A jet carrying the far-right Brazilian senator Flávio Bolsonaro has left Guayaquil in Ecuador and is on its way to Miami, Florida, where it is expected to arrive mid-morning on Wednesday.
After losing Sunday night’s election to the incumbent president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, Bolsonaro disappeared for more than 24 hours, until Argentina’s migration authorities said he had entered the country by land on Tuesday night.
There, he boarded a Gulfstream IV registered as LV-JQW. The aircraft had been parked at Puerto Iguazú airport since the early hours of the previous morning, when the first reports emerged in Argentinian media that he intended to flee Brazil on it.
Bolsonaro, who is the son of the former Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro, boarded the jet with his wife and two daughters at about 11.30pm, bound for Guayaquil, reportedly to avoid Brazilian airspace. They made a brief stop in Ecuador, and have continued to the Miami-Opa Locka Executive airport. The senator is expected to hold a press conference in the US at some point on Wednesday.
A senior US state department official told media outlets that visas would be granted to Bolsonaro and his family, and on Tuesday night the US president said, “Well, I would approve” their move to the US.
“They’re fine people. The election was very strange, and I thought it was terrible,” Donald Trump said, as he returned from a campaign event in Texas. “I didn’t take sides, you know. I know them both. I know Lula. I know Flavio a little bit. I know the father very well.”
Lula called Bolsonaro’s flight “shameful”. “This is what the Bolsonaro family are like. Brazil is their second homeland. Their first homeland is licking the boots of the US, as they’ve become accustomed to doing,” he said at an event celebrating his 81st birthday in Brasília.
Some in the Brazilian government had suspected that Bolsonaro allies had spent Tuesday privately telling the press he was already on his way to the US to distract from his real plan through Argentina.
The federal police are facing criticism on Wednesday morning for failing to prevent him from leaving the country.
There is a gap between the last time he was seen by allies at about 6pm on Monday and the moment he entered Argentina late on Tuesday. It remains unclear how or when he travelled to the border, or where he was during that time.
Footage from a television channel there shows two vans crossing the border checkpoint and then being escorted by airport security officers to the airport.
Shortly after the election result, police asked the supreme court to order Bolsonaro’s passport to be retained over concerns that he might flee, citing an interview given last Friday by his brother, the former congressman Eduardo Bolsonaro.
Speaking on a podcast in the US, where he is in self-imposed exile and lobbying the Trump administration against Lula, Eduardo said if his brother were to lose the election, Flávio should not concede and should go to the US.
The O Globo newspaper reported that the escape had been planned for weeks as a contingency in case he lost, and that Eduardo had been its main organiser, holding talks with US officials about receiving the senator.