Fl\u00e1vio Bolsonaro, the candidate defeated in Brazil\u2019s elections, landed in Miami on Wednesday, declaring himself the legitimate leader of the nation he fled after Brazilian authorities asked him to surrender his passports as part of a money-laundering investigation.<\/p>\n
Mr. Bolsonaro arrived in the United States after apparently vanishing for a whirlwind 24 hours during which it was largely unclear where he was and how, or if, he would reach the United States. <\/p>\n
The State Department plans to issue visas allowing him and his family to enter the country, a senior department official said on Tuesday. The official spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive diplomatic matters.<\/p>\n
Just after 9:30 a.m., Mr. Bolsonaro could be seen leaving a plane at a private airport outside Miami along with his family, according to news media video footage. The group was ushered into an S.U.V. shortly after exiting the airport, hidden under umbrellas.<\/p>\n
Mr. Bolsonaro had embarked on the journey by crossing into Argentina, before traversing South America on a private plane to reach the United States. <\/p>\n
Mr. Bolsonaro, in a lengthy statement on social media on Wednesday afternoon, said he had left Brazil because he faced political persecution and thanked President Trump and President Javier Milei of Argentina. After initially declaring himself the \u201clegitimate president-elect\u201d of Brazil, Mr. Bolsonaro deleted his statement and reposted it using the word \u201cleader\u201d instead. <\/p>\n
\u201cI address the Brazilian people and the international community as the true president-elect of Brazil,\u201d Mr. Bolsonaro said. He claimed the election that he lost was fraudulent and that he was the subject of a \u201cwitch hunt\u201d by Brazil\u2019s judiciary. <\/p>\n
The U.S. government\u2019s assistance to Mr. Bolsonaro could escalate tensions between the Trump administration and President Luiz In\u00e1cio Lula da Silva of Brazil, who has accused President Trump of interfering in his country\u2019s internal affairs<\/a>.<\/p>\n Mr. Bolsonaro, a right-wing senator and the son of a former president serving a lengthy sentence for attempting a coup, lost Sunday\u2019s presidential vote to Mr. Lula. After initially contesting the result, he conceded but claimed Mr. Lula had won through unfair tactics.<\/p>\n Mr. Trump has also criticized the election, saying it appeared to have been \u201crigged.\u201d When questioned about Mr. Bolsonaro on Wednesday, Mr. Trump struck a milder tone. \u201cWe gave him a pass to come into the country, so we\u2019ll see,\u201d he told reporters. \u201cBut I won\u2019t get involved. It was a very strange election, that\u2019s for sure.\u201d<\/p>\n Following his loss, Mr. Bolsonaro seized on a change in the voting hours on Sunday to demand the election be annulled because of foul play. But the change affected only 0.03 percent of the vote and Brazil\u2019s electoral authorities said it did not make any difference to the result, which saw Mr. Lula win by a margin of 4.4 million votes over Mr. Bolsonaro. <\/p>\n In his statement on Wednesday, Mr. Bolsonaro doubled down on those complaints. He also insisted that Mr. Lula had unfairly used government funds to win, citing the leftist president\u2019s move to raise a welfare stipend in the last stretch of the campaign. (Mr. Lula\u2019s government claimed the increase was an overdue inflation adjustment.)<\/p>\n Mr. Bolsonaro crossed from Brazil to Argentina by land on Tuesday night with his wife and two daughters, Argentina\u2019s National Directorate of Migration said Wednesday<\/a>. It said that he then boarded a private fight to Guayaquil, Ecuador. He flew from Ecuador to the United States.<\/p>\n On Monday, Brazilian authorities had asked Mr. Bolsonaro to hand over his passports within 24 hours because he is being investigated over his links to a Brazilian lawyer accused of laundering more than $1 billion through a scheme involving online gambling. <\/p>\n Separately, Mr. Bolsonaro is also the subject of a police inquiry over millions of dollars he raised from a disgraced banker at the center of a huge corruption scheme<\/a> to finance a biopic of his father, Jair Bolsonaro. The elder Mr. Bolsonaro was convicted of attempting a coup<\/a> after losing the presidential election in 2022 to Mr. Lula and is serving his prison sentence under house detention.<\/p>\n When Mr. Bolsonaro didn\u2019t comply by Tuesday morning, Brazilian authorities canceled his travel documents and issued an alert to immigration authorities barring Mr. Bolsonaro\u2019s exit from the country. It was not immediately clear how he was able to cross the border into Argentina. <\/p>\n The Brazilian federal police said it had no official record of Mr. Bolsonaro exiting the country. The police also said, in a statement, that the restrictions on Mr. Bolsonaro\u2019s travel and documents did not necessarily make him a fugitive or allow for his arrest. The police are now \u201cinvestigating the circumstances surrounding the senator\u2019s failure to comply with court orders.\u201d <\/p>\n Argentina\u2019s federal police also said they had not registered his entry. Still, Argentina\u2019s immigration authorities said in a statement overnight that Mr. Bolsonaro, his wife and two daughters entered the country at 10:50 p.m. on Tuesday. They made the journey in a van, crossing what is known as the \u201cFraternity Bridge,\u201d connecting Foz do Igua\u00e7u in southern Brazil to Puerto Iguaz\u00fa in Argentina.<\/p>\n The group crossed the border \u201cwith valid travel documentation and without any legal impediment to entering the country,\u201d the Argentine immigration agency said in a statement. In addition to his Brazilian documents, Mr. Bolsonaro, who also holds Italian citizenship, had also been asked to turn over his Italian passport.<\/p>\n Some 40 minutes later, Mr. Bolsonaro and his entourage embarked on a plane owned by Baires Fly, a private company that has transported Mr. Milei in the past. Once in Ecuador, they took another flight early on Wednesday morning that was headed to Miami. <\/p>\n Public U.S. government records suggest that Mr. Bolsonaro entered the United States with a canceled Brazilian diplomatic passport. <\/p>\n At home, Mr. Bolsonaro\u2019s abrupt and mysterious departure left many of his political allies perplexed. Ahead of his escape to the United States, his party had urged him to concede and harness the vast support he had drawn in Sunday\u2019s election to lead the right-wing opposition in Brazil.<\/p>\n On Monday morning, Mr. Bolsonaro signaled his intention to do just that. In a video posted to social media, he said he intended to comply with a court order to hand over his passports and claimed he had never considered leaving Brazil. <\/p>\n \u201cWe secured a majority in the Senate and the Chamber of Deputies \u2014 a victory you delivered for Brazil,\u201d Mr. Bolsonaro told his followers.<\/p>\n Mr. Bolsonaro vowed to turn Brazil\u2019s legislature into a \u201cfortress\u201d guarding against Mr. Lula\u2019s agenda. <\/p>\n Mr. Bolsonaro\u2019s political party made major electoral gains and now holds the largest slice of seats in both chambers. Among those elected were Mr. Bolsonaro\u2019s two brothers, his stepmother and an uncle. <\/p>\n In the United States, Mr. Bolsonaro\u2019s allies cheered his arrival online, claiming he will now lead an opposition movement while in exile. <\/p>\n Reporting was contributed by David C. Adams in Miami, Emma Bubola in Buenos Aires, Adam B. Ellick in S\u00e3o Paulo, Thayz Guimar\u00e3es in Bras\u00edlia, Hamed Aleaziz in Washington, and Karla Adam in London.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Fl\u00e1vio Bolsonaro, the candidate defeated in Brazil\u2019s elections, landed in Miami on Wednesday, declaring himself the legitimate leader…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":385967,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35],"tags":[14414,87986,2774,29969,1452,87987,87988,87989,75,84,83,15780,9,24,63,62010,1671,18538,1069,901,1554],"class_list":["post-385966","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-manhattan","tag-argentina","tag-bolsonaro","tag-brazil","tag-da-silva","tag-donald-j","tag-flavio","tag-jair-1955","tag-luiz-inacio-lula","tag-manhattan","tag-manhattan-headlines","tag-manhattan-news","tag-money-laundering","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-city","tag-nyc","tag-passports","tag-politics-and-government","tag-state-department","tag-trump","tag-united-states","tag-united-states-international-relations"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/385966","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=385966"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/385966\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/385967"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=385966"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=385966"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=385966"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}