Buying Votes in Paraguay
POZO COLORADO, Paraguay — The Espinillo Indigenous community is 21 kilometers from the nearest polling station — and no one has a car.
So on the eve of Paraguay’s elections, which were held April 30, Miguel Paredes, a retired ambulance driver turned local politician, loaded the Indigenous families onto a bus and brought them a short walk from the polls. “We want to look after them,” he said, standing watch with six men he called colleagues.
Then, after dark, The New York Times found vote-buying on blatant display.
Mr. Paredes, 65, and his colleagues gathered some of the Indigenous people and took down their identification numbers. He told them they were to vote for the Colorado Party — the dominant, rightwing force in Paraguay — and to make sure others did so, too. The men showed them how to use Paraguay’s voting machines, guiding them to vote for Colorado candidates.
With the Times journalists within earshot, Milner Ruffinelli, one of the men, spoke the Indigenous language, Guaraní. “That money that was promised to you, that’s all there, too, and Mr. Miguel Paredes is going to see how to get it to you,” he said. “We can’t give you anything here. You know why.”
Democracy is being tested across the planet. In some countries, leaders have attacked democratic institutions, including in the United States, Turkey, Brazil and Mexico, while in other places they have upended the democratic process altogether, as in Russia, Venezuela and Nicaragua.
But in many nations, a different threat afflicts free and fair elections: buying votes.
Political parties in Mexico have handed out gift cards and groceries. Election observers in the Philippines said last year’s vote was plagued by “blatant vote buying.” In February, a politician in Nigeria was caught with $500,000 and a list of possible recipients the day before national elections.
Last month in Paraguay, a nation of 7.4 million in South America, The Times witnessed representatives of the ruling Colorado Party attempting to purchase the votes of Indigenous people, and more than a dozen Indigenous people said in interviews that they had accepted money.
A Colorado candidate for governor personally handed out 200,000 guaraníes each, or nearly $30, to more than 100 Indigenous voters outside one polling station, according to interviews with five Indigenous people who took the money. That amount is equivalent to several weeks’ earnings for Paraguay’s poorest.
Nestor Rodríguez, chief of the Tomáraho Indigenous community that was given the money, said it was standard. “It’s just to buy clothes and things for your family,” he said. He voted for that Colorado candidate, Arturo Méndez, because of promises of jobs and a new road, he said.
Mr. Méndez handily won. In an interview, he admitted to giving the people cash but said it was only because they needed food and clothes, and the government had forgotten them. “Yes, we help them, but not to induce their vote,” he said.
Paying people to vote a certain way is illegal in Paraguay.
Many of Paraguay’s roughly 120,000 Indigenous people started integrating into modern society just a few decades ago, and many political parties have since sought to control their votes.
Before last month’s elections, party workers fanned out across the Chaco, a vast, arid region. The workers loaded people onto buses, took them to fenced-in sites and plied them with meat and beer until the vote, according to election observers, activists and Indigenous people. The goal is to control a community before a rival party can.
On Election Day, party workers paid the Indigenous people for their identification cards — restricting them from voting — or bused them to the polls and handed them cash.
The practice is so entrenched, it has developed its own vocabulary: “herding” the Indigenous voters and putting them in “corrals.”
“It’s like we’re animals to be bought,” said Francisco Cáceres, 68, a member of the Qom Indigenous group.
Among Paraguayans, vote buying is an open secret. “It’s almost like without it, it’s not an election,” said the Reverend José Arias, a Catholic priest who discourages his flock from selling its votes. “People agree in theory,” he said. “It’s just that many who agree also accept” the bribes.
Mr. Paredes and Mr. Ruffinelli said they were not handing out bribes. The Colorado Party paid for the bus, as well as chicken, noodles and cooking oil they gave to the community, they said. But they were there because they had built relationships over time, they said, and were pushing Colorado candidates because they were the best ones.
Everyone was free to vote how they wished, Mr. Ruffinelli said, but he expected them to vote Colorado. “They already promised,” he said.