Brazilian senator Flavio Bolsonaro, who lost the presidential election to incumbent Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, has arrived in the United States.
The 45-year-old landed in Miami, Florida, with his wife and two daughters, 48 hours after refusing to concede defeat. Bolsonaro secured 48% of the vote against Lula’s 52% and subsequently threatened to seek to “annul” the election results.
Earlier, flight-tracking website Flightradar24 showed that an aircraft matching Bolsonaro’s plane landed in Guayaquil, Ecuador, at around 4 am local time before departing minutes later for Miami’s Opa-locka Executive Airport. It had not been immediately clear at the time whether the defeated candidate was on board.
From Brazil to US via Argentina and Ecuador
According to Argentina’s migration authority, Bolsonaro, the son of former Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro, entered Argentina at 10:50 pm local time on Tuesday with his wife, Fernanda Antunes Figueira Bolsonaro, and their daughters, Carolina and Luiza. They crossed via the Tancredo Neves International Bridge, a key border crossing linking Brazil with Argentina’s northeastern province of Misiones.
“Those who did so possessed valid travel documentation and faced no legal impediments to entering the country,” Argentina’s migration authority said in a post on X.
At 11:30 pm, shortly after clearing immigration, the family boarded a private charter flight operated by Baires Fly SA, which, according to its filed flight plan, was headed for Guayaquil, Ecuador.
Bolsonaro’s move is likely to strain relations between a newly re-elected Lula and his Argentine counterpart Javier Milei, a close ally of US President
Donald Trump. Milei had travelled to Brazil to campaign for Bolsonaro.
Why Flavio Bolsonaro left Brazil
Bolsonaro is under investigation by Brazil’s Supreme Court in two cases involving alleged corruption, money laundering and tax evasion. The court had ordered him to surrender his regular and diplomatic passports by noon on Tuesday. It remained unclear whether he had complied, though he reportedly also holds an Italian passport.
The senator received the Supreme Court order to hand over his Brazilian passports on Monday, according to a video in which he recounted being served the notice outside the home where his father is serving a 27-year sentence under house arrest. Jair Bolsonaro attempted a coup after losing the 2022 presidential election to Lula.
Following that defeat, the former president fled to Florida before returning to Brazil three months later.
In a video posted on Monday, Flavio Bolsonaro said he was seeking to rally fellow lawmakers against his defeat to Lula. Bolsonaro had won the first round of voting but failed to secure the 50% of votes required for an outright victory, triggering a run-off that Lula won to secure a fourth non-consecutive term.
Flavio Bolsonaro’s eight-year Senate term expires on January 31, 2027, after which he will also lose the special jurisdiction that allows cases involving him to be heard by Brazil’s Supreme Court.
Trump backs Flavio Bolsonaro
Meanwhile, Trump remarked early Wednesday (local time) that he would “approve” of Flavio Bolsonaro coming to the United States, describing the Brazilian senator and his family as “fine people”.
“The election was really strange, and I thought it was terrible,” Trump told reporters at Joint Base Andrews in Maryland after returning from a campaign event in Texas on Tuesday. He did not elaborate but made clear that he did not endorse the election results.
(With AP inputs)