Roatan Muni is Setting Up a “Smart City” Monitoring Infrastructure

The new surveillance system is designed so that an individual can request a recording through an office at the municipal building. In cases of traffic accidents or robberies, a party involved can request video from the location and time the incident occurred. “It has to follow the legal chain of custody,” said Ing. Castillo.

The CCTV cameras are monitored from Monitoring Center and Municipal Police building located 50 meters behind the Roatan municipal building. The building is named after Joseph Solomon, a longtime Roatan Municipal Police chief. “We don’t know what we are going to see on these cameras,” said Solomon. “The idea is to respond when somebody is in need of help. If a woman has a broken-down car and needs to change a tire, we will come out and assist.”

Solomon doesn’t foresee any unintended consequences besides people trying to destroy the cameras. “People will feel more secure moving around, knowing that ‘Big Daddy’ is watching, you know,” said Solomon. Yet, as in all large surveillance projects, there are always unintended consequences.

One unintended consequence that could likely occur is that people may become more hesitant to assist a driver in distress, preferring for the municipality to take action. Another issue is the loss of a sense of privacy — something that is impossible to assign a monetary value to. “The negative is that the population feels their privacy is being violated,” said Johnny Suazo, project manager for Innova Solutions, which installed the cameras and trained camera operators.

The plan is for the CCTV system to be supervised 24/7 by six operators and two supervisors working in three shifts. Around 25 people will be employed in the monitoring center and likely more municipal police will be hired. Currently, the CCTV video is stored for 30 days, but that duration of storage can be changed. The system has been set up to store information from 400 cameras, with the potential to add up to 350 more.
The Roatan Municipality plans to fund the monitoring system through fines collected from residents. Infractions would include parking cars in the bike lane, littering, leaving trash by the dump outside of allowed hours, and pouring concrete on the road—all punishable by monetary fines. “At some point, we are going to be able to recognize the cars, identify the owners and send the bills online,” said Ing. Castillo.

Population feels their privacy is being violated.

The exact cost to run this operation is not known, but Paya Magazine estimates that with 25 salaried employees, the monthly cost will easily surpass $25,000. In addition, maintenance and technical fees could easily double that number, so it will probably cost over $500,000 a year to maintain this surveillance system.

This monthly municipal cost must come from local taxes or fines. Either way, island residents will have to pay for the project. In a growing economy and with a growing tax base, this type of project is one thing, but once the economy slows down—like it did during the 2008–09 financial crisis, the 2009–10 Honduran presidential coup, and again during the 2020–21 COVID-19 lockdowns—a cost of half a million dollars a year during an economic downturn will be a heavy burden to bear.

For the island it is no small-budget item, as the project was 100% funded by Roatan Municipality taxpayers. The idea is for it to become part of a national security and monitoring system. “If, by mandate, the central government someday wants to implement general 911 systems throughout the country, they could integrate this investment into what they already operate,” said Ing. Castillo.

While on Roatan so far around 90 million Lempiras had already been spent on the surveillance program, the Honduran central government spent 500 million Lempiras on the mainland. San Pedro Sula, Tegucigalpa, Santa Rosa, Tela and Choluteca already have such monitoring centers.

Recording video is just the beginning in a process that will turn Roatan municipalities’ public and semi-public spaces into surveillance zones. Of the 400 cameras, 370 are equipped with microphones, which can be activated. “This project will never end, as it is a smart city,” said Ing. Suazo. Several aspects of the surveillance system have not been set up, but can be completed fairly easily. According to Ing. Suazo, the CCTV cameras can also be configured to recognize the face of a person previously identified as a “person of interest” and scan other cameras across the entire surveillance system for that individual.

The high-resolution cameras are equipped with 40x zoom that can capture detail from a couple of hundred meters away. The cameras feature infrared capability for night operation. They can also activate a speaker function to alert someone visible on camera that they are being recorded and alert them that they may be committing an infraction.

Two of the cameras are located in front of Booty Bar, a popular tourist hangout in West End. “We think the cameras are a great idea. We all feel safer,” said Cherry Sorto, who has been the general manager of Booty Bar for 10 years. “Crime is growing on the island. We have our own cameras—many of them—and we have never been robbed.”

The camera system is just the first step in much bigger surveillance plans for the island. “Smart city” is a code term for mass surveillance programs, and its implementation depends on a never-ending stream of data, data storage, and data analysis. The idea of a ‘smart city’ is to collect data from cameras, electric meters, smartphones and smart appliances, and use that data to manage people.

This surveillance beast’s thirst will never be quenched, as there can always be more data to mine and analyze. If we want to be like the Dominican Republic or Cancun, we need to implement these types of systems,” said Ing. Castillo. “We are trying to catch up to them.”

“Good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will find a way around the laws,” wrote Plato, a Greek philosopher, 2,400 years ago. In 2025, Roatan municipality installed 400 CCTV cameras in an effort to identify the so-called “bad people.” These cameras are likely to become part of a much larger surveillance infrastructure. At the cost of losing personal privacy and spending millions of dollars in taxes, the island is on its way to building a 21st-century panopticon prison.

I guarantee there will be numerous unintended negative consequences of installing extensive CCTV cameras on the island. Here is a short list of possibilities: an increase in our taxes, a loss of our privacy, a shift from self-reliance to reliance on government assistance, the future selling of CCTV and other data to bad actors, the creation of a false sense of security, and the unleashing of a never-ending need for more surveillance.

Here is one more reason: Once a serious crime is committed by the Honduran national police —and sadly, that does happen— and it is recorded on a CCTV system, the municipality will be placed under pressure from the police and likely become a party to the cover-up.

The high-trust society that Roatan once was has gradually been replaced by technology and a false sense of trust in government institutions. Put simply, the island’s social capital is being replaced by technocracy. Once that capital is lost, it is extremely difficult to regain.

Security has two aspects: true security and the perception of security. While claiming to provide safety for citizens, security systems often serve to maintain state control and enforce conformity among the population. The carrot is not the goal, but an excuse to impose a surveillance system for the benefit of those in control. While we might argue about who those controllers are, we can all agree—the controllers are not us.

Systems often serve to maintain state control.

In other words Roatanians might be suffering from a case of collective illusion. They may be going along with the idea of creating a “smart city” that could erode the precious freedoms they may not realize can be taken away. The unfortunate truth is that by surrendering your privacy in hopes of gaining security, you could end up with neither freedom nor security. Freedom comes with risk. If you want 100% security, you would need to check yourself into a maximum-security prison with 24/7 camera surveillance—and you’d better hope your cellmate isn’t Jeffrey Epstein.

So let’s not make the mistake other already have. There are places all over the world that have already become surveillance zones ridden with nightmares. They are not in any way safer—in reality, they are unsafe for citizens. The state monitors those spaces and decides which actions it wants to prosecute. Not wearing masks in public, possibly praying near an abortion clinic, jaywalking —you name it— are all offenses that have recently been punished in Great Britain.

Great Britain has arrested tens-of-thousands of individuals for posting memes and criticizing government policies. Every day, around 30 people in Britain are arrested, tried and sent to jail for media posts deemed “offensive,” not even “hateful,” as well as for silent prayers near abortion clinics. The number of people arrested for simply making statements has grown to 12,000 a year.

This persecution of its own population is only possible thanks to media monitoring by thousands of state agencies and 6 million CCTV cameras—21 million surveillance cameras in total—monitoring 70 million British residents. Many of those cameras have one-way or two-way audio capability.

Freedom for individuals in China is even more restricted. China’s Skynet control system—a combination of the social credit system and a state-operated CCTV facial recognition network — has created an open-air prison. The 1.3 billion Chinese citizens and 70 million British citizens can no longer make that claim without the risk of being visited by police or having their lives affected. Let what took place in those so-called smart cities serve as a warning.

Roatan should be and can remain free from government aspirations to constantly surveil us and treat us as poetical criminals. The irony is that this island has a long history of people who chose to come here choosing freedom over security. Whether it was Roatan-based pirates or Puritan colony settlers, they came here in search of freedom, not security.

Also the Garifuna were brought here because they fought to keep their freedom in two Carib Wars they fought against the British on Saint Vincent. Settlers from the Cayman Islands who came here in the 1830s and 1840s were also seeking freedom and new opportunities. While security is a very important part of life on Roatan, freedom has always been more important.

Living next to the sea and living from its bounty, islanders have been accustomed to assume risk as a part of their lives. Many Roatanians died doing what they loved and supporting the families they loved. Living on a remote island in the path of hurricanes came with an understood risk — fishing on commercial boats, moving cargo, toiling in the bush.

Let’s not make the mistake others already have.

When I moved here in the early 2000s, the island was simple and still homogeneous. The vast majority of people were born on the island and knew one another, at least casually. The innocence that Roatan once had —maybe just 20 years ago— is gone.

Gone are the days when islanders were related by two degrees of separation: If you didn’t know someone, you knew someone who did. That connection brought a sense of security, trust and comfort. Today, the island is based on three degrees of separation and is a much less comforting place.

The island’s CCTV program is a large, complex and expensive and Roatan has an unfortunate history of poor government decisions. To mention just three of these white elephants: the abandoned Coxen Hole desalination plant; the José Santos Guardiola garbage dump, inaugurated by President Mel Zelaya in 2009 and still not operational; and the Roatan public hospital building, which was constructed for $3 million and will require $52 million to finish.

While those expensive failures don’t mean the municipality should stop trying, they should encourage skepticism toward new ideas. “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me,” the saying goes.

There are alternatives to CCTV government run surveillance. There are already plenty of private security camera systems that are used efficiently when needed. The other sad truth is that our computers, smartphones, and even smart devices like internet-connected cameras, refrigerators, and smart electric meters are already tools of surveillance used against us. These are employed by security agencies in the US, Israel and other bad actors. Let’s not allow the government to take control of our lives more than it has already.