Surveillance and Mexico City’s Informal Economy

As of January 2021, myriad cities around the world have video surveillance systems operating under all levels of government administration. This technological feature of megalopoli and smart cities varies considerably in terms of sophistication, scope, and everyday use. Video surveillance systems may use Artificial Intelligence (AI) applications, such as machine vision, to carry out tasks such as facial recognition and movement patterns detection. Some countries — China being the archetypical instance — have deployed large-scale camera networks aided by AI and controlled by a central authority, while in other countries video surveillance networks may be the result of public-private partnerships with local governments’ police departments and emergency services.

In Latin America, the largest economies’ major cities have large video surveillance networks operating with AI and cutting-edge infrastructure. Since 2009, Mexico City has had a video surveillance system operated by local authorities which now consists of 15,000 cameras. Recently, Mexico City’s authorities have announced the improvement of the system’s capabilities through the installation of advanced cameras and the enhancement of storage, administration, and footage. The city of Buenos Aires has gone on a similar path; today, the Urban Surveillance Center (CMU) operates a network consisting of 7,300 cameras. The Argentinian city also uses a facial recognition system designed to locate around 40,000 fugitives.

In almost every democratic context, these technological advancements give rise to multiple concerns pertaining to privacy, accountability, and transparency. However, in Latin American countries, democratic governance coalesces with context-related conditions that bring forward a different sort of challenges related to public management. As in many less-than-developed countries, public policy implementation in Latin American tends to confront a steeper path when it comes to enforcing the rules that shape the intended behavior of both bureaucrats and ordinary citizens. Specifically, increased surveillance may undermine informal rules and practices that allow citizens and officials to bypass transaction costs derived from formal rules or procedures.

The variation in enforcement in many areas of public policy in Latin America seems to obey a complex set of informal institutions and practices that go beyond the commonplace explanations in Public Administration literature of resource dependence, institutional weakness, and principal/agent dilemmas. As Alisha Holland notes, some elected officials in less-than-developed countries simply choose not to enforce some laws or policies, which can sometimes happen even without concurrent factors such as a feeble legal framework or an insolvent treasury.

At first glance, this behavior may sound counterintuitive; however, as Holland explains, non-enforcement brings as many benefits for impoverished and unattended constituents as for the politicians. To put it succinctly: “The state’s toleration of illegal activities such as squatting and street vending distributes considerable resources to the poor” (Brinks, Levitsky, and Murillo 2020, 3). This way of governing by means of foregoing instead of enforcing, which Holland refers to as an “informal welfare state” (Holland 2017, 237), is what she calls forbearance in the context of distributive policies in less-than-developed countries.

Intuitively, for this behavior to take place, it would be necessary for public officials to have some discretion, since not all constituencies and stakeholders will consider non-enforcement a desirable way of conducting public affairs. The decision to forbear or waive should remain under a veil of ambiguity, which requires at least some level of dimness in the public management record. However, as stated above, technological upgrades like video surveillance do not come only with enhanced real-time performance, but also with augmented storage, access, and information management capabilities. Under a common democratic legal framework, the stored information may be considered part of the public records, which combined with an increased ease of access, would inevitably erode the discretional margins of public officials.

Mexico City’s informal economy serves as a good example to illustrate this friction. Ambulantes — street vendors that operate without any formal governmental permit, license, or fiscal scheme — have been a relevant electoral force since the city underwent a political reform that introduced separation of powers and periodic elections back in 1993. Despite being disenfranchised from many public services, these highly organized groups of merchants have effectively lobbied the forbearance of public officials to occupy public space by supporting them throughout their political campaigns. This relationship is of such relevance that the Mexico City’s downtown ambulantes’ leader, Diana Sánchez Barrios, was appointed as Secretary of Political Operation of the local Institutional Revolution Party (PRI) committee in January 2021.

This appointment comes just three months after Claudia Sheinbaum, incumbent head of government of Mexico City and a member of MORENA political party, announced a plan to relocate ambulantes. This announcement also comes three months after the local authorities announced the addition of 20,000 cameras to the city’s video surveillance system, which comes with a video storage increase from seven to 30 days of footage. This feature will preclude elected officials and political candidates from exploiting the surveillance gaps to collude with ambulantes in exchange for electoral support, or at least will make it more difficult due to the availability of extended footage that can be used to scrutinize the presence of such groups in the streets.

An optimistic view of these changes assumes that transparency and accountability practices will improve in such places as Mexico City, where the introduction of better surveillance technology is a relevant part of the government’s agenda. However, these enhanced surveillance capabilities are happening concurrently, for example, with the renewed resolution from the president of Mexico to dismantle federal government’s autonomous agencies, including the transparency watchdog, the National Institute for Transparency, Access to Information and Personal Information Protection (INAI). Although the aforementioned policies and agencies belong to different governmental levels, in Latin America forbearance practices cut across the boundaries of political parties, governments and public policy arenas. This scenario suggests that the relationship between transparency accountability, and forbearance will be tense in the years to come.

Forbearance practices will be confronted with improved means of oversight of the transactions that occur between bureaucrats and ordinary citizens, allowing stakeholders and constituents to appraise the extent to which law is enforced. While law enforcement will not automatically improve as a result, enhanced surveillance will increase the pressure on governments to secure compliance and enforcement. If increased enforcement and compliance follow as result of this pressure, governments will need to stretch the reach and funding of official programs that are now complemented by mechanisms such as informal welfare networks.

Governments failing to both increase compliance and improve policies would result in a serious legitimacy deficit. But if enforcement is strengthened but impoverished constituents are not given redistributive alternatives, major disenfranchisement will also erode the tenets of democratic governance. For now, it seems that once surveillance is enhanced, governments will have to choose between a deep reengineering of their managerial performance or a socially onerous surrender that will result in a democratic regression.

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Antonio Villalpando-Acuña is a Public Policy PhD student at Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económicas (CIDE) in Mexico City.

Brinks, Daniel M., Steven Levitsky, and María Victoria Murillo. 2020. “The Political Origins of Institutional Weakness.” In The Politics of Institutional Weakness in Latin America, edited by Daniel M. Brinks, Steven Levitsky, and María Victoria Murillo, 1st ed., 1–40. Nueva York: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108776608.001.

Holland, Alisha C. 2017. “Forbearance as Redistribution: The Politics of Informal Welfare in Latin America.” Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316795613.