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.”
