A private jet carrying the Brazilian far-right senator Flávio Bolsonaro has landed in Miami, Florida, where the losing candidate in Sunday’s presidential election runoff left the airport under police escort without speaking to the press.
After losing Sunday’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, which 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 on it.
Bolsonaro, the son of the jailed former Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro, boarded the jet with his wife and two teenage daughters at about 11.30pm, bound for Guayaquil in Ecuador, reportedly to avoid Brazilian airspace. They made a brief stop in Ecuador and continued on to Miami-Opa Locka airport, about 11 miles north of downtown Miami, a private aviation hub catering to corporate executives and wealthy travelers.
Bolsonaro, wearing a black bulletproof vest and looking somber, and his family emerged from the plane into a postcard-perfect sunny South Florida morning at 9:24am. They briefly remained inside the airport before leaving, shielded by black umbrellas, climbing into a dark gray Ford Expedition MAX and speeding away under police escort.
He said nothing before boarding the vehicle and the mood was low-key, without any supporters present to welcome him and only two dozen journalists who were shooed away by two Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents.
He is expected to hold a press conference in the US today or tomorrow.
A senior US state department official told media outlets that visas would be granted to Bolsonaro and his family, and on Tuesday night Donald Trump said he would approve their move to the country.
“They’re fine people. The election was very strange, and I thought it was terrible,” 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 Flávio 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 suspected Bolsonaro allies had spent Tuesday privately telling the press he was already on his way to the US to distract from his real plan to go through Argentina. The federal police are facing criticism 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.
The Argentinian newspaper Página/12 reported that the aircraft belonged to the businessman Sergio Daniel Mastropietro, who was investigated by local police in one of the biggest scandals of Javier Milei’s administration, involving the alleged payment of bribes linked to the purchase of medicines for people with disabilities.
Bolsonaro is under investigation in at least two criminal cases, one of them examining suspicions that the senator was involved in a money-laundering scheme worth about £680m ($905m) involving betting companies.
It was in connection with that case that, shortly after the election result, Brazilian police asked the supreme court to order Bolsonaro’s passport to be retained over concerns he could 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, he should not concede and should go to the US.
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.
Fleeing Brazil has almost become standard practice among Bolsonaro supporters facing criminal charges or convictions in the country: about a dozen politicians or influencers closely aligned with Jair Bolsonaro have done the same in recent years.
The former president himself spent three months in Florida shortly after losing the 2022 election. He later returned to Brazil and, while facing trial over the attempted coup, spent two nights at the Hungarian embassy in Brasília, then run by his ally Viktor Orbán.
While under house arrest after being sentenced to 27 years in prison, the patriarch of the Bolsonaro clan used a soldering iron in an attempt to destroy his electronic ankle monitor.
