Ecuador. For approximately 18 months, the public company Correos del Ecuador has been in charge of collecting, packing, transporting and sending all the correspondence and parcels that the Ministry of Foreign Affairs sends to Ecuadorian embassies abroad.
The security system implemented by the entity allows to maintain a rigorous control of the official correspondence, which is verified from before being wrapped in special bags resistant to breakage, which are monitored by security cameras all the time, and even record the procedure until their arrival at the planes, where they are shipped to the different countries of destination.
"In this way we ensure that there is no violation of the diplomatic pouch, since we have registered the entire shipping chain," said the director of security of Correos del Ecuador, Galo Pazmiño.
The security measures are not only applied to the diplomatic pouch, but to all the parcels left by people, which has allowed to discover so far this year 119 packages contaminated with alkaloids. In 2014, 204 boxes were detected carrying drugs hidden, he revealed. In addition, 4,589 packages were returned to their respective owners for containing prohibited objects.
The public company has in the collection centers of Quito and Guayaquil with 6 scanners, 4 fixed and 2 mobile, through which objects of prohibited import such as cell phones, weapons or used clothes are detected.
The institution has 17 trucks that collect correspondence in provinces and transport it to distribution centers in Quito and Guayaquil.
The cars are equipped with cameras in the driver's cabin, have GPS to monitor movement on the road and remote-controlled locks that close electronically from a command center and open when they reach the main plants, where they embark on the different flights.
The general manager of Correos, Ricardo Quiroga, explained that criminal groups try in different ways to send drugs through the 14 postal agencies that exist nationwide. All the dependencies of the country have cameras and are monitored in surveillance centers of Quito and #Guayaquil, where 5 officials supervise the movement of people, and when they observe something out of the ordinary or suspect a client, they alert the guards and police.
In addition to this technology, they coordinate with the staff of the Canine Training Center so that the drug detector dogs help discover the packages contaminated with prohibited substances.
