Flavio Bolsonaro flees Brazil through Argentina and is expected to land in Miami
Brazil’s Supreme Court had ordered Mr Bolsonaro to hand over his passports.
Defeated Brazilian presidential candidate Flavio Bolsonaro has fled his country to Argentina and then Ecuador alongside his wife and two daughters, Argentina’s migration authority said on Wednesday.
The 45-year-old senator and his family were granted United States visas the day before by the Trump administration.
The move is almost certain to cause a big diplomatic rift between Brazil’s newly re-elected President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva and his Argentine counterpart Javier Milei, who travelled to Brazil to take part in Mr Bolsonaro’s campaign.
Brazil’s Supreme Court had ordered Mr Bolsonaro to hand over his passports.
Argentina’s migration authority said on X that Mr Bolsonaro, his wife Fernanda Antunes Figueira Bolsonaro, and his daughters Carolina Figueira Bolsonaro and Luiza Figueira Bolsonaro crossed into the country at 10.50pm.
It added the three entered via the Tancredo Neves International Bridge, a primary border checkpoint linking Brazil to Argentina’s north-eastern province of Misiones.
“Those who did so possessed valid travel documentation and faced no legal impediments to entering the country; furthermore, their transit was recorded by the relevant authority without any incidents,” the Argentine migration authority said.
The authority also said that at 11.30pm local time, shortly after clearing immigration control, the four boarded a private charter flight operated by aviation company Baires Fly SA. According to the filed flight plan, the aircraft departed for Guayaquil, Ecuador.
Flight tracking website FlightRadar24 showed that a plane fitting the description of Mr Bolsonaro’s landed in Guayaquil at about 4am local time, before taking off minutes later for Miami’s Opa Locka executive airport. It was not clear whether the defeated candidate was on board.
Mr Lula, who turned 81 on Tuesday, told a few dozen supporters outside the presidential residence in Brasilia that he did not have precise information about Mr 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,” Mr Lula said. “This act of leaving Brazil is shameful.”
Neither Brazilian government representatives nor Mr Bolsonaro’s were immediately available to reply to a request for comment from the Associated Press.
US President Donald Trump said early Wednesday that he would approve of Mr Bolsonaro coming to the US, calling him and his family “fine people”.
“The election was really strange, and I thought it was terrible,” Mr Trump told reporters at Joint Base Andrews, Maryland, after returning from campaigning in Texas on Tuesday. He did not elaborate but stressed that he did not endorse the election results.
Leaders all over the world and the Organisation of American States (OAS) did endorse the result and congratulated Mr Lula, who was re-elected by a margin of about 4.4 million votes in the second and final round.
Mr Bolsonaro’s decision to leave Brazil came as a deadline for him to surrender his regular and diplomatic passports expired at noon on Tuesday. It remained unclear whether he had complied, but allies said late Tuesday he also has an Italian passport.
The defeated candidate was served with a Supreme Court order to surrender his Brazilian passports on 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 Mr Lula.
After that defeat, Jair Bolsonaro fled Brazil for Florida. He returned three months later.