I follow public money and investigate public procurement (now with AI)

Public records belong to us, and they hold up our democracies.

Today I lead Abrimos.info, where we build public data infrastructure to keep an eye on power: over 32 million contracts from 54 countries and over 130 million transparency records preserved. When Mexico abolished INAI and its transparency watchdogs, I co-founded Amnesia, born during my Mozilla Fellowship, to back up their archives before they went dark. Orwell needed an entire ministry to imagine erasure. Today it only takes not renewing a domain.

I also use artificial intelligence to read what no newsroom could ever get through, and I investigate the AI that governments in the region buy, often without public debate, as in State Algorithms. Almost none of it is secret: it sits in procurement portals. What is missing is not access, it is structure.

I came to this through journalism. I started in Terrassa and Barcelona: reporter and photographer at La Torre del Palau, director of the show Terrassa Solidària on Canal Terrassa and, in 2011, co-founder of Data'n'Press, one of the first data journalism studios in Spain. I worked on the data desk of El Periódico de Catalunya and in 2014 reported from Kenya for El Mundo. I came of age in the techno-optimism of Spain's 15M movement, when freedom seemed one click away. The same technologies that promised to free us ended up concentrating power in very few hands. That left me with a conviction: technology that serves democracy is not a pretty website, it is heavy infrastructure, open and hard to switch off.

In Mexico I led the data, journalism and technology team at PODER from 2014 to 2021. I co-founded Méxicoleaks, the country's first secure leaking platform, and led TodosLosContratos.mx, winner of the 2020 Sigma Award. I founded the Latin American Journalists Network for Transparency and Anti-Corruption and published in The Washington Post and Proceso. I then ran operations at Datasketch, a Colombian company, from Mexico City with frequent trips to Bogotá. I have advised Mexico's National Transparency Institute (INAI), Mexico City's Digital Agency for Public Innovation, the Municipality of Puebla and the Open Government Partnership. From 2019 to 2024 I sat on the Citizen Council of the Mexican Radio Institute (IMER), which I chaired from November 2023.

My bet: opening data should not stop at legal compliance. It should become real capacity for citizens to hold power to account. If governments make it harder to ask, we have to ask better.

Where I am headingI want artificial intelligence to help hold power to account. To help us read millions of contracts, cross-check archives no newsroom can get through and ask better questions of those who govern. At the same time, I want to keep that same technology from capturing our minds and our democracies, as already happened with the platforms that promised to set us free. The answer is the same as with archives: public, open and auditable infrastructure, with people making the decisions and a vault that never has a single key.