Brazilian officials confirm that Sen. Flávio Bolsonaro made a daring overnight escape into Argentina and then to the U.S. just hours after federal police ordered him to hand over his passport and not leave the country as part of an ongoing criminal investigation into alleged money laundering and corruption.
His alleged links to a lawyer accused of laundering over $1 billion through a fraud scheme are under investigation, and there is a separate probe into millions of dollars allegedly raised from a collapsed bank to fund a biopic about his father, former President Jair Bolsonaro.
Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes, who once served as President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva's personal lawyer and ordered the polls to remain open for two extra hours on election night — an order Bolsonaro had vowed to challenge in court — issued the confidential restriction and passport seizure order, citing Bolsonaro's significant financial resources and public comments from his brother, Eduardo, urging him to leave Brazil.
The order came just after Bolsonaro's defeat in the presidential runoff election against Lula. When his Senate term ends Jan. 31, he will lose parliamentary immunity from prosecution.
President Donald Trump personally approved allowing Bolsonaro's entry into the U.S.
The Bolsonaro family, which Trump describes as "fine people," maintains close, long-standing ties with the U.S. president and American conservative circles; senior State Department officials reportedly supported his presidential campaign through targeted political maneuvers against incumbent President Lula.
Trump administration officials were aware of the 24-hour deadline for Bolsonaro to surrender his passport but made it clear to the defeated candidate on Monday that he would be permitted entry into the United States. The U.S. State Department confirmed it would issue visas to Bolsonaro, his wife and their two daughters.
They arrived in Miami Wednesday via Opa-locka Executive Airport, and his brother, who manages a conservative political operation from Texas, was there to receive them.
Cedarville University's Dr. Gabriel Castro, who was born in Brazil, thinks Bolsonaro's political career is toast.
"Because he left the country, there will be a new indictment saying … he tried to evade justice, so he'll get five or seven years in jail," Castro predicts. "[If] he comes back to Brazil, he'll be arrested, so, I don't think he'll be able to come back in four years."
But he still believes a couple of conservative political parties will be strong enough to challenge Lula's party at that time.
"I think that in four years, the conservatives will have a shot, especially if Lula decides not to run again, which I hope happens," the political science professor tells AFN. "As long as the voting system itself is still not rigged, I think they have a shot. Even though the judiciary, the courts will still be in the hands of the Left, there's only so much they can do to stop a highly popular conservative candidate from winning."
Noting that Lula will be 85 in four years, he says the Left's main issue is "they don't have anybody as popular as" the president.
"So, there might be hope for conservatives," Castro concludes.
Meanwhile, the most recent Brazilian election is unlikely to be overturned. Lula won by a decisive margin of over 4 million votes, and there is reportedly no evidence of fraud to challenge the legally certified results.
