What Atalaya is — and what it isn't.
What it is
An automated knowledge graph of corruption cases in Colombia, built from the traditional Colombian press. Atalaya does not write the claims — it indexes them, deduplicates them, cross-checks them across outlets and visualises them. Every node and every relation points back to the press articles it derives from.
The headline metric is deliberate: Resources under indictment · COP $X.X T. Visually unmistakable and legally precise. Never "stolen money" — that would be an editorial claim Atalaya cannot make.
What it is NOT
- Not a fact-checker.
- Not a prosecutor.
- Not a visualiser of State data (no SECOP, no Procuraduría, no court bulletins as primary source).
- Not a paid SaaS.
- Not a content producer — every public claim cites the outlet that made it.
- Not partisan. Corruption is systemic; framing it as the property of one party would invalidate the project.
Precision mechanism
Cross-source confrontation
A claim is published when two or more distinct outlets agree on (people + institution + status), with deduplication of wire copies (so a single Colprensa story republished by three outlets doesn't count as three sources).
Automatic publication with attribution
Atalaya doesn't require a human reviewer per node. It is an aggregator, not an editor. The reviewer is the confrontation between sources. If only one source exists, the claim is published with a Single source badge so the reader sees the lower confidence.
Overwrite by judicial status
The most recent judicial outcome (acquittal, conviction, archive) overrides the case status regardless of how many outlets covered it. Justice has the last word; the press has the first draft.
Semi-annual re-scrape
Every active case is reviewed roughly every six months against the latest news to capture acquittals, new charges and archives.
Legal & brand isolation
Atalaya runs on its own infrastructure, separate from B1G Digital. Reasons:
- Brand: B1G is a software studio; Atalaya is a public-interest tool. Bleeding between them dilutes both.
- Legal: If Atalaya faces a defamation suit, the firewall protects the commercial business. A separate legal entity is deferred until traffic justifies it.
- Operational: Independent rate limits, availability and secrets.
Why it exists
The motivation is a cultural problem: the lack of public memory about recent history. The records of candidates and officials are forgotten between electoral cycles — the same mistakes repeat, the same actors return.
Living in Japan reframed the perspective: in Japanese society, collective memory (historical, civic, institutional) is treated as a social asset. It lets a community avoid repeating mistakes, identify those responsible for past harm, and make better decisions over time. Colombia, by contrast, operates with amnesia.
Atalaya is the bounded answer: a tool for the Colombian public to recognise the people connected to corruption cases, build awareness across recent periods, and understand that corruption is a systemic network, deeply embedded in how the country operates — to the point that society has come to accept significant parts of it as normal.
Anchor decisions
- D-01 · Built as a portfolio piece, not a commercial product.
- D-02 · Renamed from "Corruption Wire" to "Atalaya".
- D-06 · Data source = Colombian press. NO SECOP. NO Procuraduría.
- D-07 · Own domain & infrastructure, brand isolated.
- D-08 · Cross-source confrontation replaces the human reviewer. Automatic publication with attribution. Semi-annual re-scrape. Single-source badge. Overwrite by judicial status.
- D-09 · Canonical stack: Neon + Pinecone + Next.js + Vercel.
Current status
Backend Phase 1 complete (FastAPI + Neon + Alembic + tested confrontation rules). Frontend MVP (this site) delivered April 29, 2026 for the Web Programming class at Eikei University. Public launch pending external legal review and the definitive outlet inventory.