Flávio Bolsonaro flees Brazil through Argentina toward Ecuador

Argentina's migration authority announced Wednesday that Flávio Bolsonaro, the defeated candidate in Brazil's presidential election, crossed into the country at 10:50 p.m. with his wife and two daughters and boarded a private charter forty minutes later, its flight plan listing Guayaquil, Ecuador, as the destination. Two days earlier, Brazil's Supreme Court had served the 45-year-old senator with an order to surrender his regular and diplomatic passports by noon Tuesday.

The Argentine statement, published on X, was serenely bureaucratic. The four travelers "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." A Brazilian court order binds officials at Brazilian border posts. At the Tancredo Neves bridge into Misiones province, it was paper.

The family's travel arrangements had been upgraded the day before, when the Trump administration granted Bolsonaro, his wife Fernanda and daughters Carolina and Luiza United States visas — on the same day the passport deadline expired. Whether Bolsonaro actually surrendered his Brazilian documents remains unclear; allies said late Tuesday that he also holds an Italian passport.

The exit completes a family pattern. After losing the 2022 election, Jair Bolsonaro flew to Florida and returned three months later; he now serves a 27-year sentence under house arrest for attempting a coup following that defeat, and his son received the passport order outside the home where he is confined. Argentine President Javier Milei had traveled to Brazil to take part in the campaign.

In Brasilia, Lula — who turned 81 on Tuesday and won re-election by roughly 4.4 million votes — told a few dozen supporters he had no precise information about his rival's whereabouts. "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."

At Joint Base Andrews, returning from campaigning in Texas, Donald Trump said he would welcome Bolsonaro in the United States and called the family "fine people." "The election was really strange, and I thought it was terrible," he said, without elaborating. The Organization of American States and leaders around the world had already endorsed the result and congratulated Lula.

Neither the Brazilian government nor Bolsonaro's representatives responded to the Associated Press. The last verified record of the defeated candidate is a flight plan filed by a charter operator in Argentina: Guayaquil, Ecuador.