SAO PAULO — Flávio Bolsonaro, the defeated Brazilian presidential candidate, 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 reelected President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and his Argentine counterpart Javier Milei, who traveled to Brazil to take part in Bolsonaro's campaign.
Bolsonaro is under investigation by Brazil’s Supreme Court for alleged corruption, money laundering and tax evasion in two cases. The court had ordered Bolsonaro to hand over his regular and diplomatic passports by noon Tuesday. It remained unclear whether he had complied, but allies said late Tuesday he also has an Italian passport.
Argentina's migration authority said on X that Bolsonaro, his wife Fernanda Antunes Figueira Bolsonaro, and his daughters Carolina Figueira Bolsonaro and Luiza Figueira Bolsonaro crossed into the country at 10:50 p.m. It added they entered via the Tancredo Neves International Bridge, a primary border checkpoint linking Brazil to Argentina’s northeastern province of Misiones.
“Those who did so possessed valid travel documentation and faced no legal impediments to entering the country," the Argentine migration authority said.
The authority said that at 11:30 p.m. local time, shortly after clearing immigration control, the four boarded a private charter flight operated by aviation company Baires Fly S.A. According to the filed flight plan, the aircraft departed for Guayaquil, Ecuador.
Flight tracking website FlightRadar24 showed that a plane fitting the description of Bolsonaro’s landed in Guayaquil at about 4 a.m. 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.
Lula, who turned 81 on Tuesday, told several dozen supporters outside the presidential residence in Brasilia that he did not have precise information about 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,” Lula said. “This act of leaving Brazil is shameful.”
Representatives of Brazil's government and Bolsonaro did not immediately respond to requests for comment from The Associated Press.
U.S. President Donald Trump said early Wednesday that he would approve of Bolsonaro coming to the U.S., calling him and his family “fine people.”
“The election was really strange, and I thought it was terrible,” Trump told reporters at Joint Base Andrews, Maryland, after returning from campaigning in Texas on Tuesday. He did not elaborate but stressed that he didn't endorse the election results.
Leaders all over the world and the Organization of American States (OAS) endorsed the result and congratulated Lula, who was reelected by a margin of about 4.4 million votes in the second and final round.
Argentinian lawmaker Marcela Pagano said on X she filed a suit at a federal court in the city of Puerto Iguazu late Tuesday to request an investigation into her country's government for people smuggling and abuse of authority regarding Bolsonaro.
“Our government says ‘he never entered’ Argentina. If he did, someone let him in. If they wanted to take him out through a federal airport, someone looked to the other side," Pagano said. “Argentina's border is not a VIP runway for anyone. Sovereignty is neither negotiated nor lent.”
On Tuesday, Milei's administration spokesman Adrián Ravier said “there is no asylum request (from Bolsonaro) and there is nothing more to add.”
The defeated candidate was served with a Supreme Court order to surrender his Brazilian passports 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 Lula.
After that defeat, Jair Bolsonaro fled Brazil for Florida. He returned three months later.
Flávio Bolsonaro said on Monday in a video that he was attempting to organize opposition among his congressional colleagues to the election results. His eight-year term as a senator expires Jan. 31, 2027, which will also cause him to lose special jurisdiction at the country’s Supreme Court.
Brazil's Supreme Court is investigating Bolsonaro for allegedly using a sports betting company to launder fraudulent deductions from government pensions paid to senior citizens. In a separate case, he is accused of accepting millions of dollars from a disgraced banker.
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