Flavio Bolsonaro has arrived in Miami

Flavio Bolsonaro landed in the United States on Wednesday morning, ending two days of speculation about where Brazil’s defeated presidential candidate had gone.

Earlier, Brazilian authorities canceled his passports, and the leadership of Lula’s Workers’ Party in the lower house confirmed a request for a preventive detention order and an Interpol red notice.

Argentina’s migration authority said Bolsonaro and his family crossed into the country near Foz do Iguaçu with valid travel documents and faced no legal impediments, then left on a private flight to Ecuador late that night, an account that followed an earlier denial from President Javier Milei’s office that he had entered at all.

In April, with Flavio running neck and neck with Lula in the polls, the Supreme Court opened a criminal investigation into him over a social media post that linked the president to drug trafficking. In a functioning democracy, the question of whether a candidate’s attack on his opponent is fair or false is one for voters and the press to settle. Here it became a police matter, overseen by Justice Alexandre de Moraes, who later rejected the defense’s requests to question Lula and other witnesses on the grounds that the accused cannot direct the course of the inquiry.

Flavio's father, Jair Bolsonaro, is serving a 27-year sentence for plotting a coup, and his brother Eduardo has been sentenced to more than four years in prison for coercion. Both cases ended in prison terms, and a man watching his family go through the same system could reasonably conclude that waiting for due process was a risk he could not afford.

The chain of events suggests a system that has lost the ability to tolerate dissent and treats opposition leaders as problems to be removed.