By Daniel Kozin and Mauricio Savarese
Defeated Brazilian presidential candidate Flávio Bolsonaro and his family landed in Miami on Wednesday after fleeing Brazil.
The stunning move came after 48 hours in which Bolsonaro refused to concede to Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and then threatened to attempt to annul the election result.
Bolsonaro’s father, Jair Bolsonaro, also fled to Florida after losing the 2022 presidential election to Lula before returning to Brazil three months later. On Monday, the U.S. said that it would grant visas to Flávio Bolsonaro and his family. Bolsonaro, a Trump ally, visited the White House in May.
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Bolsonaro first fled from Brazil to Argentina and then Ecuador alongside his wife and two daughters, Argentina’s migration authority said Wednesday — a day after the 45-year-old senator and his family were granted United States visas by the Trump administration.
Bolsonaro is under investigation by Brazil’s Supreme Court for alleged corruption, money laundering and tax evasion in two cases. The court had ordered Bolsonaro to hand over his regular and diplomatic passports by noon Tuesday — two days after he lost the vote to Lula. It remained unclear whether he had complied, but allies said late Tuesday he also has an Italian passport.
Argentina’s migration authority said Bolsonaro, his wife Fernanda Antunes Figueira Bolsonaro, and his daughters Carolina Figueira Bolsonaro and Luiza Figueira Bolsonaro crossed into the country at 10:50 p.m. Tuesday. They entered via the Tancredo Neves International Bridge, a primary border checkpoint linking Brazil to Argentina’s northeastern province of Misiones.
“Those who did so possessed valid travel documentation and faced no legal impediments to entering the country,” the Argentine migration authority said on X.
The authority said that at 11:30 p.m. local time, shortly after clearing immigration control, the four boarded a private charter flight operated by aviation company Baires Fly S.A. According to the filed flight plan, the aircraft departed for Guayaquil, Ecuador.
The move is almost certain to cause a big diplomatic rift between Lula and Argentine President Javier Milei, a Trump ally who traveled to Brazil to take part in Bolsonaro’s campaign.
Flight tracking website FlightRadar24 showed that a plane fitting the description of Bolsonaro’s landed in Guayaquil at about 4 a.m. local time, before taking off minutes later for Miami-Opa locka Executive Airport. The plane carrying Bolsonaro and his family landed in Miami at around 9:30 a.m. EST.
Lula, who turned 81 on Tuesday, told several dozen supporters outside the presidential residence in Brasilia before the plane landed that he didn’t have precise information about Bolsonaro’s whereabouts, but said he had left Brazil.
“I regret that he left Brazil, because he could have stayed here and proven that the accusations are not true,” Lula said. “This act of leaving Brazil is shameful.”
Paulo Figueiredo, a close Bolsonaro ally who lives in the U.S., said in a short statement that he can’t confirm information from foreign authorities, but added “Flávio Bolsonaro is well, in security and resting with his family.” Figueiredo also said there would be a press conference Thursday in Miami to discuss the case.
Representatives of Brazil’s government didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment from The Associated Press.
U.S. President Donald Trump said early Wednesday that he would approve of Bolsonaro coming to the U.S., calling him and his family “fine people.”
“The election was really strange, and I thought it was terrible,” Trump told reporters at Joint Base Andrews, Maryland, after returning from campaigning in Texas on Tuesday. He did not elaborate, but stressed that he didn’t endorse the election results.
Leaders all over the world and the Organization of American States, or OAS, endorsed the result and congratulated Lula, who was reelected by a margin of about 4.4 million votes in the second and final round.
On Tuesday, Milei’s administration spokesman Adrián Ravier said “there is no asylum request (from Bolsonaro) and there is nothing more to add.”
The defeated candidate was served with a Supreme Court order to surrender his Brazilian passports Monday. In a video, he said he received it outside the home where his father, former President Jair Bolsonaro, is serving a 27-year sentence under house arrest for attempting a coup following his 2022 election loss to Lula.
After that defeat, Jair Bolsonaro fled Brazil for Florida. He returned three months later.
Flávio Bolsonaro said on Monday in a video that he was attempting to organize opposition among his congressional colleagues to the election results. His eight-year term as a senator expires Jan. 31, 2027, which will also cause him to lose special jurisdiction at the country’s Supreme Court.
Brazil’s Supreme Court is investigating Bolsonaro for allegedly using a sports betting company to launder fraudulent deductions from government pensions paid to senior citizens. In a separate case, he is accused of accepting millions of dollars from a disgraced banker.
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