Flávio Bolsonaro lands in Miami after fleeing Brazil
By ANA IONOVA, EDWARD WONG and ALICE MACIEL
Flávio Bolsonaro, the presidential candidate defeated in Brazil’s elections, landed in Miami on Wednesday, according to a U.S. official, fleeing his country after Brazilian authorities canceled his passports as part of a money-laundering investigation.
Bolsonaro arrived in the United States after apparently vanishing for a whirlwind 24 hours during which it was largely unclear where he was and how, or if, he would reach the United States.
The State Department plans to issue visas allowing him and his family to enter the country, a senior department official said Tuesday. The official spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive diplomatic matters.
Just after 9:30 a.m., Bolsonaro could be seen leaving a plane at a private airport outside Miami along with his family, according to news media video footage. The group was ushered into an SUV shortly after exiting the airport, hidden under umbrellas.
The U.S. government’s assistance to Bolsonaro could escalate tensions between the Trump administration and President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of Brazil, who has accused President Donald Trump of interfering in his country’s internal affairs.
Bolsonaro, a right-wing senator and the son of a former president serving a lengthy sentence for attempting a coup, lost Sunday’s presidential vote to Lula. After initially contesting the result, he conceded but claimed Lula had won through unfair tactics.
Trump has also criticized the election, saying it appeared to have been “rigged.”
After his loss, Bolsonaro seized on a change in the voting hours Sunday to demand the election be annulled because of foul play. But the change affected only 0.03% of the vote, and Brazil’s electoral authorities said it did not make any difference to the result, which saw Lula win by a margin of 4.4 million votes over Bolsonaro.
Bolsonaro eventually dropped those complaints but still insisted Lula had unfairly used government funds to win, citing the leftist president’s move to raise a welfare stipend in the last stretch of the campaign. (Lula’s government claimed the increase was an overdue inflation adjustment.)
Bolsonaro crossed from Brazil to Argentina by land Tuesday night with his wife and two daughters, Argentina’s National Directorate of Migration said Wednesday. It said that he then boarded a private fight to Guayaquil, Ecuador. He then took another flight to the United States.
Earlier Tuesday, Brazilian authorities had canceled Bolsonaro’s passports because he is being investigated over his links to a Brazilian lawyer accused of laundering more than $1 billion through a scheme involving online gambling.
Separately, Bolsonaro is also the subject of a police inquiry over millions of dollars he raised from a disgraced banker at the center of a huge corruption scheme to finance a biopic of his father, Jair Bolsonaro. The elder Bolsonaro was convicted of attempting a coup after losing the presidential election in 2022 to Lula.
Besides canceling his passports, Brazilian authorities also issued an alert to immigration authorities barring Flávio Bolsonaro’s exit from the country. It was not immediately clear how he was able to cross the border into Argentina.
