Here’s a story from TexasObserver.org about the Torre Centinela, that surveillance tower going up in downtown Ciudad Juarez that will soon be looking over our shoulders.
Once complete, this looming tower, known as Torre Centinela (the Sentinel Tower), will serve as the police command center for Chihuahua—Mexico’s most sprawling state and home to 3.8 million residents, including those of Ciudad Juárez, El Paso’s larger and more violent sister city. Construction is around 75 percent complete as of early July, according to Chihuahua’s Secretariat of Public Safety, the state police agency.
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But the imposing tower is just the most visible component of a much broader $200-million project. “It’s like seeing the eye of Sauron hanging over your city,” said Dave Maass, director of investigations at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a civil liberties advocacy group, referencing the fictional villain from The Lord of the Rings whose surveillance powers emanated from his own dark tower.
Eventually, the 370-foot-tall Torre Centinela will be the nucleus of Chihuahua’s burgeoning, AI-powered state surveillance system called Plataforma Centinela, a project introduced in 2021 by Governor María “Maru” Eugenia Campos Galván, a firebrand of Mexico’s opposition party, the conservative National Action Party (PAN). Once fully operational, the Centinela system will include almost 10,000 cameras, nearly 2,000 license plate readers, and 13 police command subcenters statewide, able to deploy facial-recognition technology and conduct cross comparisons with a biometrics database of those deemed to be criminals, according to presentations and interviews with Chihuahuan officials.
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But Chihuahua’s massive investment in surveillance tech is cause for civil liberties concerns on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border, Maass and other watchdogs said. Specifically, he worries information could be gathered in ways that violate U.S. laws and passed on to U.S. law enforcement. That type of massive data sharing in a binational community like El Paso-Juárez could impinge on the rights of many border crossers. “Is it going to result in people having their devices searched more often? Is it going to result in people being rejected from crossing the border because of something that the Centinela surveillance system picked up?” he asked.
Check out the story at TexasObserver.org for the rest of the news, and with pictures by talented local photographer Omar Ornelas.
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