Flávio Bolsonaro Arrives in the US After Brazil Cancels His Passports

That is the cleanest verified fact. The more dramatic version — a neat account of where he landed and how he got there — is exactly what is still missing. The BBC reports that Bolsonaro has already met his younger brother Eduardo in Florida, but says his exact travel route from Brazil to the US remains unclear.

The legal backdrop is already serious enough without embellishment. Brazil’s Supreme Court had ordered Bolsonaro to surrender his passports within 24 hours as part of an investigation into alleged money laundering. He has not been charged and denies the allegations. After he missed the deadline, his passports were cancelled. Hours later, a senior US official confirmed to the BBC that the State Department would issue visas to Bolsonaro and his family and allow them entry into the country.

Bolsonaro had publicly insisted that he had no plans to leave Brazil and would stay to lead the opposition after losing the presidential run-off to Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. Then he disappeared from public view. His lawyers told BBC Brasil they were “completely in the dark” about his whereabouts. Federal officers checked border crossings to see whether he might have travelled via Argentina, but Argentine authorities told the BBC there was no record of him entering that country through any border crossing.

The politics and the investigation are now tangled together, though they are not the same thing. Bolsonaro has not conceded defeat and has called for the election to be annulled, arguing that a two-hour extension of voting disadvantaged him, even though the BBC reports that both his party and Lula’s had requested the extension. His party, the Liberal Party, accepted the result while saying the change “merits investigation.”

He is also facing scrutiny on more than one front. Besides the alleged money-laundering inquiry that led to the passport order, Brazil’s Supreme Court has ordered police to examine his campaign over alleged foreign funding. The BBC says he was already under investigation over alleged corruption linked to the financing of a film about his father, former president Jair Bolsonaro, and over alleged links to a lawyer accused of laundering more than $1bn through a fraud scheme. Police said they had found Flávio Bolsonaro had access to bank accounts of a company owned by that lawyer; Bolsonaro denied doing business with him.

For now, the confirmed picture is oddly narrow: a court order, cancelled passports, a vanished candidate, a confirmed arrival in the US, and a meeting with his brother in Florida.