When a group of Latin American investigative journalists began looking into the Costa Rican company Constructora Meco, one of the first tools they consulted was NINA.
Simply entering the company's name on this platform revealed a complex web of business operations and government contracts in several countries in the region, including not only Costa Rica, but also Panama, Colombia, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Belize. Thus was born "Tras los pasos de Meco" (Following in Meco’s footsteps), a joint investigation by CRHoy, Foco Panamá, and El Espectador of Colombia, in partnership with the Latin American Center for Investigative Journalism (CLIP, for its acronym in Spanish).
“NINA is a platform that connects different open databases to find connections between companies and individual government contractors in Latin America,” Emiliana Garcia, general manager of CLIP, told LatAm Journalism Review (LJR).
The NINA platform positions itself as an ally for investigative reporters at a time when Latin American journalism is in crisis due in part to a lack of funding and restrictions on the independent press. Developed by CLIP, this tool allows journalists to access open databases on contracts, companies and sanctions from 21 countries and cross-reference key information to reveal alleged corruption networks and other potential irregularities, saving time and money.
“We recommend that journalists use the tool daily. That is, every time they begin an investigation, they should go to NINA to see if they find anything. That's its true power,” García said.
For example, Oswaldo Hernández, co-director and editor at Guatemalan site No Ficción, told LJR that they are becoming increasingly familiar with NINA searches, which has allowed them to start and even discard investigative reports.
“On one occasion, we were able to verify, thanks to NINA, that a company's legal representative was actually a connection within a municipal contracting system,” Hernández said. “The report was ultimately discarded because we were unable to validate our initial hypothesis, but we did confirm that the person had that connection.”
NINA has also been used in cross-border investigations into lithium-related conflicts in Chile and Argentina, or consultants spreading misleading political agendas in the region.
How to use NINA
NINA contains the databases of OpenCorporates, Open Sanctions, Poderopedia Venezuela, the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP), and others. It also connects to public registries and internal databases from various media outlets, such as the public contracting database created by Ojo Público in Peru.
Access to NINA requires registration and the provision of information about the media outlet where the journalist works, country of residence and nationality. Once logged in, users can view information about companies, entities, individuals, contracts and documents. The platform currently has 400 users.
The tool allows the user to view structured data, that is, data organized in tables. It also offers unstructured data such as images, PDFs, Word documents, emails and more.
NINA also offers the option of using its Application Programming Interface, or API, so its users can perform searches from their own platforms. However, this option requires authorization from the CLIP team, as access is only granted to journalists or investigators.
The CLIP team also offers free consulting to journalists who want to cross-reference information with NINA data but lack the technological expertise or financial capacity to do so.
Saving time and money
Journalism today is experiencing a sustainability crisis like never before: the passage of laws imposing restrictions on independent media, low salaries, the suspension of foreign aid support, journalists in exile pursuing other professions, and so on. Therefore, investing in technology is among the least urgent needs of Latin American media today.
However, over the past five years, the CLIP team has been working to maintain and improve its tool, continuing its mission of engaging in cross-border collaborations and putting its technological innovations at the service of journalism in the region.
“The first phase of NINA was completed in 2020, but over the years we've made many improvements, such as adding new data and perfecting the front end of NINA,” García said. “This has enabled many investigations in Latin America to advance.”
CLIP was able to build NINA thanks to a grant from Google News Initiative. Creating, developing and deploying the tool, which took approximately one year, cost US$150,000.
This doesn't include payments to employees or subsequent maintenance. According to García, they require between US$3,000 and $4,000 a month to keep it running.
“Developing technology is expensive because you have to pay for a server, you need memory, you need speed,” García explained. “The more users there are, the more searches there are. In other words, more requests require different server speeds and loads, and that means more money.”
NINA also contains data from Sayari, a database with access to public records, financial intelligence and structured business information for millions of companies worldwide. Individual use of Sayari requires a payment in US dollars; however, CLIP pays for an annual subscription and makes it available to journalists for free.
NINA not only saves money, but also time. One of its new features is an artificial intelligence chatbot that provides more analytical and accurate results. This allows journalists to advance their investigations more quickly by saving time that would be spent reading documents.
Alejandra Gutiérrez, director and co-founder of the Guatemalan digital media outlet Ocote, told LJR that before the introduction of this tool, they had to access each database individually. Now, they can cross-reference information with various sources in minutes.
“We saved ourselves countless hours of work searching for documents,” Gutiérrez said. “Now, with the integration of data from Guatemala, we have all, or even the main, sources of journalistic information concentrated in one place.”
Photo by Markus Winkler on Unsplash
This article was originally published on LatAm Journalism Review and republished on IJNet under Creative Commons CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.