Flávio Bolsonaro lost Brazil’s presidential election on Sunday. By Wednesday morning he was in Miami, having left the country after Brazil’s Supreme Court ordered him to surrender his passports.
The court’s order, issued Monday, came in a money-laundering investigation. Bolsonaro denies any wrongdoing. The man he lost to, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, leads a country where 55.5% of people identified as Black or mixed-race in the 2022 census. Whether a defeated candidate answers to Brazil’s courts is a question that Black and brown Brazilians, a majority of the population, have a direct stake in.
On Monday, Bolsonaro said publicly: “I have never thought about leaving the country. I will hand over my passports and defend myself.” Reports from Argentine immigration authorities say he and his family entered northern Argentina on Tuesday evening, then boarded a private plane to Guayaquil, Ecuador. From there a private jet took them to Opa-Locka Executive Airport near Miami, where they landed around 9:30 a.m. Wednesday.
Lula, who won Sunday’s vote, answered the flight directly. “I regret that he left Brazil, because he could have stayed here and proven that the accusations are not true,” he said. “This act of leaving Brazil is shameful.”
The United States did not stop the family at the door. The State Department granted them visas, and President Donald Trump told reporters he “would approve” of Bolsonaro coming to the country, adding: “I think they’re fine people.”
That matters for what comes next. The United States and Brazil have an extradition treaty, but Al Jazeera’s correspondent noted that with a visa issued and the president’s praise on record, “they’re not gonna be in any hurry to hand him back to Brazil.” Florida also has the largest Brazilian population in the United States.
Bolsonaro resigned his Senate seat to run for president. That leaves him without the immunity senators hold, and his legal exposure grows once the new year begins, according to reporting from NBC News and Al Jazeera. No charges have been announced in the money-laundering investigation, which remains under investigation.
What happens next depends on two governments. Brazil’s Supreme Court has to decide how to respond to an order he ignored, and Washington has to say whether it will entertain any request to send him back. Neither has said.
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