It started—where else?—on Twitter. Over the second weekend in March, Mauricio Toro, a 34-year-old mechanical engineer and CEO of Techfit, the Florida branch of a Colombian-owned company that 3D-prints surgical devices, saw a tweet from Singularity University that read, “Wouldn’t it be great to create an open-source ventilator?”

Toro was immediately intrigued. He knew that MIT had posted open-source specs for a ventilator back in 2010, and he knew that his home country of Colombia was in dire trouble. Whatever happened with COVID-19, Colombia’s population of 50 million people, including 2 million recently absorbed Venezuelan refugees, was likely to suffer badly. The nation’s public health care system was fragile in the best of circumstances, and ventilators were in short supply. With every country in the world bidding for the lifesaving machines, which provide oxygen to patients in extreme respiratory distress, Colombia was likely to be priced out of the international market. “These are economies with preexisting conditions,” said Luis Alberto Moreno, president of the Inter-American Development Bank. “It is very hard for them to get medical equipment.” Like the rest of the developing world facing COVID-19, Colombia would be left to its own devices—literally.

From Twitter, Toro went right to WhatsApp, where he proposed a bold idea to a group of his colleagues at Techfit’s Medellín headquarters: Why don’t we build an open-source ventilator for Colombia? They, too, were intrigued, even though collectively they had “zero experience” manufacturing such a complicated machine. Two days later, on another group chat of innovation managers from major Colombia companies, Toro volunteered Techfit to build a ventilator, parts and labor gratis.

Mauricio Toro. Courtesy of the author.

From there the effort took on a life of its own. Within 24 hours more than 60 people had joined the chat, volunteering to help. The circle rapidly widened beyond techies and biomedical engineers to include university faculty, doctors from private labs, and financiers, many of them recruited by Ruta N, the Medellín mayor’s office for tech innovation. Founded in 2009 with the goal of turning Medellín into the Latin American Silicon Valley, Ruta N built a fundraising platform to finance the research. As important, Ruta N signaled, by virtue of its involvement in the project, was that Colombia’s government and ruling oligarchy were behind it. The paisas wanted this done.

“Paisas” is the colloquial term for the inhabitants of Colombia’s largest state, Antioquia, and its capital, Medellín. The paisas are the business leaders of the country, and they are not shy about trumpeting their acumen and superior work ethic. Long before Pablo Escobar employed his evil genius to create a worldwide distribution network for illegal drugs, Medellín was a thriving textile and agricultural sector. Today the city, contrary to its Narcos image, is not only a manufacturing hub of 3 million people, but a financial-services center with a thriving start-up culture. The paisas decided that Colombia’s response to the coronavirus would not devolve into the scrambling chaos they observed in the United States. Already, Colombia’s infection curve is flatter than South Korea’s, a testament to the government’s decision to impose restrictions early. (There is also speculation that a tuberculosis vaccine administered to some 80% of Colombians may help reduce infections.)

By nature, paisas think big. So building a ventilator also meant creating a supply chain for parts and inventing an entire production line from scratch. They enlisted the Colombian embassies in the U.S., Canada, India, China, and Japan for help sourcing parts that couldn’t be produced domestically. In honor of the “unique ecosystem” that birthed the project, said Juan Andrés Vásquez, the head of Ruta N, they branded their venture InnspiraMED—a mash-up of Spanish terms for “innovation,” “inspiration,” and “medicine.” “It is from Medellín for the world,” said Vásquez. “This effort means we can be recognized for something different than violence. We have changed in the last 20 years.”