Bol-110 'Ciudad Segura AI' — Bolivia's Chinese-Built Facial-Recognition Policing Network

On August 20, 2019, then-President Evo Morales inaugurated Bol-110, an integrated citizen-security command-and-control system built by the Bolivian National Police with support from Chinese state-linked contractors. The system combines CCTV, drones and an AI-driven facial-recognition and license-plate-recognition module linked to Bolivia's criminal records and biometric (AFIS) databases. Its reported cost was $105 million across two phases ($50 million and $55 million), with initial rollout concentrated in La Paz and El Alto.
Independent reporting on the system's scale is inconsistent. One account describes roughly 600 new facial-recognition-capable cameras added to an existing base of more than 2,000 cameras, plus 840 further cameras planned for license-plate verification, alongside 100 camera-equipped patrol vehicles, 5 drones, 60 radio units, 1,900 'safe taxi' units and 2,500 community alarms. A separate 2025 account from a Bolivian police official instead cites a much smaller total of 305 cameras in La Paz and El Alto, of which 26 carry facial recognition and 8 carry plate recognition. This discrepancy has not been resolved in available reporting and is presented here without adjustment.
In April 2026, Bolivian authorities announced a 'phase 3.0' expansion under the name 'Ciudad Segura AI,' extending facial recognition and automated crowd- and vehicle-anomaly detection from La Paz to Santa Cruz and Cochabamba. No independently verified budget or camera count for this expansion phase was found.
At the system's 2019 launch, independent hemispheric-affairs reporting cited Latin American security-policy researchers who warned that the system's data reach — potentially extending to social-media activity, medical records and political affiliations — combined with its Chinese surveillance-model lineage, raised risks of monitoring political dissidents, comparisons that referenced Freedom House's framework for 'digital authoritarianism.'
This practice is included as a documented cautionary case: a large, real, multi-phase national deployment with verifiable cost and launch data, but inconsistent public reporting on scale and no independent evaluation of its public-safety impact or human-rights safeguards.

Read the full analysis: https://dialogo-americas.com/articles/china-exports-citizen-control-model-to-bolivia/