What Atalaya is — and what it isn't.
What it is
An automated knowledge graph of corruption cases in Colombia, built from the Colombian traditional press. Atalaya does not author the claims — it indexes, deduplicates, cross-confronts and visualizes them. Every node and every relationship points back to the news articles it was derived from.
The primary metric is deliberate: Amount under indictment · COP $X.X T. Visually forceful, 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 state-data visualizer (no SECOP, no Procuraduría, no judicial bulletins as primary sources).
- Not a paid SaaS.
- Not a content producer — every public claim cites the outlet that formulated 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 news-wire copy deduplication (so a single Colprensa story republished by three outlets does not count as three sources).
Automatic publication with attribution
Atalaya does not require a human reviewer for every node. It is an aggregator, not an editor. The reviewer IS the cross-source confrontation. When only one source exists, the claim ships with a Single source badge so readers see the lower confidence.
Override by judicial status
The most recent judicial ruling (acquittal, conviction, dismissal) overrides the case status, regardless of how many outlets covered it. The courts have the final word; the press has the first draft.
Semestral re-scrape
Every active case is re-scraped once per semester (~6 months) against the latest news to capture acquittals, new charges and dismissals.
Why it exists
The motivation is a cultural problem: the lack of public memory of recent history. The track records of candidates and officials are forgotten between electoral cycles — the same mistakes repeat, the same actors return.
Living in Japan re-framed 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 narrowly-scoped response: a tool for the Colombian public to recognize the people connected to corruption cases, build awareness of 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.