado plates, so we decided to get the Returno Seguro permit at the SAT office on Francisco Via. After talking to several people who had received the permit, I decided to do it myself, I speak some Spanish, but don’t consider myself fluent. We assembled all the originals and three (3) copies which were:

• Title of the car
• Import certificate
• Registration certificate of the car
• Passports of both of us since we were both on the title
• Permanente Visas of both of us
• Drivers license, I used my Colorado license

I also prepared a short one page letter in Spanish with the list of the six items above and ended with a short paragraph saying that everything I submitted was true and that the car had no criminal, civil or administrative claims. I made up a letter head with our names and Jalisco address. We were told that if we used the PV SAT office we must have a Jalisco address.

On Monday morning September 30, I arrived at the SAT office just after 8:30 AM, I went into the SAT office and the young man at the desk spoke no English and I told him I was there for a Returno Seguro. He brought me the form to fill out and I told him I already had prepared a letter and three copies of the items we needed. He looked very surprised but looked at the letter and copies and took his form back and then he asked me to wait for 20 minutes.

At about 9 am he pointed to the office by the front door and there was a lady and a young man in the office and several minutes later an older man showed up. I gave them the 3 copies of the letter and the copies of the six items. The older man looked very skeptical and looked carefully at the letter and the copies, then he asked me for the originals which I had and then he sat down started hand writing a list, I thought he was preparing a list of things I needed. There was a lot of talk between the three, all in very rapid Spanish, with numerous chuckles. None of which I could really understand. After about a half hour the young man came to the office window (all that time I was just standing there waiting) and told me to come back at 11 am the next day. I asked in Spanish if everything was OK and he said Si. During the whole time there, I did not hear one word of English! The handwritten list the man wrote was a very detailed receipt for each of the items.

The next day my wife and I went back to SAT and got there right at 11 am, I came up to the counter and one person who was there the day before nodded at me but said nothing. For five or ten minutes he and another man were going through a very large stack of papers, I presumed they were looking for my Returno Seguro. Then the other man got on the phone and a bit later came to me and said in very loud Spanish, “cinco minutos”. I presume he thought if he shouted I might understand “five minutes” better. My wife had been waiting in the car and I went out to have her come in as it didn’t seem to be going well.

My wife came in and stood at the counter with me for a some time and I suggested that she go sit in the waiting room as I thought this was going to take a while, I stood at the counter for a bit longer and asked (in Spanish) what the problem was, the only thing I could really grasp from the answer was someone was in a meeting. I told them I was going to the waiting room with my wife.

Probably fifteen minutes later, the guy who did the paper work the day before came and got me and showed me where to sign two documents that he gave to me and another document that he kept showing I received the two documents. He then said “returno” as he pointed to the two documents and turned around and went back to the office. I said “muchas gracias” and got my wife from the waiting room and left. It seemed like forever, as I thought all along they were going to tell me something was wrong and to come back much later, but it only took a bit less than an hour. The Returno Seguro I received gave us five days to get to the border. The days are working days, weekend days don’t count, so we had a week to get to the border.

We left the next day Wednesday, October 2, 2013. We drove that day to Ajijic, Jalisco on Lake Chapala to visit friends; we lived there for a number of years before we moved to Nuevo Vallarta. We stayed there for two nights and left on Friday morning to head to the border. We drove from Ajijic to Matahuala and stayed overnight there at Las Palmas, a place we had stayed several times in the past. Saturday morning we got up and started for the border. We arrived at Laredo, the Columbia crossing, in the early afternoon. We stopped at the little booth on the way in and returned our Auto Import papers which were five years old. The car was still in the computer and he gave us a receipt for our long expired import certificate and asked us to remove the windshield sticker. It didn’t take more than five (5) minutes, We didn’t have to use the Returno Suguro and the exit at Columbia was very easy, the wait on the US side was a bit longer. Even though we didn’t need the Returno Seguro, we didn’t have to worry about being stopped on the long trip to the border, so we’re glad we had it.

There was some road construction, it seems like there always is, but the roads were good. We didn’t keep track of the tolls or the distances on this trip. The tolls are expensive, but we feel the toll roads are well worth the cost. We have a TomTom portable GPS and found it to be very accurate. We also used it on our way into Mexico through Nogales with the Jeep in the fall of 2012.For those of you who haven’t driven in Mexico a lot and have concerns of what you would do if you experienced a problem, I thought I would pass this along. The only “snag” in the trip was just after Sayulita and San Pancho, we had been on the road for less than an hour from Nuevo Vallarta, one of our rear brakes was getting hot. We weren’t aware of the problem, but a kind and concerned Mexican from the pickup behind us came to the car window while we were stopped for some road construction and said he could smell our hot brake. We knew we couldn’t drive much further with the problem, so after a couple of miles we stopped at a Pemex and I asked where we could find a mechanic and they directed us to a road side place about 100 yards away, The “shop” was at the road side and I asked if he could help us. The mechanic pulled the wheel off, looked at it and said come back in an hour so we left the car and waited at the Happy Go at the Pemex. In an hour the mechanic had it fixed and charged us $250 pesos! That’s less than $20 US! If this had happened in the USA, I would have called AAA and they would have taken us to service area and I’m sure we would have spent the better part of the day (or more) and the bill for fixing the locked up brake would have been many times more than the $250 pesos.