Update, October 30: Argentina’s government first said Flávio Bolsonaro did not enter the country. It changed that position on Wednesday, when the immigration agency said he crossed into Misiones at 10:50 p.m. Tuesday with valid documents and boarded a private jet. Read the full account.
Argentina’s government said Tuesday that Brazil’s defeated presidential candidate, Flávio Bolsonaro, did not enter the country, while his allies and a US government source say he left Brazil for the United States despite a court ban.
Argentine news reports said early Tuesday that Bolsonaro, a senator and the son of ex-president Jair Bolsonaro, had crossed the border at Puerto Iguazú, in the northeastern province of Misiones, to board a private jet to Florida. Under the rules of Mercosur, the South American trade bloc, Brazilians can enter Argentina with an ID card instead of a passport. Brazil’s Federal Police asked Argentine authorities to check.
The reports land in an already strained relationship. President Milei, an ally of the Bolsonaro family, drew a formal protest from Brazil’s foreign ministry last week over a post calling President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva a thief, and Brazil withdrew its ambassador from Buenos Aires earlier this year.
A Gulfstream G400 jet belonging to the Buenos Aires charter firm Baires Fly landed at Puerto Iguazú airport from Aeroparque, Buenos Aires’ domestic airport, at 11:45 p.m. Monday, according to FlightRadar24 tracking. It was due to leave for Florida with four passengers and three crew, airport sources said. The flight did not go ahead, and airport security police sources said a passenger did not show up.
Argentina’s immigration agency said it recorded no entry by Bolsonaro, that the jet’s paperwork was in order and that no flight plan listed the Bolsonaro family. The Security Ministry, which oversees the agency and airport police, said he neither entered nor asked to enter. Presidential spokesman Adrián Ravier told a news conference at the Casa Rosada, the presidential palace, that Bolsonaro had made no asylum request to Argentina.
Bolsonaro lost Sunday’s run-off to Lula. On Monday, the Federal Police served him an order from Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes to surrender his passports within 24 hours and not to leave Brazil, part of a money-laundering investigation involving a lawyer friend, Willer Tomaz. Both men deny wrongdoing, and Bolsonaro has called the order politically motivated. In a video that day, Bolsonaro said he had never thought of leaving and would hand over his passports. When the 11 a.m. Tuesday deadline passed, police cancelled his ordinary and diplomatic passports, and a Federal Police official said he had not left Brazil through any regular immigration checkpoint.
Earlier Tuesday, his campaign coordinator, Senator Rogério Marinho, and his brother Eduardo, who lives in the United States, denied that he had left. Later, an ally of Bolsonaro and a US government source said he was on his way to the United States, and allies told Brazilian media he flew with his wife and two daughters and would seek political asylum. Those allies say the Trump administration knew of the trip and would grant him asylum. Their accounts of the route differ: one has him leaving from another point in Argentina, with his name on the Iguazú passenger list a decoy, while another person close to him says he did not pass through Argentina.
Three lawmakers from Lula’s Workers’ Party asked Moraes on Tuesday to order Bolsonaro’s detention and an Interpol red notice, an international alert to locate and provisionally arrest a wanted person. The Federal Police will report the missed deadline to the justice.
