As Ecuador battles the wave of violence narco-terrorist organizations have unleashed on the South American country, China is exploiting the situation, further insinuating itself and expanding into the country’s security industry.
Not only is China behind the construction of Ecuador’s first maximum-security mega-prison, known as the El Encuentro prison, in Santa Elena province, it also won the bidding for the second mega prison, initially scheduled to be erected in Archidona, Napo province, and moved to Salinas, in Santa Elena in December, following protests from the community. Puentes y Calzadas Infraestructuras SL, a subsidiary of Chinese state-owned China Road and Bridge Corporation (CRBC), a company that has one of the largest projects counts worldwide under China’s Belt and Road Initiative, is set to deliver the El Encuentro prison by September.
CRBC, its sister company China Harbour Engineering Company Ltd. (CHEC), and their parent company China Communications Construction Company (CCCC), have long been accused of delivering shoddy work, construction delays, winning tenders illegally, human rights violations, and environmental degradation, among many other issues.
“The main concern is the threat to our sovereignty […],” Paúl Mena Mena, an Ecuadorian investigative journalist and member of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), told Diálogo. Among the fears is that Beijing could steal sensitive data about the country’s security.
“In addition, Ecuador is going through a process of potential privatization of prison centers. The fact that China, which is an authoritarian state, is involved may increase the possibility that the prisons will be conditioned to schemes or models that do not respect human rights or that do not provide guarantees of rehabilitation,” Ecuadorian political scientist Bernardo Gortaire Morejón told Diálogo.
Red flags for both mega-prisons have already gone up. Among the issues is that their contracts lack transparency, with very little known about the award process. The work at El Encuentro has also caused controversy due to its environmental impact. To make room for construction, the native forest of Envidia was stripped, despite having been declared a Conservation and Sustainable Use Area by the prefecture of Santa Elena in 2023.
Chinese surveillance project
China has also made a strong entry into the residential and commercial security sector. Chinese companies Hikvision, Dahua, and EZVIZ now dominate the Ecuadorian market. Their equipment and servers not only contain sound and images of millions of Ecuadorian homes, businesses, and government offices, but also biometric information of millions of Ecuadorians.
“It’s a kind of big brother or surveillance system of the People’s Republic of China. Our citizens are victims of a lack of control and guarantees that the use of information and image transmission will be completely respectful of issues such as privacy,” says Morejón. According to the expert, “the data can be used to build models within China for China’s benefit, which can also take advantage of the situation of insecurity that our country is going through.”
Hikvision and Dahua technologies have faced bans and restrictions in several countries worldwide, from the United States to Canada and Europe, for ethical and security reasons. In 2022, the Guayaquil municipality installed 15,000 Hikvision facial recognition cameras at a cost of $29.5 million. In 2019, Quito, the capital, bought 203 cameras, also from Hikvision, to be installed at 47 points around the city.
“In Ecuador there are doubts about the possible violation of citizens’ right to privacy. In addition, there have been complaints about the malfunctioning of this technology,” Mena Mena wrote in the report China in Ecuador, published by Central American think tank Expediente Abierto. “Both projects were justified by the increase in insecurity, but they could become systems of mass surveillance of citizens, without respecting the right to privacy, intimacy, and peaceful association.”
China’s penetration is also advancing in the construction of police stations, not without controversy. The state-owned China EximBank is financing the construction of some 100 Community Police Units for $835 million. However, the participation of the Chinese state-owned company CRBC in the project has been imposed as a condition for the loan. Eximbank was previously implicated in a bribery scandal in relation to the construction of the Coca Codo Sinclair hydroelectric plant in Ecuador.
The cyberthreat
The national surveillance and emergency response system ECU-911, developed by China National Electronics Import & Export Corporation (CEIEC) and Huawei, also uses Chinese software. ECU-911 consists of 16 regional response centers that operate a national network of 4,300 cameras monitored by the Ecuadorian Police, from the Galapagos Islands to the Amazon. The entire system is continuously updated through Chinese products and companies.
Huawei has also grown a lot in cloud services. Its clients include Ecuador’s state-owned telecommunications company, the National Telecommunications Corporation (CNT) and, consequently, several government institutions that use CNT.
According to Mena Mena, Xiamen Meiya Pico Information Co. Ltd., a Chinese company that operates in the surveillance technology sector of the Chinese Communist Pary, has also offered cybersecurity training in Ecuador.
“If a state has penetration into the national security of your state, it is doubtful whether the security system is protecting the interests of Ecuadorians or whether in some way that information, those tools, those methodologies may instead be being used in the interests of a power such as China,” Mena Mena concluded.
