The government of Mexico City has eyes in the sky. He has used them to monitor social protests and mass events, to search for missing persons, to do cartographic mapping, plan mobility works, evaluate damage caused by rains, carry out remote environmental inspection and even to document an electoral campaign, even though that was not the purpose of your purchase.
It is a fleet of 30 drones with a value of 29 million 981 thousand 883.43 pesos, as he could learn Forbes Mexico based on public data and requests for information. Even with the benefit represented by the use of this equipment, the floating eyes of the government have had chiaroscuro: overpriced purchases, lack of flight due to not having trained personnel, lack of flight logs, personal use.
Secretary of the Environment | 4 |
Secretariat of Citizen Security | 3 |
Auxiliary Police | 3 |
Attorney General’s Office | two |
Secretariat for Comprehensive Risk Management and Civil Protection | two |
Heroic Fire Department | two |
Mayor Miguel Hidalgo | 6 |
Xochimilco Mayor’s Office | 3 |
Gustavo A. Madero | two |
Tláhuac | two |
Cuajimalpa | one |
Twenty-eight of the 30 units are from the Chinese brand DJI, the firm that displaced the US GoPro and 3D Robotics from the market and that in December was included in the commercial blacklist by the United States government derived from the drone war it sustains. the North American country against the Asian giant. The other two teams, which belong to the Ministry of the Environment, are brand senseFly.
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On November 15, 2018, a few days after the government of Claudia Sheinbaum began, the then Secretariat of Public Security (SSP) paid 20 million pesos for three DJI brand drones, Matrice 200 model, to Grupo Leobe SA de CV, a company founded in 2009 in Ciudad Obregón, Sonora, by Leonel Aguirre De la O and Beatriz Adriana Vázquez Orrantia, dedicated to the sale of uniforms and tactical equipment.
Forbes Mexico He consulted a couple of drone distribution companies that confirmed that the purchase was made with a surcharge of at least three times higher than the real value of the equipment. The SSP paid 6.6 million pesos for each drone, when, according to the experts consulted, a maximum price would not exceed two million pesos with software, training and other components included.
The corporate purpose with which Grupo Leobe was born was: “manufacture and distribution, commercialization of all kinds of clothing and footwear; the purchase and sale of all kinds of clothing and footwear, both national and foreign; the purchase and sale in the national market of the raw material and articles necessary and indispensable for the fulfillment of the corporate purpose ”, according to its articles of incorporation.
In 2010, it modified its corporate purpose, which, among other things, included: purchase, sale, import, export and distribution of all kinds of personal safety equipment, antimontin equipment, ballistic equipment, medical equipment, surgical equipment, specialized systems in medicine, equipment for computing and electronics, vehicles, trucks and motorcycles and radio communication equipment.
In 2016 it added to the corporate purpose: preparation of civil engineering projects, provision of professional services related to business administration, accounting, financial, real estate, construction (…) advice, preparation of economic, financial, accounting studies, among others. However, no reference is made to unmanned aerial systems.
The contract was signed by the then General Director of Material Resources of the SSP, Luis Armando Carranza Camarena, and two dispatchers: the General Directorate of Police Intelligence Analysis, Reyes Sánchez Mendoza and the Head of the Departmental Unit of Purchase of Specialized Goods, Miguel Ángel Navarrete Silva.
Until the closing of this note, the Secretariat of Citizen Security (SSC) had not responded to a request for transparency in which access to the drone flight log is requested, so until now it is not possible to know the use that is being used. has hit the drones.
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No training to use them
In November 2017, the Auxiliary Police (PA) bought three Phantom 4 Pro drones, DJI brand, from the company Coordinación de Servicios en Informática SA de CV The corporation justified the purchase arguing that these teams complement its work in the control of social protests, in which, he said, “the presence of much more radical groups that have made physical aggression their way of operating has increased.”
On paper, the PA says that “unmanned aerial systems could be used for aerial surveillance with police functions, be used in emergency situations, rescue or any event related to public safety.” However, the reality is different: the drones, in which 149,999.97 pesos were invested, “have not been used since there is no specialist staff for their use and management.”
Arturo Cruz, geographer and CEO of Terrasat, a company that provides surveying, photogrammetry and mapping services with unmanned aerial systems for sectors such as agriculture, mining, construction and the environment, considers that the fact that the PA has not used its drones since 2017 due to the lack of trained personnel speaks of the great distance that the city and the country must travel to normalize the use of this technology.
“They are very easy to use, it has happened to me in companies that I have sold drones that when I train employees they tell me that they are afraid to use them because if they throw it away they will charge them, as it is a technology with a lot of risk, many times people don’t want to use it. It does not matter that you bring the best impulse, the best idea, it is very difficult for someone from a (government) agency to want to commit to that responsibility (of flying drones) ”, he comments in an interview with Forbes Mexico.
He assures that before moving to a renewal or expansion of the drone fleet, that also, the government of Mexico City should bet on the technical training of its personnel to have certified drone operators. “With that the drone becomes a consumable, because the equipment becomes obsolete very quickly and new models come out, the important thing is that the staff have the knowledge about this type of technology.”
In April 2019, it was reported that the budget cut due to the federal government’s austerity policy reached drone operators from the Attorney General’s Office (FGR). Of a team of 25 operators trained in Israel to learn how to fly the unit’s unmanned aerial systems, 12 were laid off.
It was identified that the mayor’s office Gustavo A. Madero does not have a flight log either, although not precisely because it has not used the two unmanned aerial equipment that it bought in 2019 and 2020, respectively. In response to a request for information, the demarcation indicated “we do not use flight logs,” despite the fact that the equipment is used to capture images that are later used to disseminate government actions.
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Drones for electoral campaign
On December 13, 2017, the Heroic Fire Department purchased two DJI drones, Inspire model, with a thermal imaging camera, which would serve to support emergency missions. However, the equipment was used to document the electoral campaign of the then leader of the Firefighters Union, Ismael Figueroa, who in 2018 aspired to a local deputation for the PRD.
In an interview with Forbes Mexico The Operational Director of the Heroic Fire Department, Edgar Rosas, affirms without hesitation: the purchase of the equipment took place “in a corrupt administration.” The teams were never registered with the General Directorate of Civil Aeronautics. The current administration recovered them from the Syndicate and assigned them to the Directorate of the Academy to give them the correct use.
It was up to two years after its purchase, in 2019, that one of the drones (the other was found broken and remains so) began to be used for rescue missions of lost people, at the request of the Attorney General’s Office of the City from Mexico. Thus, Chief Rosas and a cell of firefighters have participated in operations in the wooded area of Parres, and in the Ciénega Chica, south of the capital.
They have also flown the drone to monitor social demonstrations, such as the one on March 8. The objective, he says, is to detect fire risk points from the air, so that the firefighting cells that participate in a preventive manner in the marches can act more quickly and efficiently.
Chief Rosas admits that so far only he and two other elements of the Fire Department have adequate training to fly drones, which is why it is hoped that more personnel can be trained through the Directorate of the Academy. He even points out that the objective is to generate a specialized team dedicated to the flight of unmanned aircraft, since they already do so in Brazil, the United States or China.
But for that, he says, in addition to training, it is necessary to buy new equipment and with the technical capacities for the use of Firefighters, since those that were acquired have limited functions for emergency care, in addition to the fact that the lack of batteries makes the Flight time is limited to 10 minutes and not 20, as it should be.
There are drones in China, he says, that have the ability to support hoses and aid in fire fighting. There are teams in Brazil and the United States with the ability to search for people trapped in collapsed structures, mapping structural fires, detecting fire points. We must go there, but training must first be expanded, he reaffirms.
Through requests for information, the Secretariat for Comprehensive Risk Management and Civil Protection reported that it has used its equipment for emergency care and cartographic updating, and the Tláhuac mayor’s office reported uses such as topographic surveys, flights for planning mobility works and evaluation of damage caused by rain.
* This note was originally published on March 29, 2021.
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