Taking off from the small runway at Albrook airport in downtown Panama City, it’s just a short fifteen minute flight southeast over the gaping mouth of the Panama Canal. Over the hulking cargo ships that are waiting in the bay for passage, over the seemingly endless turquoise waters of the Gulf of Panama, to the Pearl Islands — a paradisiacal archipelago of some 200 islands a mere thirty miles away from civilization.

Outside the foggy airplane window, some of the smaller islands begin to reveal themselves like tiny cigarette burns on bright blue silk. And then larger islands. Most of them swathed in virgin rainforest. Some of them ringed by sandy white halos. Hundreds of years ago, these scattered mounds were known for two things: the rich pearl beds lurking in their waters and the menacing pirates lying low in their coves.

The Emperor is Dead’ screamed the front-page headline of the San Francisco Chronicle on the morning of January 9, 1880. “On the reeking pavement,” the ensuing obituary lamented, “in the darkness of a moonless night under the dripping rain, Norton I, by the grace of God, Emperor of the United States, departed this life.”

If you were to believe the history books and the immigration records, Joshua Abraham Norton was born in 1818 in the London borough of Deptford to parents John and Sarah. Two years later, he and his young Jewish family disembarked from the vessel La Belle Alliance at the Cape of Good Hope in South Africa as part of the group now referred to as the “1820 Settlers” — Africa’s first British colonialists.

THINGS ARE CHANGING. For the past fifteen years the Web has been a catch-all. A landfill. A place where people came to dump their opinions, thoughts, concerns and drama — and where other people came to enjoy those things for free. All the while, major media outlets and corporations vied for a share of the attention. But there were very few rules (if any). It was an anything-goes affair. A frontier town with the usual suspects: the obnoxious tycoon, the corrupt sheriff, the painted whores, village idiots, drunkards and beggar-bundles slouched in dark doorways. No one really knew what the Internet was — or how to act inside of it — they just knew it was the place to be.

In this ‘Wild West of the Web’, the concept of paying for a piece of the heap seemed asinine. The Internet was a place for making money, not spending money. However, as the abundance of online content continues to increase, the abundance of low-quality online content also increases — but it does so exponentially. If one follows this trend far enough, the landfill analogy becomes strikingly clear. Eventually, the time will come when users are tired of sifting through the mountains of dirty diapers and decomposing sludge just to find an old iPhone 3 casing or a Mike Tyson’s PunchOut cartridge. Users are going to want to know exactly which services to employ in order to get content they trust and enjoy. It’s happening with music (Spotify: over 10 million paying subscribers) and with television (Netflix: 50 million active subscribers and 63% of Americans use it to stream television daily). Digital Publishing is next. I touch on this transition briefly in a recent interview with Steve Watson of Stack Magazines.

Yesterday I downloaded the June 2014 issue of National Geographic on my iPad. At almost 200 megabytes, it took over an hour to download. After swiping through the issue that is filled with editor’s notes, tables of contents, app instructions, advertisements, photo contests, user instagram showcases and single-page micro-features, I found only three long-form, in-depth articles that I could really sink my teeth into. And the issue cost $4.99. What’s with all the noise? What if I just wanted those three meaty articles? Why do I have to pay for content AND look at interruptive advertisements?

I can’t even find refuge in the travel sections of mainstream media websites. Outlets like The Huffington Post and The Guardian seem hellbent on publishing Top 10 round-ups, click-bait puff-pieces and how-to-travel tips. And if I head to the personal blogs of travel writers, most of the time, I am met with more puff-pieces or even sponsored articles with subtle advertising and a discreet ‘paid-for’ bias—not to mention sloppy reporting.

After 15 years of development, ten years of construction, four Panamanian presidential administrations, countless project delays and $100 million dollars spent, Panama’s Biomuseo, designed by famed architect Frank Gehry, is at last open to the public. Slowly but surely, the building, much like the isthmus upon which it is perched, has emerged from nothingness, pushing itself up into being. As I crawl along the Bridge of the Americas in a stream of heavy Saturday morning traffic, it’s impossible not to notice the beast in the distance, with its technicolor shell lazing on the banks of the Canal, basking in the sun.

Bertolini’s restaurant was cheap, but charming: perfect for the creatures who roamed 19th-century London after the sun went down. On Tuesday nights, in Bertolini’s backroom, respected judges and doctors, esteemed lawyers, admired politicians and award-winning poets and writers drank heavily, smoked cigars and secretly discussed what they thought they knew of the British colonies, more specifically polygamy, bestiality, phallic worship, female circumcision, ritual murder, savage fetishes and island cannibalism. The gentlemen would trade in exotic pornography and tales of flogging and prostitution. If, by chance, a pious, God-fearing bloke were to accidentally stumble into the Fleet Street backroom on a Tuesday night, the tips of his Victorian moustache would’ve certainly stood on end.

The road begins at the southern edge of town. It slithers its way up into the perfect green mountains surrounding the red brick metropolis of Medellín. Partly gravel, the road is so steep at times that the wheels of our Chevy 4×4 spin out beneath us.

As we continue our ascent, I consider the bizarre assortment of people who, over the past 25 years, have made the journey before me: the imprisoned drug lords, mass-murderers and street thugs, the politicians both noble and corrupt, the soccer superstars, beauty queens and prostitutes, the military brigades and would-be fortune hunters, the hermetic monks, religious pilgrims, and, as of recently, the low-income senior citizens.

I have arranged a meeting with Brother Davide—one of two monks who live at The Cathedral full time. But when I arrive at the entrance, the timid gatekeeper tells me—without explanation—that I can no longer speak with him. I am left to explore the grounds unsupervised, armed with nothing more than some archival photos and a rudimentary map of the old prison that I found online. With little of the original structure still standing, I find it quite difficult to get my bearings. With me is David Graff, a German journalist and guide at Palenque Tours in Colombia, who is acting as my translator.

The parking lot must be new because it’s not on my map. Uphill, behind the parking lot, is more new construction: two small buildings with a courtyard and benches.] I can hear somber music playing—it sounds like Colombian bambuco. I notice some old weary faces staring back at me. The gatekeeper appears out of nowhere. “Those are the senior citizens,” he whispers to me, “you’re not allowed to go up there.” Suddenly, it feels like a prison. Maybe even more so than it did twenty-five years ago…

***

By 1991, Medellín was the murder capital of the world. With the help of a CIA surveillance operation, the Colombian government was beginning to close in on Pablo Escobar’s Medellín drug cartel. Feeling the pinch and running from hideout to hideout, Escobar began taking national dignitaries hostage and mapping out the conditions of his surrender.
Before Escobar and his posse would surrender, the drug kingpin had a few stipulations. His first demand was that the country’s official constitution be rewritten to prohibit extradition. Second, that he be allowed to build his very own prison. There were a few other conditions, of course, such as the removal of Gen. Miguel Maza, one of Escobar’s most determined rivals, from his post as the Director of the Administrative Department of Security (DAS). Another requirement was that the Colombian National Police would not be permitted within a 12-mile radius of his prison.

Before he stepped down from DAS, Gen. Maza warned President Gaviria of the dangers of negotiating with a criminal of Escobar’s caliber. But President Gaviria assured him, “His treatment will not be any different from what the law demands.”

With negotiations underway in the spring of 1991, Escobar began hunting for the perfect piece of land upon which to construct his prison. He took along his brother, Roberto, who was the cartel’s accountant. Escobar had scouted much of the vacant land surrounding Medellín but found the lush mountainside of Mont Catedral particularly ideal. “This is the place, brother,” Escobar said during a site visit. “Do you realize that after six in the evening it fogs over and is foggy at dawn, too?” Escobar also appreciated the steep topography that would make it nearly impossible for the military or rival cartels to mount an air attack on the compound. And so, prior to formally surrendering, Escobar began construction on The Cathedral.

Weeks later, with construction in full swing, Escobar and his brother returned to the site. They buried a stockpile of rifles and machine guns on a slope just above the building that was to house the inmates. “One day, we’ll need them,” Escobar told his brother.

Then, in June of 1991, a continental congress officially added an amendment to the Colombian constitution forbidding the extradition of nationals. After receiving confirmation that the amendment had been approved, Escobar finally revealed the location of his hideout.

Late in the afternoon of June 19, two government helicopters landed on a rock-strewn soccer field at The Cathedral. Escobar was the first to get out, setting his famous white velcro sneakers on the dirt. He then looked up to find 50 uniformed men all pointing machine guns in his direction. “Escobar gave a start,” Gabriel García Márquez wrote in his book, News of a Kidnapping. “He lost his control for a moment, and, in a voice heavy with fearsome authority, he roared, ‘Lower your weapons, damn it!’ By the time the head of the guards gave the same order, Escobar’s command had already been obeyed.”

Although Escobar’s Cathedral was still incomplete, it was habitable. Fences built ten-feet high with fifteen rows of electrified barbed wire surrounded the compound. There was a cinder-block home for the warden, seven guard towers, a collection of larger prison buildings on a clearing below, and a large building higher up on the slope that would house the prisoners. “It seemed to me a very prison-like prison,” Alberto Villamizar, a diplomat who helped facilitate the surrender, said to President Gaviria. After saying goodbye to his family, Escobar entered the complex and signed a document of voluntary surrender in front of a special prosecutor. He then retired to his cell.

“Starting the next day,” Márquez continued, “the very prison-like prison described by Villamizar began to be transformed into a five-star hacienda with all kinds of luxuries, sports installations and facilities for parties and pleasures, built with first-class materials brought in gradually in the false bottom of a supply van.”

***

Sensing the eyes of the elderly upon me, I wander toward the lower buildings, which appear to be in fairly poor condition. According to the map, these must have been the prison dormitories. Half of the second story has been demolished and replaced by a small memorial building in the shape of a cross. At one end stands a life-size crucifix with a collection of golden AK-47’s resting at Jesus’ feet. Black marble slabs etched with the names of Escobar’s victims hang on the walls.

The second half of the upper story looks like the original. It’s empty inside, just four walls with a few crumbling archways and a concrete staircase that leads to nowhere. The metal doors of the basement level are locked. The entire structure has been newly painted in a variety of garish colors. There are no signs of The Cathedral’s notorious five-star amenities. The prison had a gym, a billiards room, a bar, a disco where Escobar even hosted wedding receptions, a sauna, a jacuzzi, a waterfall, big screen TV’s, and a life-sized dollhouse for when Escobar’s young daughter would visit. During the drug lord’s imprisonment, The Cathedral was often referred to as Hotel Escobar and Club Medellín.

Behind the assisted living home is a lot where the soccer field used to be. Some claim that Escobar had workmen install a grid of high-gauge wire over the field to prevent the police, the military, and the rival Cali Cartel from landing a helicopter on the premises. In a 2010 ESPN documentary title The Two Escobars, one of Escobar’s most loyal hit men, Jhon ‘Popeye’ Velásquez, who is still serving time in prison for terrorism, drug trafficking, and murder, said Escobar would routinely invite soccer players up to the prison for a game.

In fact, Velásquez also confesses that, prior to beginning their official 1994 World Cup qualifying run, all twenty-two players of the Colombia National team visited The Cathedral. The players made their way up the dirt road to the prison in a jolly convoy of dusty Jeeps and Land Cruisers. The team enjoyed a leisurely lunch with Escobar and his men. Afterwards, Escobar put on a pair of short-shorts and cleats and took part in a friendly match with one of the world’s most famous soccer clubs. The young, professional players indulged the pudgy kingpin as he kicked his ball around in the dirt. The prison guards served drinks from the sidelines and later, doubled as waiters in the bar.

There is still an original guard tower near the tree line. Somebody (a monk, I presume) has put a dummy dressed in a guard’s uniform inside. The place begins to feel like a second-rate Madame Tussauds. Nestled here, in the southwestern corner of the compound, is a heap of crumbling concrete. Walls have toppled in on themselves, flights of stairs are covered in a carpet of soft, green moss, and the tips of rusted pipes curl out of the chaotic wreckage. I wander up the mossy stairs. I’m able to look down into an old room. The only identifiable artifact is a perfectly circular slab of concrete. A museum-like sign on the wall claims this was Escobar’s cell and that the circular slab was where he had his rotating, round bed. In old pictures I’ve seen of Escobar’s cell (which looked more like a Sofitel suite), his bed is square, so I’m inclined to think that this rotating bed was part of The Cathedral’s elaborate disco. And I’m sure it was put to good use, too.

Escobar and his men were constantly drinking booze and smoking pot while inside. Sources say the drug lord became quite talkative when he was high. Needless to say, there was also a state of the art industrial kitchen on the premises, and Escobar hired many of the best chefs in Medellín to come cook there. On his 42nd birthday, the kingpin hosted a lavish banquet, and many of his friends and family were transported up to the prison for the fiesta. They ate stuffed turkey, caviar, fresh salmon, and smoked trout. Parties were commonplace, and models, beauty queens, and prostitutes were regularly driven up to the prison in the back of a covered military truck.

***

Escobar required a substantial cash flow to support this rather agreeable lifestyle. In order to get cash inside the prison, his men on the outside would squeeze tightly rolled wads of one hundred dollar American bills into milk cans. Then, whenever the early morning mountain fog provided enough cover, his men would bury the cans in the dirt surrounding the compound. Each can reportedly contained a million dollars. While wandering the grounds, I keep an eye out for suspicious lumps in the dirt.

After a few months of semi-retirement, Escobar grew restless. He was still the head of the Medellín Cartel and was being paid a “war tax” of $200,000 a month by each of the cartel bosses on the outside. But he wanted more. He desperately wanted to reconsolidate his empire. The CIA was still listening in on telephone calls from the hilltops surrounding The Cathedral. A busy job, I’m sure, considering every inmate was given his own Motorola cell phone. Aware of the constant phone surveillance, Escobar raised carrier pigeons to facilitate secure communication. Keeping in step with his characteristic boldness, Escobar even had little leg-bands created for his pigeons that read “Pablo Escobar—Maximum Security Prison—Envigado”

Reports of the luxurious netherworld in which Escobar reveled began to reach the government in early 1992. The new Justice Minister, Eduardo Mendoza, was shown photos of the posh amenities that had slowly been brought into the prison. When Mendoza started to investigate, he found that every single piece of The Cathedral’s furnishings were completely legal. Each item had been stamped and approved in efficient triplicate by his very own Bureau of Prisons. He was furious. Mendoza decided the only effective solution was to build a new prison—a real prison. But, per Escobar’s terms of surrender, the only facility in which he could legally be detained was The Cathedral. The new prison would have to be built right on top of the current one, with Escobar still inside. News of this plan did not sit well with the world’s most famous inmate.

Unable to trust his corrupt Bureau of Prisons with the construction, Mendoza sought help from the U.S., only to find that they were prohibited from assisting in the construction of a prison that wasn’t on American soil. Mendoza then approached Colombian contractors, but they were far too intimidated by the ever-present menace of Escobar. One contractor even said to Mendoza, “We are not going to build a cage with the lion already inside.”

Mendoza finally found an Israeli security expert named Eitan Koren who was willing to take on the challenge. Koren drafted up blueprints. Workmen were hired from the most distant nooks and crannies of the country to ensure they weren’t connected to the powerful cartel. It was a clever idea, but ultimately pointless. As work slowly began, Escobar’s men were seen sitting on the prison fences writing down the license plate numbers of all the new vehicles that came and went from The Cathedral. Scared for their lives, most of the workmen walked off the job.

The Medellín Cartel was generating more revenue than ever. Two to three tons of cocaine were being trafficked into the U.S. every week—even more than before Escobar’s incarceration. Safe within his mountaintop fortress, Escobar grew bolder and more unscrupulous. In July 1992, he made a move to take even more control of the cartel, one that would bring his residency at The Cathedral to an abrupt end.

On the outside, Fernando Galeano and Gerardo Moncada, two bosses of the Medellín Cartel, were growing suspiciously wealthy. Escobar decided to raise their “war tax” from $200,000 to $1 million dollars per month. Escobar also stole $20 million from their private stash house. When Galeano and Moncada visited The Cathedral to complain, Escobar first lectured them about their place in the pecking order and then had them both executed in the prison. One account claims they were brutally tortured before being killed, that they were “hung upside down and bled like steers.” Other reports claim that the bodies of Galeano and Moncada had been dismembered in The Cathedral and buried nearby so as to never be found.

News of the executions reached the government almost immediately. President Gaviria had had enough. “We made a huge mistake,” Gaviria later said, “we underestimated the capacity of Escobar for corruption and intimidation. He was running his business from jail.” On July 21, 1992, Gaviria gave the orders to move Escobar to a military base in Bogotá. There was just one tiny problem: nobody had the cojones to go in and get him—not Rafael Pardo, the Defense Minister, not Andrés Gonzales, the newly appointed Justice Minister, not Col. Hernando Navas, the Military Director of Prisons, not even Gen. Gustavo Pardo, who currently had The Cathedral surrounded with a four hundred man brigade.

Mendoza, who had recently been demoted to Vice Minster of Justice, resolved to go in and get Escobar on his own. Television reports of troops amassing in the hills around The Cathedral were all over the news. It was now dark, and any chance of a surprise attack had been squandered. Escobar was waiting for Mendoza as he walked up the dirt path and into the compound. He noticed Escobar and his men had all put on considerable weight during their imprisonment. The dining hall, it seemed, had been put to more use than the gymnasium.

“You have betrayed me, Señor Vice Minster,” Escobar said to Mendoza. “President Gaviria has betrayed me. You are going to pay for this. And this country is going to pay for this because I have an agreement and you are breaking that agreement. You’re doing this to deliver me to the Americans.” On Escobar’s order, Popeye took Mendoza hostage in the warden’s house while Escobar tried to figure his way out of the bind.

With the Vice Minster of Justice now a hostage, Gen. Pardo’s 4th brigade had little choice but to strike. All hell broke loose. Mendoza managed to escape amid the frenzy. A sergeant from the Directorate General of Prisons, Mina Olmedo, was shot and killed, and eleven other guards were badly injured. At some point during the madness, the most famous prison inmate in the world and nine of his henchmen simply walked out the back door, past a few guards, into the thick woodland of Mont Catedral.

***

The sky begins to cloud over. I’m standing at the eastern edge of the compound where Escobar would have entered the woods during his escape into the mountains. I’m surrounded by mossy ruins that just barely retain the shape of a building.

For fifteen years after Escobar’s escape, the carcass of The Cathedral sat in purgatory. It was far from deserted, however. With visions of million-dollar milk cans dancing in their heads, the people of Medellín flocked to the legendary prison with sledgehammers, pitchforks, and shovels. These would-be fortune hunters mounted what I imagine to be one of the largest, most enthusiastic civilian excavation campaigns in Colombian history. They dug, demolished, and dismantled The Cathedral brick by brick, looking for the leftovers of Escobar’s fortune. Those who were more practical merely went to collect scrap metal, shingles, and other recyclable building materials.

Yovany Moncada, who at the time lived in Socorro, the closest neighborhood to The Cathedral, admitted to me that he was one of those hopeful amateur archaeologists. “We never found anything,” he said. “Escobar’s men, who knew where everything was, managed to get there first.” The site also became popular with Pablo-pilgrims. Foreign tourists would often hike up the winding road and camp out in the ruins. Why? I haven’t the faintest idea.

Things changed in 2007. The government of Colombia decided to loan the 28,000 square meter fixer-upper to a fraternity of hermetic Benedictine monks. In the seven years since they moved in, the monks have transformed the site into a “center of religious and cultural tourism” complete with a chapel, a library, a cafeteria, a guest house for religious pilgrimages, workshops, an ecological trail, and a memorial to victims of the cartel. What was once a half prison, half luxury resort is now part house of prayer and part house of horrors. The Cathedral was an oxymoron then and still is. It seems to be cursed with an endless identity crisis. In the last year, however, the monks have established a refuge for senior citizens who can’t afford long-term care facilities in the city. The monks hired unemployed men and women to take care of the seniors and even paid for their training. Currently, there are twenty-four occupants.

The gatekeeper appears once again. I ask him about The Cathedral’s reported ghost sightings. “I haven’t seen anything,” he mumbles, shaking his head while staring down at the ground, “but the night patrolman says he has seen white figures like floating blankets.” Several others claim to have seen a robust figure wearing a hat and a poncho crouched against a table in the library. In 2010, nuns who were visiting the monastery had taken pictures of the waterfall just past where Escobar’s bunker had been. Upon returning to Bogotá they developed the film and found bright lights rising up from the water. Apparently, they were terrified. The most terrifying thing I encounter during my visit is a fat, white Himalayan stray cat with red eyes and a scrunched up face.

A gigantic mural with a picture of Escobar behind bars hangs on an original thirty-foot concrete wall that supports one of the new seniors buildings. He is wearing a silly fur hat, and below his pudgy face is written, “Those who don’t know their history are condemned to repeat it.” It’s a big, fat cliché, but, right here, right now, it feels somehow applicable. Nearly half a mile down the mountain, the city of Medellín has its sights set on the future—on modernization, on redemption. Two months ago, Medellín was named ‘Innovation City of the Year’ by the Wall Street Journal However, the gangs still operate. And the cartels still traffic. But hell, progress is still progress.

As dusk approaches, a fog creeps up the slope of the mountain and swallows the sprawling city below—just like Pablo promised. Then comes the rain. As I head back to the car, I look up and watch the old folks slowly waddle to a nearby building for shelter. The somber bambuco music plays on.

The Cordilleras rolled out like centuries from one end of the horizon to the other. In front of them, clouds veiled the snowy caps. The rain rushed down off the mountain range and into the irrigation channels. The water rose by the minute and the sound of the rushing water could be heard from all over the posada. Dark patches on the sides of the adobe buildings would slowly grow larger from absorbing the cold rain. 

The wind also came down from the mountain range, every day at four in the afternoon. Like clockwork. The locals called the wind conchabado, which means hired, because of its taste for punctuality. We had to shut the windows and the doors before the conchabado came, else our blankets, curtains, tapestries and clothes would blow like mad around our room.

Gangs of monkeys strolling over our balcony on some unnamed mission. Naked Indonesians bathing in the running stream below our window. Sounds of scooters buzzing. Horns baying. And birthday-suit children splashing around while their mothers scrub their clothes with stones and soap upon a large rock in the water.

North of town it’s quiet and the sun feels hotter. Confused roosters, buzzing flies and the swash, swash, swash of ladies in the paddy beating third-world bouquets of rice frawns against a box. The soft grating of the beaten off pellets in the round sieve. Crack go the stalks under bare, leathery feet. How many grains have come off I wonder? How deep is the universe?

The Soup Cart Man
Under the arch of the paint-stripped doorway, young Balinese girls waitressing at Cafe Havana practice their salsa steps. A soup cart man rings an old bell to announce his presence. Smoking a cigar stub on the moonlit road out front, I buy a street girl a bowl of Bakso for 10,000 RP. Walking home it starts to rain. The drops pelt with fury. After two minutes we are soaked through and can’t even feel the rain anymore. But it’s warm and it’s nice. Ankle deep, the water rushes down hill, past us, toward the monkey forest, through its green swarm and onto forever. We get home. Drip, drip, drip the roof leaks.

Rice-Field Queen
Wading in the pool like a tourist, my skin begins to redden. She walks over, a princess, a rice-field queen. She carries offerings to Gods I will never fully understand. Not like she does. I can smell jasmine. She holds something between her fingers and waves it before a shrine, a mini-temple. Its stone skin baking like mine. Incense smoke wafts up like dancing ballerinas. Rising, she walks to another shrine. I haven’t moved.

Poets Of Classic Rock
Paint rips away from the shutters on the wall. It looks near intentional in its perfection. Two Balinese men sit up front with guitars. Strumming sour. Phonetic covers of American classics fill the air like a musty fragrance. Now ‘Wish You Were Here’. The sound is so off it becomes something new and right and fine like a honky-tonk piano. Or like crème fraîche. Mix-matched tables scattered about, confused. The second man never opens his eyes. He just plays. An old ball cap, worn low, casts a shadow like a thousand years. Now ‘Let It Be’. Small water glasses like shots. Now ‘Knocking On Heaven’s Door’. Eyes still shut as fat tourists waddle in. Now ‘Layla’.

The Detour
The pitted road is blocked ahead. From here it’s all colour and movement emphasized by the glow of a plunging sun. An elaborate carpet of unknown obstruction. Closer, ornate umbrellas gesture, up and down, tassels hanging, figures beneath hairy animal costumes dance, up and down, sarongs swing and white head-dresses reflect the sun’s hellish glare. And music, oh, the music. Steel crashing together, hands on skins, confused wooden xylophones all folding together in accidental brilliance. Even the stray mutt takes his friendly fleas on a detour. A local says in contorted English: ‘The God’s Are Visiting’.

Kopi Bali
It’s grainy on the tongue and wet. Like eating mud as a kid. It stirs looser than it tastes. But it tastes rich and deep like a good old wine. Mixed in is condensed milk, viscous, sugary, maple syrups good twin. Stirred together, it’s thicker. Small grains hang up by the rim like distant stars in a forgotten galaxy trillions of lightyears from man in the deep inky night. Near the bottom, a layer of dark sludges oozes as I rotate the cup. It’s almost a religious experience. A million granules of roasted prayer. Velvety worship spinning in a cheap porcelain cup.

Kecak
Licks of fire dance up into the balmy night air. Rings within rings within rings of men chant exotic grunts and distant chirps. A rhythmic sort of machine gun from a hundred hungry mouths. Licks of fire dance on. Burning coconut shells scatter across the tumbled stone under a blackened foot. Embers play along the way. And the gods move like serpents in the middle of it all. Their faces painted white. All the mossed-over statues lining the drunken alleys animated by the heat of orange flame and the melody of chant more than a thousand years old. A resurrection of song and movement. And the whole fiery scene burns off into time like a fog drifting away.

In a small room above a funky little shop in San Telmo, a meeting is about to begin. One by one, members of The Net Party filter in. They kiss each other on the cheek and help themselves to beer in plastic cups. I get swept up in the cheek kissing. After thirty or forty kisses, I start to wonder how many members are in The Net Party. It feels a bit like a receiving line at an Italian wedding. Eventually, the room fills up and those in attendance take their seats along the green leather banquette, or on the bar, or on the floor, or anywhere there is space, really. It’s the party’s first meeting since last year’s election and there is an electricity in the air—though I can’t tell if it’s a good one.

The Net Party (Partido de la Red, in Spanish) is one of several new avant-garde parties burrowing their way into the dirt and the mud of the Argentina political landscape—what makes them different, and interesting, is their platform of a tech-enabled, semi-direct democracy. The Net Party did well in last years legislative election. They surprised a lot of people. Now, for the band of ministerial mavericks, it’s all about momentum.
The atmosphere in the small, hot room feels more like a late-seventies Apple Computers brainstorming retreat than a modern political think-tank. There are more scuffed-up Chuck Taylors than spit-shined Rockports. More Levis than Dockers. More plaid shirts than pressed shirts. Not a single tie in sight. Scruffy beards abound, along with constant tweeting (in fact, The Net Party’s manifesto is comprised of a series of sixty tweets). Still, there are plenty of pens and clipboards and loose pieces of paper floating around to give the gathering a professional edge.
Pia Mancini, a young political-science maven and one of the co-founders of the party, begins the meeting with a word: “anxious.” Working their way around the packed room, which is quickly turning into a sauna, the members, who range from seventeen to seventy-seven years in age, each use one word to describe their current mental or physical state—a technique they employ to open-up the lines of communication. Anxiety is the most common sensation among the group. And for good reason.
Much has happened in the three months that have elapsed since The Net Party participated in their first legislative election this past October, when they racked up an impressive 22,000 votes. Since the election, consumer prices in Argentina have skyrocketed, climbing 2.4 percent in November alone. In December, police officers demanding higher wages went on strike, sparking deadly nation-wide looting. Shortly after, the hellish summer heat waves led to water and power shortages, leaving many residents in the capital without electricity for as many as four straight weeks. Private sector economists claimed inflation had reached a staggering 25 percent. President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner even dropped out of the public eye for more than a month—worrisome behavior from a leader who likes to address her nation on a daily basis. And in a bid to preserve international reserves, which had plummeted to a SEVEN-year low, Kirchner’s finance squad opted to intentionally devalue the national Peso by almost 13 percent.
It’s been a tough summer for Argentines. Needless to say, morale is low. Recent polls have shown that as much as 75 percent of Argentines are deeply distressed about the state of the economy and believe the Kirchner administration is on the wrong track. And then there’s the corruption. According to Transparency International, 77 percent of the population considers their government’s efforts to fight sweetheart deals and back-door bribes to be entirely ineffective. An impotent democracy has left its people feeling powerless. Fortunately, all this contributes to a rather fertile political landscape for The Net Party and their mission to upgrade the system.
Democracy, there’s an app for that.
At the core of the party’s platform is an open-source software they’ve built from the ground up called DemocraciaOS: a user-friendly, vote-and-debate tool specifically designed for houses of parliament and political parties. Within the software, users can read summaries as well as detailed pro-versus-con breakdowns on every law that is currently being debated in the Buenos Aires City Legislature (CABA). Users then have the option to vote for or against each law, or simply abstain. Because The Net Party has yet to win a seat in the city’s legislature, the votes carry little weight beyond contributing to a sort of collective intelligence. However, if and when The Net Party secures seats, they vow that their elected candidates will always vote in line with the DemocraciaOS user consensus.
“We are like hackers,” Mancini says boldly. “We are not anti-system. We are about understanding a system and trying to propose updates, but building upon what exists. We need to understand what is already good about the system and what actually needs changing.” It’s precisely this humble approach that so elegantly conceals the fact that to propose a transparent democracy to a corrupt democracy is something quite radical indeed.
“At the end of the day, politics is about building systems,” adds Santiago Siri, the reluctant front man for The Net Party and also one of its central co-founders. “What we have now is a stale democracy. It’s a democracy that started in 1983 but it got stuck somewhere.” Siri is right. The world in which the representative democracy originated has changed. All systems need updating—especially democracy. Eventually, bugs develop. Mistakes in the framework are discovered and abused. Back doors are opened. If neglected, any system can become a host upon which all other systems will leech. And it doesn’t take a genius to realize that the system in Argentina is diseased. This isn’t the first time the country has found itself teetering on the edge of crisis.
As the party members fan hot air away from their shiny faces, Siri, who has a background in software development, suggests avoiding classical top-down hierarchal structures and, instead, embracing the distributed-power framework of a horizontal organization. The pith of the meeting is clearly the party’s required normalization. In last year’s legislative election, The Net Party needed only a couple thousand signatures of support to run as a temporary party. In order to participate in the upcoming 2015 elections, the party must normalize, which means they must establish their official assembly base. And the powers-that-be are not making it easy. Every party in the city legislature must gather 3,000 new assembly members per year, no matter how large they are. The Net Party has been told they must obtain 4,000 members (not just supporters) in their first year alone. It’s no small feat. Yet, the party seems resolute.
If the events of last year’s elections are an indication of what’s to come in 2015, the road ahead is not only long, but it is lined with highway-robbers, conmen, smear-artists, and land-mines. “What we did not expect is how perverse the traditional system can be towards new coming parties,” Siri says. “Our first campaign was like a baptism by fire.” Siri is referring to a series of attempted bribes and blackmails from shady characters who offered up thousands of fake supporter signatures, and even cold hard cash, in exchange for candidacy within the party. Refusing to build their future on corrupt foundations, Siri and his crew respectfully declined. As a result, The Net Party found themselves on the ugly side of an all-out smear campaign.
After two and a half hours, the meeting comes to a close. Florencia, a hot-blooded former-MP who was the campaign manager for the The Net Party’s 2013 election, leads the group in a moment of hand-in-hand meditation and reflection to ease party tensions. Breathing in. Breathing out. Remembering. Connecting.
I catch up with The Net Party again a few days later in the micro-center of Buenos Aires for the Day We Fight Back march. Although technically a world-wide online protest against mass surveillance, the party decided it would be an appropriate day to hit the streets and drum up support. Armed with picket-signs, flyers, party T-shirts, and stickers, the relatively small band of demonstrators casually paces along Avenida 9 de Julio, the widest avenue in the world, and gathers in the long-reaching shadow of the Obelisco de Buenos Aires.
At the march, I catch up with Guido Vilariño, a long-haired rock-and-roller who is the party’s lead software coder. With only 70 percent of homes in Buenos Aires having access to the internet, and around 50 percent in rural Argentina, a proposed internet-based democracy has its share of road blocks. I ask Vilariño about the technological lag in the country to which he replies, “Technology wise, Latin America is behind five to ten years. A friend of mine says that the problem with Argentina is that we missed the seventies. There’s some wisdom in this. We missed the apogee of the hippie revolution becoming something more serious. That generation was killed by the dictatorship here in the seventies. The guys who should be forty to fifty years old by now and engaged politically were killed. It’s a problem, but we manage.”
Even if the Establishment within Argentina is slow to catch on to the idea of the Internet as a valuable actor in politics, the open-source DemocraciaOS has caught the attention of many outside the country. Jorge Soto, who is the deputy general director of civic innovation and national digital strategy under Mexican president Enrique Peña Nieto, is working with DemocraciaOS to implement a version of the software in Mexico. “It makes citizen participation easy. It’s kind of a personalized civic engagement,” Jorge told me in an email. “We’ve released a draft version of the open data national policy, and we want citizens to edit it. Our first version was not getting a lot of comments so we are releasing a new version using the DemocraciaOS software.”
DemocraciaOS has even made its away across the pond—and into other languages. Radhouane Fazai, an information and communications officer for Democracy International in Tunisia has launched a version of the open-source software translated into French and Arabic. “DemocraciaOS is one of the tools that I believe can truly give the power to the people,” Fazai says. “Everyone represents himself and gets a say in the subjects. Tunisia as a country has been doing a lot of things recently in the interest of democracy, citizen participation, and open governance. [Tunisia] can use DemocraciaOS to build a better democracy even at the level of local organizations and parties.”
After the march, the political convoy of picket-signs makes its way to a grandiose fast-food joint for pizza and beer. Again, I am swept up in the proceedings. I take Mancini and Siri aside for a chat and ask about their thoughts on their country’s current leadership. “Our president pretends that she has all the answers. But we are a generation that is starting to understand that that sort of paternalistic authority is a fallacy,” Siri says. However, it’s this sort of leadership-without-leaders mentality that is at odds with Latin American political ideology. The fact is, it’s difficult to write about Latin American politics without writing about Latin American leaders. There always seems to be a face. Someone to love or to hate. An iconic beard or beret or bad habit. Latin Americans have a long history of putting their faith in saviors instead of systems.
At the end of the day, a democracy is not about the glory of one, it’s about the voice of many. “Ego,” Santiago says, “is the bug in the system.” A democracy does not preach. It listens. And the game of listening has changed. The internet is possibly the greatest single listening device ever conceived and The Net Party is using it to upgrade not only their own country’s democracy, but democracies all over the globe. For The Net Party, the road is long, the game is dirty and the odds are unfavorable. But hey, this is Argentina. Anything could happen.