Mexico Watches Surveillance Boom Blur Safety, Secrecy, and the Border

From Ciudad Juárez to Texas, Mexico’s security apparatus is becoming smarter, larger, and more private at the same time. The rise of Seguritech and Plataforma Centinela reveals how anti-crime technology now doubles as a border policy, a business model, and a democratic test.

A Tower Over the Border

Inside a command center in Ciudad Juárez, a police officer slid her fingers across a digital map of Chihuahua and watched colored bubbles light up. One bubble meant a camera. Click it, and the live image appears. Another analyst zoomed in on a feed from the women’s unit of a state prison. The camera lingered on a group of women sitting around a table, their playing cards visible in full detail. It is the kind of scene that stays with you because it says so much in so little time. Mexico’s surveillance future is no longer theoretical. It is already watching. As José Olivares reported for Rest of World, the promise here is precision, speed, and control. The unease is that those same qualities can easily outrun public oversight.

For decades, Juárez has been one of the cities most associated with fear in the Mexican imagination, a place shaped by gang wars, cartel struggles, and the endless reinvention of violence along the border. So it is not hard to understand why officials there would want something bigger, sharper, and more total than the old methods. Plataforma Centinela, the system running through Chihuahua’s command structure, brings together thousands of cameras, license plate readers, drones, helicopters, panic buttons, and other intelligence tools. Gilberto Loya Chávez, Chihuahua’s public security chief, told Rest of World that the artificial intelligence built into the system allows officials to spot crime hotspots, track suspects quickly, and dispatch officers faster. “It accelerates our investigations,” he said.

That is the official argument, and it is not trivial. Security officials pointed to cases in which the system helped arrest an alleged high-ranking trafficker wanted by the FBI and identify a suspect who had hurled Molotov cocktails inside a movie theater. The technology, they insisted, was working. Soon it will be housed inside an even more imposing symbol, Torre Centinela, a 20-floor tower rising over downtown Juárez, visible from El Paso. Loya said he wanted it there because Juárez is the city with the most reported crime in the state, and because the goal was to install the command center where the problem exists. That line sounds practical. It is also revealing. The state no longer wants to police from a distance. It wants to sit above the city, literally and digitally, at the point where danger is believed to live.

But Juárez is not only a crime story. It is also a border story. And this is where Mexico’s surveillance expansion becomes something larger than domestic policing. Chihuahua’s agreement with Texas gives that state access to large amounts of surveillance data collected on the Mexican side. Officials said they also share certain information with U.S. agencies, including Customs and Border Protection, the FBI, the Drug Enforcement Administration, the ATF, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The agreement with Texas was described by the Chihuahua governor at the time in blunt terms. It meant Texas would have eyes on this side of the border. That is not a metaphor. It is a governing philosophy. The line between national security and cross-border data exchange is thinning fast.

Civil liberties groups have warned that the implications reach well beyond chasing drug smugglers or violent suspects. Local activists and privacy advocates worry that everyday people will be tracked without any clear proof that gang violence will fall, and that the Chihuahua-Texas arrangement could be used not only against traffickers and kidnappers but against migrants, too. In a region where mobility itself has become criminalized by policy, that fear is not abstract. Surveillance does not arrive with a single political purpose attached to it forever. It arrives as infrastructure. Then, different states and different agencies decide what else it can do.

The Company Behind the Screens

The corporate engine behind this system is Grupo Seguritech, a company that, as Rest of World and Olivares lay out, has quietly grown from a small alarm seller in Mexico City into one of the largest surveillance contractors in the region. Over three decades, it evolved into a web of at least 31 companies operating under the Seguritech umbrella or registered as affiliated entities abroad. Since 2012, that network has been awarded at least 63 government surveillance contracts in Mexico worth more than 21.8 billion pesos. The company says it has constructed or managed more than 188 command centers throughout Mexico and is active in 26 of the country’s 32 states.

There is something distinctly Mexican about that rise. The company did not conquer a clean, transparent consumer market. It learned to dominate the relationships-driven government sector in a country transformed by the drug war launched in 2006, when police and military forces began investing heavily in surveillance technology as an antidote to organized crime. Since then, hundreds of command centers have been built across Mexico, connecting local, regional, and federal law enforcement agencies and pulling intelligence gathering into the same nervous system as public emergency response. In Chihuahua alone, 13 regional command centers are feeding into the central hub in Juárez. Police also draw on live feeds from private security cameras, which one researcher described to Rest of World as an “electronic eye.” That phrase lingers because it captures the system’s logic perfectly. The state no longer sees only through its own devices. It sees through a growing public-private mesh.

Seguritech’s own pitch is almost patriotic. Ariel Zeev Picker Schatz, the company’s founder and CEO, once described it on television as “Mexican, 100% Mexican.” That matters because this is not simply a story of foreign technology flooding a weak state. Mexico is now the second-largest security technology market in Latin America, and Seguritech has become one of the country’s most ambitious homegrown players. It has expanded into Colombia and Brazil, set up entities in the United States, and, according to company statements and public records cited by Rest of World, is actively pushing further into South America and the U.S. market. In that sense, Mexico is not just consuming surveillance. It is exporting it.

That is a profound shift. Latin America is usually imagined as a place where advanced security infrastructure is imported from the United States, Europe, or China. Here, a Mexican company is building a sprawling, cross-border operation and marketing itself as ready for the international stage. The political meaning of that should not be missed. Mexico’s surveillance industry is becoming one of its most consequential and least publicly debated technological sectors.

When Security Outruns Accountability

And yet the more powerful the system becomes, the harder it seems to pin down. Much of the information around Torre Centinela is classified. Some Mexican states and federal agencies refused to release records about Seguritech contracts, arguing that disclosure could threaten national security. Mexico does not have a centralized database for government contracts, which makes it difficult to compare the company’s footprint against competitors or even understand what many agencies are paying. Karina Nohemi Martínez Meza, a researcher cited by Rest of World, said the public is often unable to review the cost of the technology clearly, down to something as basic as how much is being spent per camera. Ana Gaitán, a human rights lawyer, argued that identifying suppliers and the way they commercialize these tools is essential for accountability and any future attempt to hold them responsible.

That accountability question becomes even sharper once the broader Mexican record enters the room. The country’s expanding surveillance apparatus has already been implicated in past abuses, including the disappearance of 43 students in 2014, when police monitored the students and then allegedly handed them over to criminal groups. Mexico was also the first government to purchase Pegasus spyware, later used against journalists and human rights defenders, according to multiple investigations cited in the report. Santiago Narváez of R3D told Rest of World that systems like these do not seem to have much impact on reducing crime or improving investigations, while having a significant impact on privacy. The skepticism gains force in a country where homicide data are contested and where, according to México Evalua, disappearances rose by 213% between 2015 and 2025. A state can become more watchful and still fail to become more trustworthy.

Then there are the questions around Seguritech’s own contracting history. Public records and news reports cited by Rest of World show scrutiny around subsidiaries in Tamaulipas and Michoacán. One customs contract was terminated for “excessive costs.” In Guanajuato, an investigation was sought after reports linked a former governor’s home in Texas to a former Seguritech executive, a matter President Claudia Sheinbaum said needed to be cleared up because, if proven, it would be corruption. Seguritech has denied wrongdoing, said auditors found no impropriety, and insisted it has complied 100% with its contractual responsibilities and faced no lawsuits or criminal sanctions. Even so, the pattern is telling. The faster the surveillance state grows, the more public trust depends on scrutiny that often remains partial, delayed, or classified.

What Mexico is building in Juárez is not just a tower, not just a command center, not just a border tool. It is a model. One in which the language of emergency, the prestige of technology, and the business of security all reinforce one another. There may be genuine success stories inside that model. The report includes them. A missing older man was located in less than 20 minutes on the U.S. side. Suspects tracked by drones after a shoot-out. Officers praised the system because it helped them catch men they believed were exploiting migrants. But the harder question is the one Mexico cannot afford to dodge. When the screens get bigger, the databases deeper, and the companies richer, who is making sure the country is becoming safer rather than simply more visible to power?

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