Flávio Bolsonaro leaves for the US after defying a court order to hand over his passports
Brazil's defeated presidential candidate Flávio Bolsonaro has travelled to the United States, an ally and a US government source told Reuters, after he missed a Supreme Court deadline to surrender his passports. Brazilian police have cancelled them, and Washington says it will give him and his family visas.
Flávio Bolsonaro, the right-wing senator who lost Brazil's presidential runoff to Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva on Sunday, has left the country for the United States, a close ally and a US government source told Reuters on Tuesday, 27 October. The ally said he had arrived in Florida. Sources told BBC Brasil and BBC Mundo that he met his younger brother Eduardo there, although his exact route out of Brazil is unclear.
Supreme Court justice Alexandre de Moraes had ordered on Sunday night that Bolsonaro hand over his passports, and federal police served the order on Monday, giving him 24 hours. The decision is part of a money-laundering investigation into the senator and his friend, the lawyer Willer Tomaz, linked to Tomaz's companies and the betting sector in Rio de Janeiro. According to Reuters, Moraes cited a flight risk and the suspects' considerable economic power. Both men deny any wrongdoing, and Bolsonaro has not been charged.
The deadline passed around midday on Tuesday without the passports being handed in. Federal police then cancelled all of his Brazilian passports, including the diplomatic one he holds as a senator, and said they would inform Moraes that the order had not been obeyed. According to the state news agency Agência Brasil, police had no formal record of him leaving the country.
Argentine media reported that he had crossed into Argentina and would fly to the US by private jet from Puerto Iguazú, but Argentina's migration authority said it had no record of him entering the country and found no flight plan involving the Bolsonaro family on the aircraft it checked. Liberal Party lawmaker Mauricio Marcon said in a video on X that Bolsonaro was heading to the US to go into 'exile'.
On Monday Bolsonaro had said he had no plans to leave and would stay to lead the opposition to Lula. His lawyers told BBC Brasil they were 'completely in the dark' about his whereabouts. A senior US State Department official told Reuters and AP that the department 'will issue visas to Flávio Bolsonaro and his family and allow them entry into the United States'. His brother Eduardo already lives in the US despite an open arrest warrant in Brazil, and their father, former president Jair Bolsonaro, is under house arrest.