Colombia · Sala de Crisis
On 10 August 2026 a magnitude 7.4 earthquake with its epicentre in San José del Palmar (Chocó) and a deep rupture caused damage across 14 departments and more than 400 municipalities. Two days later the government declared an economic emergency and announced a package of commitments: utility and rent relief, support for families and shopkeepers, and the Fondo Milagro to channel national and international contributions into reconstruction.
It is worth being precise about what the government committed to and what it did not. There is no official commitment to a public dashboard, open data, citizen oversight or independent audit for the Fondo Milagro; as of today the fund has no founding decree, no administrator, no accounts and no platform. What does exist, by constitutional mandate, is after-the-fact scrutiny: spending under an economic emergency passes through automatic review by the Corte Constitucional, political control by Congress, and the jurisdiction of the Contraloría and the Procuraduría. That is the gap this suite occupies: the real-time transparency layer that does not exist today, built so that the review which arrives anyway finds records that can sustain it.
The President himself set the standard before the earthquake. On 23 July 2026, questioning a transfer of 4 billones de pesos (COP 4 trillion) to the UNGRD, he demanded «ejercer vigilancia preventiva inmediata sobre este traslado presupuestal, verificar la legalidad del proceso y garantizar la trazabilidad de cada peso» — immediate preventive oversight of the budget transfer, verification of the legality of the process, and a guarantee of traceability for every peso (El Universal). This platform is that traceability, applied to the fund he created.
Sala de Crisis is the Futuros extension that turns those announcements into execution infrastructure: eleven surfaces that answer what the situation is, where it is worst, what was promised and whether the response is keeping pace. It exercises the four pillars over a single domain — verified provenance of crisis data (Pillar 1), the cited assistant over the emergency corpus (Pillar 2), the fund ledger and the oversight surfaces (Pillar 3) and the command center (Pillar 4).
This is a demonstration, not a production system
The suite was built to be presented to the Colombian government. The aggregate figures are real and cited; every person-level record is synthetic and is labeled on screen. Nothing here collects real personal data or moves real money. The section The two-lane model explains exactly what is what.
Two legal instruments, not one
Press coverage mixes them constantly, and the suite keeps them apart because they run on different clocks:
| Decreto 1171 de 2026 | Economic emergency (art. 215) | |
|---|---|---|
| Instrument | National disaster declaration (Ley 1523 de 2012) | State of Economic, Social and Ecological Emergency |
| Date | Signed on the night of 11 August | Announced on 12 August; decree number still unpublished |
| Enables | Direct contracting, budget mobilization, Subcuenta Sismo 2026 | Decrees with the force of law |
| Duration | 12 months, extendable | 30 calendar days; 90 per year as the cap |
The annual cap matters: Decreto 150 of February 2026 already consumed 30 of those 90 days, so the earthquake emergency has on the order of 60 left. Attributing "12 months" to the economic emergency is contamination from Decreto 1171.
Module map
| Route | Surface | What it answers |
|---|---|---|
/colombia | Sala de Crisis | The 16 figures of the official toll with their delta between reports, a map of the 14 affected departments (UNGRD) by severity, with municipal detail for the five worst hit, a timeline that travels to any cut-off, and "Lo prometido" (what was promised): the tracker for the 17 commitments in the address |
/colombia/fondo-milagro | Fondo Milagro | Public ledger of every inflow and every disbursement, hash-chained and verifiable in the browser; source → sector → works flow; JSON/CSV export. Includes "International response": the real pledges itemized by donor and split by status — offers are not receipts — with the CAT DDO terms table and COP→USD conversions only at the certified TRM rate |
/colombia/registro | Registro Único de Damnificados | The census console: coverage against the official 25,872 families, field capture designed to operate without signal, and duplicate detection with human review |
/colombia/alivios | Relief | The 5 announced programs, with the eligibility engine exposed as readable rules and a "why?" that shows which rule was applied to each household |
/colombia/desaparecidos | Person finder | Searchable registry in the Person Finder style, plus the board that cross-checks against shelter rosters and hospital admissions |
/colombia/albergues | Shelter network | Capacity against occupancy by municipality and the planner that flags where the next shelter is needed |
/colombia/logistica | Colombia Un Solo Corazón | The control tower for the humanitarian operation: collection → transit → delivery, corridors to the Cali hub, and the gap board that ranks municipalities by unmet need |
/colombia/reconstruccion | Reconstruction | The public-works pipeline — identified → structuring → contracting → execution → delivered — with the procurement risk engine running on top, plus the Copernicus EMS satellite assessment panel (EMSR916) as damage evidence independent of the government |
/colombia/reconstruccion/:id | Works record | Full financial trace of a single project, cross-checked against the ledger entries that funded it |
/colombia/briefing | The daily brief | The executive summary composed from the other surfaces, print-ready and with plain-text export for WhatsApp |
/colombia/propuesta | The proposal | The presentation page: the problem, the module map, the deployment plan and what is being asked of the government |
The two-lane model
The suite's credibility depends on nobody mistaking a real datum for an invented one. That is why the data live in two directories that never mix, under the same schema wrapper, so that a surface changes lane by changing one path and nothing else.
The wrapper's synthetic field is mandatory and is never inferred: it is what DemoBanner reads to decide whether a screen is marked as a demonstration. A real-lane file with rows and no registered citation breaks the build (scripts/colombia/check-real-data.ts, chained into prebuild alongside the repository's other gates).
What is real
Everything in the real lane came from a public API queried by scripts/colombia/ingest-*.ts, with the raw responses cached and the provenance recorded in public/data/colombia/citations-real.json:
| File | Source | Rows |
|---|---|---|
seismic-events.json | USGS FDSN Event Web Service | 5 |
demographics.json | DANE DIVIPOLA + MinEducación | 126 |
health-facilities.json | MinSalud REPS | 3,051 |
schools.json | MinEducación · school campuses | 7,313 |
procurement.json | SECOP II · Colombia Compra Eficiente | 516 |
sitreps.json | IFRC GO (emergency 8055) | 7 |
fiscal.json | World Bank · WDI | 6 series |
situation-reports.json | Presidential address of 12 Aug 2026, transcribed | 1 |
pledges.json | Consolidated press dossier of 13 Aug 2026, transcribed and validated on every bake | 17 |
cat-ddo-terms.json | Consolidated press dossier (World Bank CAT DDO terms) | 8 |
trm.json | Superfinanciera · certified TRM rate (datos.gov.co) | 1 |
satellite-damage.json | Copernicus EMS Rapid Mapping · activation EMSR916 (+ GDACS and UNOSAT) | 7 AOIs |
Also real, and cited on screen, are the aggregate figures of the official toll (265 dead, 496 missing, 25,872 families, 11,347 homes destroyed…), the 17 commitments with their verbatim quote, the 5 announced relief programs and the names of the companies that joined the humanitarian operation.
When a query came back empty, the file is baked with zero rows and the reason written into ingest.note. An empty result is a finding; filling it in would destroy the only thing the platform sells. The per-file caveats — the SGC catalog was unreachable, USGS only detects from about M4.5, the SECOP record runs hours behind — live in public/data/colombia/real/MANIFEST.md and have to be read before citing any figure from there.
What is demonstration data
Everything that reaches the level of an individual person or operation is synthetic: the ~205 households in the registry, the 120 missing-person cases, the 42 shelters, the 84 aid shipments, the 83 reconstruction projects and the 79 entries in the fund ledger. They are plausible and mutually consistent — the municipalities and DIVIPOLA codes are real, the totals per zone reconcile with the national aggregates — precisely so that the demonstration shows what the system would look like once populated. None corresponds to a real person, and every surface that displays them carries the DATOS DE DEMOSTRACIÓN banner.
The suite's forms — registering a household, reporting a missing person, pledging a contribution — write to localStorage and export JSON, following the mailbox pattern the platform already uses. There is no backend, no payment gateway and nothing is transmitted.
The verifiable ledger
The Fondo Milagro is the piece where traceability stops being an intention and becomes a mechanism. Every ledger entry carries the hash of the previous one, so the full sequence forms a chain: changing a single peso in an old entry invalidates every subsequent hash and the tampering becomes detectable without trusting anyone.
What matters is that the verification is not done by the server: the "Verify chain" button recomputes the sha256 over the downloaded JSON using WebCrypto, in the browser of whoever is looking. If the chain is intact it shows the head hash; if it is broken, it points to the entry where. An auditor does not have to take the platform's word for it: they can recompute it themselves, or download the full ledger as JSON or CSV from the page's open-data section.
That is the difference between publishing a PDF of budget execution and publishing a record that can be audited. It is the same provenance argument applied to money instead of to indicators.
The engines exposed as data
Three surfaces make decisions, and in all three the rule is visible on screen instead of living hidden in the code:
- Eligibility (
/colombia/alivios) — which program each household qualifies for. Any household's "why?" shows the rule that was applied. Explainability is the anti-clientelism argument here: if a citizen can see why they fell inside or outside, discretion shrinks. - Procurement risk (
/colombia/reconstruccion) — financial progress far ahead of physical progress, single bidder, a contractor with too many projects, unit cost deviating from the sector median, excessive delay in contracting. Each flag shows its one-line justification. Direct contracting under urgencia manifiesta is, historically, the channel through which disaster money leaks in Colombia; this is the surface for the Contraloría and for citizen oversight groups. - Aid gaps (
/colombia/logistica) — need against tonnage delivered by municipality, with the score formula printed on the page. It serves a single sentence: aid goes where the data says, not where the cameras point.
The assistant over the crisis corpus
The transcript of the presidential address and a domain context are registered as corpus for the cited assistant, so that questions like "how many shelters are there in Risaralda?" are answered with their citation. The assistant's general caveat applies: it answers from the corpus, and a question outside it is refused rather than improvised.
Status and what is missing
The suite is complete as a demonstration and is not connected to any state system. What it would take to operate it for real, in order: data-access agreements with UNGRD, DANE, SECOP and Medicina Legal; an official pilot department (the recommendation is Risaralda); and, for the fund, a trust entity with real payment rails. Field registration and missing-person reporting would additionally require a WhatsApp front end and an offline app for the census brigades; connectivity in Chocó is the design's number-one constraint.
One piece is identified and unbuilt: a donation-account verifier. Accounts attributed to the Fondo Milagro that do not belong to it are already circulating, no authoritative registry exists to check them against, and the fraud is an active problem rather than a hypothetical one. Geography now covers the 14 affected departments (UNGRD; Decreto 1171 names 12 "and others"): the five worst hit carry the municipal detail and the demo split of the figures, and the nine secondary ones enter at severity 1–2, without figures and with their citation — the Sala de Crisis map draws them all.