Thomson Reuters Foundation/Bogota


Murders on the campaign trail, reports of votes being bought for $14 each and murky campaign financing threaten to undermine the credibility of Colombia’s local elections, researchers say.
Colombians go to the polls tomorrow to elect 32 provincial governors, 1,101 city and town mayors, and councillors.
So far this year 20 people have been killed in campaigning, mostly candidates running for mayor and councillor posts, according to the Electoral Observation Mission (MOE), an independent monitoring group based in the capital Bogota.
“Electoral violence remains a problem. The election campaign this year has been less violent in terms of the number of people killed compared to the local elections in 2011 when 44 people were killed,” said Diego Rubiano, a researcher at MOE.
“But the number of threats and attacks against candidates has risen this year,” he said.
Rubiano added 41 more attacks on candidates and elected officials had been reported this year, including death threats, compared to the 2011 local elections.
In a “few and isolated” cases, the killings of candidates were linked to drug trafficking, Rubiano said.
He singled out the Norte del Valle region in western Colombia where criminal gangs are bent on controlling cocaine trafficking routes and want to elect mayors and governors who are likely to turn a blind eye to their criminal activities.
A recent report by the Peace and Reconciliation Foundation, a Bogota-based think-tank, lists the names of 152 candidates across 21 of Colombia’s 32 provinces, including those running for mayor and governor posts, who are under judicial investigation and or have alleged links to criminal groups.
Allegations of vote buying, including votes bought and exchanged for food and building materials, is a long standing problem in local and parliamentary elections in Colombia.
“Our field researchers report the going rate to buy a vote is from $14 up to $86 depending on the region in Colombia,” Rubiano said.
In response, the government announced earlier this week it would offer a reward of five percent of any seized vote-buying cash to people who report such incidents to the authorities.
“We are going after these mafias who carry money to buy the conscience of Colombians,” Interior Minister Juan Fernando Cristo was quoted as saying in El Espectador newspaper on Wednesday.
Another big concern is voter registration fraud. Eligible voters can only vote in the place where they live, work or study, once they have registered with authorities.
But electoral officials say candidates have been bussing in people to other municipalities and paying them to illegally register to cast ballots in places other than where they live.
So far Colombia’s National Electoral Council has annulled nearly 1.3mn identity cards belonging to people who had registered illegally in this way.
“This problem is particularly apparent in municipalities with a low population and where there’s a tight race between several candidates who buy votes and inflate electoral lists to ensure victory at the polls,” Rubiano said.
Authorities say they are cracking down on election fraud. An official at the attorney general’s office, Luis Gonzalez, told reporters earlier this month that 27 candidates, including five mayoral candidates, had been arrested on charges of vote rigging.
Anti-corruption watchdog Transparency International (TI) says a lack of transparency in campaign financing in the upcoming elections is also a concern.