Comercio Y Finanzas

“Ecuador and China contract for the creation of the Integrated Security System (ECU 911)”

By Gabriela Katiuska Larrea Castro

As all the countries of the world, Ecuador suffers from insecurity due to the different types of offenses to which each of its citizens are exposed.

ECU 911 is a project that will cover all the districts of the province of our country, counting with a special focus of the Army, regarding to the border control mainly in Tiwintza and Taisha, which are two cantons where the government should strengthen these capacities.

Ecuador opted to make use of the strategic and complementary relationship between our country and China; deepening and thus strengthening the bilateral relationship with the country that we have already mentioned. This is a big benefit to carry the implementation of this new method of public safety since this state-owned company of China will be responsible for the infrastructure of the 14 integrated security systems.

Basically, this mega project is based on the analysis and strategic decision-making in regard to security. By using this system we are obtaining better studies on criminal behavior. Thanks to the good use of these resources that we now have, we may get its incidence and its spatial location because as it states: “Another major function of the ECU-911 is tracking and locating

automatically citizens who place calls from their cell phones” .

To analyze this situation we must mention many contributing factors, such as the installation of peripherals, it means cameras (fixed, dome, HD dome, facial recognition cameras, cameras for roads), community alarm buttons as well as the delivery of communications equipment and PDA, and also installation of GPS in mobile resources that are used by different institutions that dispense resources to meet these incidents, disasters or major emergencies.

As we can realize the main objective of this project is to improve the quality of life of the Ecuadorians, as the government is concerned about the safety of each of its citizens.

The country is also seeking to document the records of all the calls and alerts that they receive every day, for later processing in a statistical analysis that aids to the evaluation of all the institutions that are involved. It should be noted that the institutions involved are the National Police, Red Cross, transit commission and also the army.

One of the aspects that most caught my attention is the rapid advance of this new system and the great acceptance that it has had within the country: "This is a landmark project that has national coverage scheduled to culminate in full in the first half of 2014. The minute amount of progress we have is the 70% in regard to civil works and implementation of the territorial coverage; of almost 80% we have covered 13 provinces and we are just completing two more centers in Porto Viejo and Babahoyo” explained César Navas, national director of ECU-911. Here we can see the percentages

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