Las Condes: Municipal Cameras, Drone Patrols and Facial Recognition
Gran Santiago has no metropolitan municipality and no metropolitan police force. Policing is national, through Carabineros and the PDI, while each of the 32 comunas funds its own municipal security service from its own budget. Las Condes, which reports the highest security spending of any Chilean municipality, runs one of the largest. Its own site describes more than 3,300 cameras watched around the clock from five municipal security centres; the mayor's December 2025 plan cited more than 4,000, plus a digital ring of 55 gantries carrying 95 plate-reading cameras. Municipal inspectors, trained for months to hold Chilean civil aviation authority (DGAC) certification, began flying two surveillance drones over 15 plazas in April 2017, from 6pm to midnight, under a rule that footage is deleted after 30 days and can be requested or erased on demand. Five residents and the NGO Derechos Digitales challenged the flights as a breach of privacy; on 12 December 2017 the Supreme Court rejected the case, finding the drones fell within the municipality's public-security competence. Derechos Digitales called the ruling wrong and noted that no statute governs municipal drone surveillance. A separate facial-recognition system, bought from IDEMIA in 2019, ran on ten cameras with the PDI matching faces against its own database. The municipality's security pages do not mention it.
A 2023 Universidad Diego Portales survey of Chile's 345 municipalities, to which 261 replied, put Las Condes first in the country both for security spending, at CLP 76,931 million, and for the number of security measures in place, ahead of Quilicura, Puente Alto and Huechuraba, each above CLP 23,000 million (reported by BioBioChile, July 2024). The facial-recognition component has no comparable record: America Transparente, working from municipal documents, reported that Las Condes paid CLP 352 million for the IDEMIA software and that two people were detected in the six months to 28 December 2020. Chile's transparency council (CPLT) publicly warned of very low accuracy at the launch. No independent evaluation of the effect of the comuna's cameras or drones on crime was found.
🎓 Lesson
Santiago cannot buy surveillance as a city because it is not one. What a single comuna's budget approves — drones, a plate-reading ring, a facial-recognition contract — stops at its boundary, and the only outside scrutiny it drew came from a court ruling on five residents' complaint and a transparency watchdog's warning, not from any metropolitan authority.
Evidence📊 Independent
Scale🏘️ District
CostCLP 352M (IDEMIA facial-recognition software)
FundingLas Condes municipal budget
Sources
↗ Municipalidad de Las Condes — Seguridad: VigilanciaFetched OK. Operator page: 'Sistema de mas de 3.300 camaras, con las que se monitorea las 24 horas del dia' and five municipal security centres (Quinchamali, Presidente Errazuriz, San Carlos de Apoquindo, Alexander Fleming, Apoquindo). Verified negative: this page does not mention facial recognition, and gives no breakdown of how many cameras the municipality owns.
↗ Municipalidad de Las Condes — Red Municipal de CamarasFetched OK. Confirms the same 3,300+ figure and 24-hour monitoring. No drones, no facial recognition and no start year for the camera network on this page — the network's start year is not documented in any source found, which is why yearStart follows the 2017 drone programme.
↗ La Tercera — Las Condes inicia vigilancia con drones (23 April 2017)Fetched OK. Supports: two drones, five municipal inspectors, DGAC certification after months of training, 15 plazas, 6pm to midnight, and the retention rule: 'Las grabaciones solo pueden ser guardadas durante 30 dias, luego se borran, y cualquier persona puede solicitar acceso a ellas y pedir que eliminen aquellas en las que esta su imagen.' Note a date conflict left unresolved: this piece dates the start to April 2017, other coverage says March (DGAC support) or May 2017 (a later La Tercera headline); the entry says 2017 and April only where this source says so.
↗ BioBioChile — Corte Suprema ratifico el fallo a favor del uso de drones (12 December 2017)Fetched OK. Supports the date, the parties (five residents plus NGO Derechos Digitales), the unanimous rejection of the recurso de proteccion, and Derechos Digitales director Maria Paz Canales calling the ruling erroneous and noting no legislation governs the technology. The entry makes no claim about whether flights were suspended during proceedings, because sources conflict on that point.
↗ La Tercera — Plan 'Navidad Segura' en Las Condes (6 December 2025)Fetched OK. Strongest recent source: the programme is still running. Supports 'patrullaje aereo a traves de drones', 'mas de 200 inspectores de la Direccion de Seguridad' (a 60% increase), 'mas de 4 mil camaras de seguridad', 'un anillo digital con 55 porticos y 95 camaras lectoras de patentes', and mixed patrols with Carabineros. Its camera count exceeds the municipal website's 3,300; both figures are given rather than reconciled.
↗ GobLab UAI — Plataforma de Algoritmos Publicos: videovigilancia con reconocimiento facial, Las Condes y PDIFetched OK. Independent academic registry (Universidad Adolfo Ibanez). Supports: vendor IDEMIA (Morpho Video Investigator), start 2019, ten real-time cameras, matching against the PDI's own facial database, municipality supplies infrastructure while the PDI operates the software, and that no ethical assessment framework is recorded. Its own last status note is 'in use as of March 2020' — no source found confirms whether the system still operates, which the entry states rather than guesses.
↗ BioBioChile — Estos son los municipios que mas invierten en seguridad en Chile (23 July 2024)Fetched OK. Reports the 2023 Universidad Diego Portales study 'Municipios y seguridad publica ciudadana' (all 345 municipalities surveyed, 261 responded). Carrying sentence: 'Las Condes invirtio $76.931 millones y aplica mas medidas de seguridad en Chile, seguida por Quilicura, Puente Alto y Huechuraba. Todas estas 3, pertenecientes a la region Metropolitana, invirtieron mas de $23 mil millones.' The study ranks absolute spending and does not itself compare rich and poor comunas, so the entry reports the ranking and does not assert a causal inequality claim.
↗ DGAC — Operacion de drones (regulator)Regulator reference for the certification requirement. Tested and did NOT confirm the hypothesis that a regulator grounded municipal drone programmes: no evidence was found of any DGAC restriction on Las Condes. The documented direction is the opposite — the DGAC trained and certified the municipal operators, and its operational-safety director stated publicly that municipalities may fly over populated areas where the regulation's 'public interest' test is met.
📎 Cite this project
1001 Smart Cities (2026). “Las Condes: Municipal Cameras, Drone Patrols and Facial Recognition” — Santiago, Chile. The Smart City Atlas. https://1001smartcities.org/projects/santiago-las-condes-surveillance/ (last verified 2026-07-26). Data: CC BY 4.0.
The underlying data is free to reuse with attribution — see the open data page.
