Buying votes, a sophisticated and rooted practice in Colombia

Former Colombian senator Aida Merlano, before a court hearing in Caracas (Venezuela) on the 6th. MIRAFLORES PALACE (Reuters)

“If the voter does not receive an economic dressing, he does not vote.

It can be money, a public position, favors or having the front of the house painted.”

In 2018, the words of Roberto Gerlein, a former senator from the Caribbean coast who held a seat in the Senate for 50 years, already showed how this illegal practice has marked the elections of recent decades in Colombia.

“It is traditional not only in the towns of the Atlantic but in all the departments of the coast and has spread throughout the country.

In Bogotá they buy votes, in Medellín they buy votes;

in Pasto they buy votes, in the Valley they buy votes,” the former congressman, who died in 2021, said in an interview at the time. Now, although according to several experts, this illegal practice has become more sophisticated, it is still present throughout the country.

The recent scandal of former congresswoman Aida Merlano, which affects the pre-candidate for the presidency Alejandro Char, reveals that it is no longer an obvious and retail purchase, but rather a criminal network.

"In the Atlantic, votes are bought throughout the region, but here the issue is that they are bought with the money and resources of the nation and they are the financiers of almost the entire political class in the region," Merlano said last February. in an interview with

magazine

.

The former congresswoman was sentenced to 11 years for electoral corruption in the 2018 elections and then starred in a movie leak during a dental consultation in Bogotá.

She lowered herself down a rope and fled on a motorcycle that was waiting for her.

Months later she was recaptured in Venezuela and from there she delivered a statement to the Supreme Court of Justice of Colombia where she denounced that the Char house, as the candidate is known, and other politicians from her family, participated in the escape. her.

Since then, the local press has revealed videos of how the White House, headquarters of Merlano's campaign, worked and where, according to complaints, votes were bought en masse.

“What this case allowed us to see is how there is a technology ready for purchase and that it has become something systematic.

Also, that politicians who gain access to high public office are seen controlling and managing an organized criminal structure that favored different candidates.

The collective imagination would say that votes are bought only for them, but that they entered Congress and obtained votes for other candidacies is striking”, says Camilo Mancera, coordinator of electoral justice of the MOE, a mission that the Pilas con el Voto platform has, where citizens can denounce constraints and other electoral irregularities.

Impunity favors electoral corruption

The mechanics of the purchase of votes starts even on the day of registration of ballot papers to vote, three months before.

Intermediaries (coordinators) between citizens and politicians tell voters which polling stations they should register for and thus can monitor that those who receive the money ultimately deposit it for the candidate who pays.

In many cases, explains Mancera, they are given an advance payment that can be 50,000 pesos (14 dollars) when they register and the rest of the money when they vote.

In Barranquilla alone, the MOE identified 18 polling stations with "consolidated electoral risk" and has issued alerts.

The bought voters are usually taken directly to the voting point, accompanied by a leader who verifies that those who received the advance do comply with the electoral appointment.

These leaders, in turn, report to

and there are some characters called

, who deliver the money they keep in backpacks.

The business is the massive sale of votes.

"They tell politicians I'll sell you a package of 2,000 votes, that costs you an x ​​amount of money and I make sure you get it," adds Mancera.

However, the ways to buy the vote are varied.

David Char, who was a senator between 2002 and 2006 and is the cousin of the pre-candidate and brother of the former president of Congress Arturo Char, told the Special Jurisdiction for Peace (where he also admitted alliances with paramilitaries) that another form of vote buying and selling is called “election carousel”.

“It was a safe vote, but more expensive, but there was no need to do any work with any leader because the Registrar's Office had its hand in here.

There were people inside the Registrar's Office who put the sale of tables at the service ".

The former senator also spoke of roof tiles, construction materials and other aid in exchange for the vote and mentioned Laureano Acuña, current senator of the Conservative Party as a person "known in the Atlantic who handles this way of buying votes a lot."

Acuña was a neighborhood leader who obtained one of the best votes for the House and Congress, beating electoral barons from the coast.

Today he is being investigated by the Attorney General's Office precisely because of an audio in which he talks about buying 70,000 votes for this Sunday's legislative elections.

A polling station on the 11th in Bogotá, on the eve of Sunday's elections.

RAUL ARBOLEDA (AFP)

Impunity in electoral crimes is the reason why this is repeated for years.

A study by the Transparency Corporation for Colombia shows that between 2014 and 2021 the Prosecutor's Office received 1,549 criminal news related to the crime of "voter corruption", but only 2% (31 criminal news) have been sentenced.

"This shows that there is difficulty in identifying and prosecuting those responsible for the crime," indicates the document

.

Andrés Hernández, director of the Transparency Corporation for Colombia, explains that the range of irregularities is wide.

It ranges from voter fraud, identity card registration fraud, fraudulent voting, favoring fraudulent voting, vote trafficking, and the pattern of impunity is maintained: of 7,048 complaints filed by the Prosecutor's Office in those years, only 6,276 went to the investigation stage. and 111 made it to formal investigations.

"It generates suspicion that more cases like Merlano's are not known when we have 7,000 complaints and when we know that there is a whole structure and that it is not that someone waits at the polling place with a tamale or tiles," says Hernández.

For him, the practice of buying votes has been so present in the Colombian electoral context that he believes that this Sunday it will continue.

“There is hardly any reason to think that in these elections that pattern is going to change.”

Subscribe here to the EL PAÍS América

and receive all the key information on current affairs in the region