The State of Chihuahua Is Building a 20-Story Tower in Ciudad Juarez to Surveil 13 Cities–and Texas Will Also Be Watching

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EFF Special Advisor Paul Tepper and EFF intern Michael Rubio contributed research to this report.

Chihuahua state officials and a notorious Mexican security contractor broke ground last summer on the Torre Centinela (Sentinel Tower), an ominous, 20-story high-rise in downtown Ciudad Juarez that will serve as the central node of a new AI-enhanced surveillance regime. With tentacles reaching into 13 Mexican cities and a data pipeline that will channel intelligence all the way to Austin, Texas, the monstrous project will be unlike anything seen before along the U.S.-Mexico border.

And that’s saying a lot, considering the last 30-plus years of surging technology on the U.S side of the border. 

The Torre Centinela will stand in a former parking lot next to the city’s famous bullring, a mere half-mile south of where migrants and asylum seekers have camped and protested at the Paso del Norte International Bridge leading to El Paso. But its reach goes much further: the Torre Centinela is just one piece of the Plataforma Centinela (Sentinel Platform), an aggressive new technology strategy developed by Chihuahua’s Secretaria de Seguridad Pública Estatal (Secretary of State Public Security or SSPE) in collaboration with the company Seguritech.

With its sprawling infrastructure, the Plataforma Centinela will create an atmosphere of surveillance and data-streams blanketing the entire region. The plan calls for nearly every cutting-edge technology system marketed at law enforcement: 10,000 surveillance cameras, face recognition, automated license plate recognition, real-time crime analytics, a fleet of mobile surveillance vehicles, drone teams and counter-drone teams, and more.

If the project comes together as advertised in the Avengers-style trailer that SSPE released to influence public opinion, law enforcement personnel on site will be surrounded by wall-to-wall

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