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The Indigenous Community of Espinillo is 13 miles from the nearest polling station – and no one in the village owns a car.
So two weeks ago, on the eve of the Paraguayan election, Miguel Paredes, a retired ambulance driver turned local politician, loaded an Indigenous family into a bus and took it to the side of the road, just a short walk from the polls. “We want to keep him,” said Mr. Paredes, 65, standing to watch with six young men he called friends.
Then, after dark, Mr. Paredes and his friends gathered some of the natives and took their identification numbers. Mr. Paredes told them to vote for the Colorado Party – the dominant, right-wing political force in Paraguay – and to ensure that other community members do the same. The young man then walked the natives through a simulated Paraguayan voting machine on their phones, guiding them to vote for the Colorado candidate.
With a New York Times reporter in his ear, Milner Ruffinelli, one of the young men, entered the Indigenous language, Guaraní. “The money promised to you, everything is there, and Mr. Miguel Paredes will see how to give it to you,” he said. “We can’t give you anything here. You know why.”
Democracy is being tested all over 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 entire democratic process, as in Russia, Venezuela and Nicaragua.
At the same time, internet disinformation has fueled swirling claims of hacked voting machines, dead voters and stolen ballots, undermining faith in clean elections.
But in many countries, a less visible but just as pervasive threat continues to undermine free and fair elections: vote buying.
Political parties in Mexico have given away gift cards, groceries and even washing machines. Election observers say last year’s election in the Philippines was marred by “blatant vote buying.” In February, a politician in Nigeria was caught with $500,000 and a list he could have received a day before the national election.
Last month in Paraguay, a country of 7.4 million in central South America, The Times found a typical type of vote-buying, developed over decades, in plain sight: A political operation mobilized indigenous people in Paraguay’s remote north and try to control it. or buy their votes.
On the weekend of the national election, The Times witnessed representatives of the ruling Colorado Party trying to buy votes from Indigenous people, and more than a dozen Indigenous people said in interviews that they had received money from the party before voting.
In one case, a Colorado gubernatorial candidate gave 200,000 bonds, or nearly $30 each, to more than 100 Indigenous voters outside a polling station in the riverside town of Fuerte Olimpo, according to interviews with five Indigenous people who took the money. That amount is equivalent to several weeks’ income for the poorest people in Paraguay.
Nestor Rodríguez, head of the Tomáraho Indigenous community who was given the money, said it was standard. “It’s just to buy clothes and things for your family,” he said. They voted for the Colorado candidate, Arturo Méndez, because of his promise of jobs and new roads, he said.
Mr. Méndez easily won the election. In an interview, he admitted giving cash to Indigenous people, but only because they needed food and clothing, and the government had forgotten. “Yes, we help them. But not to push their votes,” he said. “It’s really heartless.”
Paying people to vote a certain way is illegal in Paraguay. Many payments are framed as financial assistance, such as money for lunch on Election Day.
In the border province of Concepción, where there are 3,000 Indigenous people, the Colorado candidate won the governorship with only 28 votes. The losing candidate challenged the results, claiming irregularities in the counting of votes.
Vote buying can swing local elections, but rarely national ones, said Ryan Carlin, a Georgia State University professor who has studied the issue. But it certainly undermines democracy by “shortening the mechanisms of representation and accountability,” he said. “If the vote is accepted and given for another exchange, there will be no policy promises on the other side.”
Many of Paraguay’s approximately 120,000 indigenous people began to integrate into modern society only a few decades ago, and many political parties – not just Colorado – began to seek to control their votes.
In the days before the national elections, party workers spread across the Chaco, an arid region that covers the northwestern half of Paraguay, where almost half of the Indigenous people live.
In remote communities, workers load Indigenous people onto buses, take them to fenced-in sites and fill them with meat and beer until the vote, according to election observers, local activists and Indigenous people who have experienced it. The goal is to control the community before rival parties can.
On Election Day, party workers pay Indigenous people for identification cards – so they cannot vote – or drive to the polls and hand them money.
The practice is so well established, it has developed its own vocabulary: “grazing” 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.
European Union election observers said they witnessed such “corrals” in Paraguay’s 2013 and 2018 elections, and saw several cases of vote buying in the April 30 election. The party is seeking to buy votes from many Paraguayans, not just Indigenous people, observers say.
The practice is part of a powerful political machine that strengthens the grip of the Colorado Party in Paraguay, which it has controlled for 71 of the past 76 years, including four decades of military dictatorship.
Colorado presidential candidate Santiago Peña won with 460,000 votes, 43 percent of the total. (Paraguay has fewer than 80,000 Indigenous adults, according to estimates.) Mr. Peña is a political protégé of Horacio Cartes, the former president and current party chairman, who was convicted this year by the US government on charges of bribing him. way to power.
The second and third candidates have suggested that Mr. Peña’s victory was rigged, but have not provided clear evidence. A third candidate, whose supporters blocked the streets in protest, has been jailed on charges of trying to obstruct the election.
In an interview before the election, Mr. Peña said that if vote buying happened, there would be no race.
“The buy vote argument doesn’t have much evidence,” he said. “You have not been able to demonstrate a massive buying scheme. If 2.5 to 3 million people vote, how many votes should we buy?”
Among Paraguayans, however, vote buying is an open secret. “It’s almost like without, it’s not an election,” said the Reverend José Arias, a Catholic priest who used his sermons to stop Indigenous horses from selling votes. “People agree in theory,” he said. “It’s only a lot of people who agree to accept” bribes.
At the highway camp, Mr. Paredes and Mr. Ruffinelli said they did not offer bribes. The Colorado party paid for the bus, as well as the chicken, noodles and cooking oil provided to the community, he said. But they are there because they built relationships over time, he said, and pushing Colorado candidates because they are the best for the community.
Everyone is free to vote as they wish, Mr. Ruffinelli said, but he expected to vote for Colorado.
“He made a promise,” Mr. Ruffinelli said. He rattled off statistics: Indigenous people accounted for 86 percent of the 5,822 registered voters in the local electoral area. He said he would analyze the results to test whether “this community betrayed us.”
Some in the Enxet Sur community said they would accept the money – but still voted against the Colorados. “If the Colorados come with an offer, we will take it, but we know how we will vote: for change,” said Fermin Chilavert, 61, one of the elders of the community.
Others have taken the money and plan to vote as requested, including 10 community members who agreed to be “political operators” for the party on Election Day.
In a meeting that night, Mr. Paredes and Mr. Ruffinelli explained to operators that they needed to make sure other indigenous people voted in Colorado, including entering the polling booth with them. (Election observers say political parties often abuse laws that allow disabled people to be escorted into voting booths.)
“You are going to go in with them, teach them where to click,” said Mr. Paredes to the Natives, many of whom looked nervously at the ground.
The next day, on election day, the truck stop near the TPS was full of buses. He had transported hundreds of natives to vote, and each was decorated with political party decals, mostly for Colorados.
In one of the buses with Colorado signs, Indigenous passengers said they were given 100,000 to 150,000 guaraníes, or $14 to $21, and had chosen Colorado.
The bus rider, Catalino Escobar, said voters were given allowances for meals. (A sandwich and a Coca-Cola at the gas station cost $2.)
“I don’t know who the candidate is, to tell you the truth,” said Mary Fernanda, 51, who said she received a 100,000 bond to feed her children. “I just chose it out of necessity.”
When the votes were counted, the Colorado Party again dominated the elections in Paraguay, retaining the presidency and strengthening control of Congress.
19 indigenous people who ran for national or state seats all lost. Paraguay has never elected anyone who identifies as Indigenous to national office.
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