It happened with Trump in the 2020 elections and in Peru during the 2021 presidential elections, now the risk has moved to Colombia with politicians who denounce electoral fraud or speak of a coup d'état without having convincing evidence in their hands.

From the two political fronts in dispute, to the right and the left, there are leaders willing to warn their followers against the electoral system and create a dangerous political storm before knowing who will be the winner and who will be defeated.

The first round of the presidential elections will be held next Sunday and the tension has skyrocketed.

Some of the opponents of the left-wing leader Gustavo Petro have announced a coup without having evidence.

Conservative former president Andrés Pastrana (1998-2002) published an open letter to President Iván Duque on Monday: “The coup d'état is over, Mr. President.

For the good of Colombia, undo it."

Two days earlier, the candidate Petro, from the other political side, claimed that "enemies of democracy" were planning to "suspend the elections."

"They plan to suspend the bodies that govern the electoral process," he warned publicly.

In the midst of the dialectical war, some voices ask for calm.

Shortly after Pastrana's letter, the mayor of Bogotá, Claudia López, from the Alianza Verde center party, asked for restraint on a radio station.

"There is not and there will never be a coup d'état, those who say so are poisoning our democracy and our electoral process in an unfounded and irresponsible manner."

The Minister of the Interior, Daniel Palacios, also denied on Saturday the fear of the Petrismo to suspend the elections: "Affirmations in which there is talk of postponement or suspension of the elections are absolutely false."

The Electoral Observation Mission, the institution in charge of overseeing the process, published a statement to make "supremely clear that there is no constitutional or legal figure that allows the suspension or postponement of the presidential elections."

Sunday's elections already started this Monday abroad and could only be legally suspended in very exceptional cases such as a natural disaster or a health emergency, as the director of the MOE, Alejandra Barrios, explained in the media.

“The Executive has been absolutely clear that the elections are going because they are going,” said Barrios in the digital media

Petro's fear, as explained by the leader in voting intentions in the polls, is that the registrar Alexander Vega will be suspended after the complaint against him for his performance in the March elections, but Barrios has assured that, even so , the elections would continue.

"The institutions are not the people, if there is a suspension, the elections continue, the elections do not depend on the National Registrar," he explained.

Pastrana and the coup

Former President Pastrana, who has warned of a coup, has not yet presented any evidence, but has cast his suspicions on the Spanish company Indra.

The company was contracted by the Registrar's Office to disclose the first pre-count on election day and designed the software for the final count, for which the National Electoral Council is responsible.

According to the former president, Indra is a company close to the candidate Petro and in the March legislative elections he gave his movement "a million or more votes", which was proven to be wrong and was due to a pre-count error. , prepared with data provided by the juries, which was corrected with the official count.

The operation of the software has been the subject of debate for months, precisely because of this gap between the first results of the legislative elections in March, which were reported by the Registrar, and the total number of votes that were officially counted in the National Electoral Council. .

The thousands of missing votes claimed by Petro's movement increased its seats, but it was not the only political movement affected by the gap (which also affected New Liberalism).

The lack of transparency has raised legitimate questions about the pre-count process and the software – which works like a black box – and it is in the darkness of the algorithm that conspiracy theories can easily emerge.

Especially when, according to a 40db survey for EL PAÍS,

But distrust does not equal fraud.

So far there is no evidence that the March gap is due to anything more than a mistake.

"There has never been any talk of Indra being able to alter the result of an electoral process, our processes are arithmetical and professional," said the company's representative in the legal case brought against the registrar.

a repeated history

León Valencia, director of the Peace and Reconciliation Foundation, is surprised by the accusations.

“What seems amazing to me is that this is said by Pastrana, son of former president Misael Pastrana (1970-1974), when the most serious accusation of fraud that has been made in Colombia is that of 1970, when his father won. .

And because of that experience, because of that fraud or alleged fraud by Pastrana, the M-19 movement (a guerrilla) was born, of which Gustavo Petro is the just son”, he explains.

"In Colombia, the hiring of private companies to advance the elections has been criticized, but hardly anyone has the idea that the software of a company is being manipulated by private sectors, that is a conspiracy theory," he adds.

Valencia, close to the left, says that on the Petrismo side rumors have also been spread due to the enormous distrust in government institutions.

“Since President Duque has put his hand so much in the electoral campaign in favor of a candidate, just like the prosecutor when he suspended the mayor of Medellín, all those political actors have generated an atmosphere of great concern, of mistrust, and for that reason Rumors have spread.

Petro echoes these rumours, but I think it is more preventive than being certain”, he says.

The questioning of the electoral software, in fact, did not start from the right but from the left in 2018. “If everything is transparent in the Registry, they have wondered why it does not allow technical auditing of its software?” Petro asked in May 2018. 2018, during the presidential elections of that year.

In December 2020, when he was still demanding an audit, he spoke of the possibility of "technological mega-fraud in the elections" of 2022. And last March, when the legislative vote gap began to be seen, and the registrar spoke of an (impossible) recount of the votes, Petro denounced, without evidence, that the chain of custody of votes had been broken and mentioned on several occasions the "coup d'état promoted by Uribe."

The reality is that since March there has never been so much talk about fraud.

According to a study by the Green Lantern, an organization that investigates how public opinion is built on social networks, in these elections the narrative of electoral fraud has been considerably higher compared to what happened four years ago.

“We found that the number of posts around citizen account fraud has grown 25-fold, and that complaints from candidates, voters, and the media have made the conversation the most dominant in posts with words linked to the campaign on Twitter.” says the study.

The narrative, however, is no longer controlled by Petrismo.

Earlier this year the right began to pick up and spread the idea of ​​a possible fraud.

“Does the lord of the bags (referring to Petro) meet with the president of Indra?” Senator Maria Fernanda Cabal, of the Democratic Center party, asked in February 2022. She was referring to a Petro meeting in Spain in which there were several Spanish companies, but without showing evidence of a meeting between the candidate and the president of Indra.

Shortly after, Pastrana also extended the doubt on his Twitter account and so did Uribe senator Paloma Valencia.

The conspiracy escalated until Vice President Marta Lucía Ramírez, of the Conservative Party, sent a letter to the registrar concerned about the "recent statements by former Colombian President Andrés Pastrana Arango about the Indra company."

But despite the crossed accusations, there is no evidence that the software is Petrista, as the right says, or Uribista, as Petro has said.

“Trying not to automatically attribute to evil what could be adequately explained by human incompetence is key,” says another Green Lantern report on the public debate.

"If we all automatically mount the idea of ​​​​the great fraud, there is no room to analyze more calmly what proportion of the differences in the votes are the result of a systematic action and which respond to human error," he adds.

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