The eyes of Chihuahua

From the Texas Observer:

Editor’s Note: This story was produced in partnership with the Pulitzer Center’s AI Accountability Network and Under the Volcano, an annual binational writing residency in Tepoztlán, Morelos.

For three years, Luis Mendoza has periodically gone to the same construction site in downtown Ciudad Juárez to check on the progress of a 20-story tower that will serve as the home base of a vast state surveillance project.

On one visit in early May, Mendoza, a 37-year-old activist with the Juárez group El Frente Político Ciudadano para la Defensa de los Derechos Humanos (Citizens’ Political Front in Defense of Human Rights), was confronted by a company representative overseeing the project and a police officer and asked to leave.

But during our trip there on a blistering June afternoon, we encountered only a stray dog and a handful of construction workers, most of whom sat or leaned against a dusty chain-link fence. One greeted Mendoza warmly with a smile.

Mendoza and other activists in his group have been keeping watch over the watchtower. They’re motivated not only by concerns over privacy related to the expanding police program, but also by worries about a lack of transparency in government expenses and technical specifications for the state project. In terms of publicly available information, “You don’t have a lot to work with,” Mendoza said.

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.

Mendoza and his fellow human rights activists oppose the tower as a waste of resources that could better be used for investing in youth, violence prevention, and local education initiatives. “Why is the tower downtown? Why even build a tower?” Mendoza said. He criticized state government officials for failing to consult locals. “It was a unilateral decision.”

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.

The Centinela project is running behind schedule: Seguritech, the business tasked with building the tower, was recently fined close to a million pesos, or around $50,000, for delays, according to Norte Digital. Even so, more than 90 percent of Centinela’s pan-and-tilt cameras, nearly 75 percent of its license plate readers, and nearly 85 percent of its fixed-spot cameras are already in place.

The Campos Galván administration has promised that the new system will improve public safety, describing it as “the guardian of Chihuahua” in promotional materials. In one such video, the governor states: “From here, the state will be observed, and the most important decisions will be taken to strengthen the security and peace of Chihuahuans in all the regions of our beloved state.”

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.

Groundwork has been laid for Centinela’s information to be utilized in the United States, though Observer records requests turned up few concrete examples of its use by Texas law enforcement so far. (In Chihuahua, most information related to Centinela is considered confidential by the state until 2030, according to responses to the Observer’s requests under Mexico’s transparency laws.)

But Chihuahua state leaders have certainly offered to let Texas in on the surveillance action—and the Lone Star State’s governor has leapt at the chance.

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Amid high levels of unauthorized border crossings in April 2022, Governor Greg Abbott directed state troopers to conduct aggressive, secondary inspections of commercial vehicles crossing from Mexico into Texas—even though federal Customs and Border Protection agents already check trucks. That slowed commercial crossings into Texas for about a week, created a bottleneck at ports of entry, hurt profit margins for businesses importing goods, and uncovered no smuggled drugs or migrants, as reported by the Texas Tribune.

In response to the ramped-up inspections, the governors of four northern Mexican states that border Texas—Chihuahua, Coahuila, Nuevo Léon, and Tamaulipas—signed security agreements, apparently to appease Abbott, though three of those states reportedly had similar public safety protocols already in place.

Chihuahua’s agreement stood out. In a memorandum provided to Abbott’s office and obtained by the Observer, Campos Galván explained her approach. “We must build a new border model,” she wrote, boasting of the plans for Centinela. “We are willing to share that information with Texas State authorities and commercial partners directly.”

At a press conference that April when the two governors signed their deal, Abbott called Campos Galván’s strategy “the best border security plan that I’ve seen from any governor from Mexico.”

During the public relations campaign for Centinela in 2022, Chihuahua’s leaders kept their next-door neighbor’s interests in mind. In a pitch to Abbott, Chihuahuan officials painted Centinela as a guarantor of border security. Campos Galván made a series of promises to Abbott: a migrant biometrics database, an anti-drone system, and permanent tracking of cross-border shipments—all powered and supposedly improved by artificial intelligence.

Her proposal for cross-border, state-to-state cooperation was unusual since international police collaboration is more often brokered at the federal level. In one presentation, Campos Galván’s office offered: “The state of Texas could have eyes in this side of the border.”

Tony Payan, director of the Center for the U.S. and Mexico at Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy, said Campos Galván’s offer to grant Texas such access to a state surveillance system would be significant if her administration follows through, in part because such collaboration is usually federal and also because of the proposed degree of access.

“If we assume that the State of Chihuahua is inviting law enforcement agencies to have a more formalized, well-established, permanent embeddedness in the system, I think that would be unique,” Payan said. “We’ll see if the Mexican government—the central Mexican government—interferes with that because they may not like it.”

Payan said the surveillance apparatus should especially alarm those on the Mexican side, given the history of involvement between state authorities and cartels. “There seems to be an utter degree of incompetence by the Mexican government at just about all levels to prevent their law enforcement agencies, their surveillance agencies, the information that is shared, from being used by organized criminals or handed over to organized criminals,” he said. Those kinds of leaks, he said, enable evasion of law enforcement and an even “greater degree of impunity.”

The potential cross-border exchange of data involving facial recognition for immigration control purposes is also “really worrying,” according to Santiago Narváez, a researcher at Red en Defensa de los Derechos Digitales (Network in Defense of Digital Rights), a Mexican advocacy organization focused on data privacy and surveillance.

Chihuahua is not the first Mexican border state with a surveillance system: Coahuila has its own network of cameras, including a few hundred with facial-recognition capabilities. During the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020, facial-recognition tech in Coahuila helped U.S. authorities track down a couple suspected in an arson case who had fled to Mexico.

But the collaboration proposed between Chihuahua and Texas has a different context. The original pitch was related to immigration control, Narváez pointed out. He fears that Centinela’s facial-recognition capabilities could be used to, perhaps erroneously, target migrants who passed through Chihuahua to the United States and “detain them, deport them in an authoritarian manner, [and] terminate their regular status in the United States in an arbitrary way.”

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After first visiting the Torre Centinela on foot, I returned to the site in a sleek black helicopter with two Chihuahua state police officers and a spokesperson. From more than 300 feet up, the cops said that on previous trips they’d spotted cartel scouts perched on hilltops in plastic chairs, partially hidden and surrounded by strategically placed boulders. The sparse, shrubby vegetation outside Juárez could hardly shield a lookout spot.

Once we flew closer to the border, I saw cars in long lines on highways waiting to cross in either direction. The rust-colored U.S. border wall that divides the two cities zigzagged across a mountainous stretch of desert, where sandy soil and rock glistened. An occasional chunk of the wall was tagged with graffiti, sometimes legible even from the air. One message on the Mexican side, spray-painted in white letters, read, “Fuck Donald Trump”—and beside it, “y su pinche muro.”

Looming above the rest of downtown Juárez was the tower, which these same cops will soon use to surveil their state.

While Centinela’s camera network is only partly operational, Mexican police analysts already have “had quite a few successful cases,” Javier Martinez, the spokesperson for Chihuahua’s Secretariat of Public Safety, told me a few hours before that helicopter ride. “Let’s suppose we’re searching for someone with an orange or pink backpack, and the cameras and the programs are searching for this type of person—they’ll notify you. Same with vehicles.”

But community activists and academics in Juárez and El Paso remain skeptical that a costly mass-surveillance system will meaningfully improve Chihuahua’s entrenched crime problems, which are largely linked to the international drug trade and cartel-related violence.

“The whole idea of [Plataforma Centinela] is preposterous, because it won’t be used the way it’s supposed to,” said Howard Campbell, an anthropologist at the University of Texas at El Paso who has done decades of fieldwork in Juárez. “That’s never been the case in terms of the Mexican government,” he said, predicting the project will fail because of rampant corruption and infiltration by organized crime.

Catalina Castillo, another Juárez human rights activist who works with Mendoza, said she, too, has little faith that more surveillance could bring meaningful public safety changes, especially given that some high-profile femicides in busy urban areas remain unsolved, despite the city’s growing camera network.

Castillo, who is also part of a local feminist collective, pointed to a particularly high-profile case: In May, Isabel Nieto Romero, a 30-year-old public school teacher, disappeared in a commercial area near the busy Bridge of the Americas border crossing in Juárez. Six days later, her body was found in an empty lot near train tracks in the southern part of the city. She’d apparently survived several days after her abduction prior to being asphyxiated, according to a postmortem medical analysis released by state prosecutors, yet authorities had not publicly identified her assailant or a suspect, despite cameras being present in those same areas. In part because of unsolved crimes like Nieto Romero’s murder, “There is constant criticism” of Chihuahua’s Centinela project, Castillo said.

In response to questions from the Observer in July, a Chihuahua state police spokesperson said authorities identified and arrested a suspect in Nieto Romero’s murder at the end of May, in part using license plate readers and surveillance video from the Centinela system.

Castillo and Mendoza’s organization first denounced the Centinela project in 2022. In the face of criticism from this coalition and other community groups, Gilberto Loya, the state’s public safety secretary, called activists “criminals.” Group members demanded an apology at a press conference but never received one.

Activists express other concerns aside from inefficacy, privacy, and infiltration by organized crime; they’re also worried about Centinela’s widespread use of artificial intelligence. The state’s plans include large-scale use of AI technologies, including facial recognition and the ability to recognize a car by make, model, and distinctive characteristics via automated license plate readers. (Authorities in Texas have used automatic license plate readers for years; under Abbott’s multibillion-dollar border security project, Operation Lone Star, the state expanded its use of plate readers and other AI-powered surveillance technologies.)

Many technical aspects of the Centinela system remain undisclosed, since information related to the platform has been withheld as confidential by Chihuahua. Nevertheless, in May, Loya—the public safety secretary—won a prize for the state’s use of artificial intelligence in Centinela at the 2025 World Police Summit, a global gathering that attracted more than 10,000 law enforcement personnel to Dubai.

In a June interview in his Chihuahua office, Loya told the Observer that Centinela can help predict crime using machine learning, a subset of artificial intelligence in which a system learns and adapts using statistical models to infer patterns and perform tasks without explicit instructions from the user. “It can generate a prediction for you about what could end up happening,” Loya said. “It takes what historical [data] it has about homicides, time, manner, and place … and it tells you, ‘The risk could be here.’”

Loya explained that, like other algorithm-powered tools, Centinela will train itself over time. “As the platform is used more, it’s fed more—it has more machine learning,” he said, emphasizing that any use of AI in the platform will be “supervised” by humans and that decisions about how to do police work will be made by officers.

Still, some experts warn that predictive policing based on algorithmic recommendations fails to address the root causes of crime and can contribute to discriminatory policing practices. In a recent report calling for the practice to be banned in the United Kingdom, Patrick Williams, a lecturer at Manchester Metropolitan University who studies the overpolicing of gang members, criticized the technology. “Rather than ‘predictive’ policing, it’s simply, ‘predictable’ policing. [It] will always drive against those who are already marginalised.”

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More than three years ago, Campos Galván first offered Texas “eyes in this side of the border.” But it’s unclear what degree of access Texas authorities actually have to the Centinela system’s data so far.

In the June interview, Loya told the Observer that Texas officials will not have direct access or a way to log in: “They’ll have access through us,” he said. Martinez, the spokesperson for Chihuahua’s Secretariat of Public Safety, separately said that a formal plan is in the works to bring Texas state police, along with federal law enforcement, into the physical tower itself to work with local authorities on intelligence-sharing and joint police work. “They can come and work here when they’re at [the tower], on the platform, so they can come, set up a security roundtable, and from here they can extract some data,” he said.

The Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS) did not respond to emailed questions for this story.

In response to a public information request, DPS withheld records related to Centinela. Employees at the open records office confirmed that DPS possesses intelligence reports mentioning the system, but the agency argued to the attorney general that the records should be exempt from disclosure because they consist of “threat assessments shared between various state and federal law enforcement partners” that would “provide insights into what tools are available, the potential effectiveness of these tools, and the parameters of the searches performed using these tools.” The attorney general’s office agreed.

Adan Covos, the police chief of Presidio—a Texas community of 3,000 bordering the Chihuahuan city of Ojinaga near Big Bend National Park—said he knew that Mexican authorities had placed cameras near the local port of entry, but he’d never heard of the overall Centinela system. “I have no idea about this,” he told the Observer by phone. El Paso County Sheriff Oscar Ugarte said he hadn’t heard of it either.

In response to a records request, the City of El Paso Police Department provided one incident report that mentions Centinela—specifically its license plate reader database—involving the recovery of a stolen SUV.

On January 29, Maria Williams was about to leave for work when she realized her 2023 Toyota Highlander was missing. Williams, a career counselor at Bowie High School in South El Paso, where many students commute across the border to school, had left her computer in the SUV. Because of the proximity of her house to a major thoroughfare that provides a straight shot to the international bridge, Williams worried a thief might have already taken the vehicle to Mexico.

After hearing from her, El Paso police notified their counterparts in Chihuahua, who tried to track the vehicle using Centinela’s license plate reader database and the Highlander’s built-in GPS system, according to a police report. Two days later, Toyota located the Highlander using the car’s internal GPS system, then Chihuahua state police searched for it via surveillance cameras, apprehended the driver, and towed the vehicle to a police auction lot.

Williams, afraid to pick it up herself because of the history of entanglement between organized crime and law enforcement, requested that police return the SUV to her in El Paso. At one point, her insurance company went to Juárez and took photos, but for two months, the Highlander remained in the lot. When the vehicle was finally returned, Williams noticed several things amiss. Her SUV was caked in dirt. Somebody had attempted to remove the radio screen, messed with dials on the mirrors, and taken the floor mats, her laptop, and the battery.

She now wonders if her Highlander might have been used to commit crimes. Police in Chihuahua never told her where all they tracked her SUV, she said. A spokesperson for Chihuahua’s Secretariat of Public Safety said the agency did not know details concerning the car and outlined how to file a complaint if needed.

Part of Williams wishes the police hadn’t found the vehicle at all. “Now it’s like a dirty car to me,” Williams said. “Like somebody took something personal and just disconnected me.”