Brazil's Flavio Bolsonaro headed to US after election loss

GUAYAQUIL — A plane carrying far-right Brazilian senator Flávio Bolsonaro has left the Ecuadorian port city of Guayaquil and is on its way to Miami, Florida, according to press reports on Wednesday.

After losing Sunday night’s election to incumbent president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, Bolsonaro disappeared for more than 24 hours, until Argentina’s migration authorities said he had entered the country by land on Tuesday night.

There, he boarded a Gulfstream IV registered as LV-JQW. The aircraft had been parked at Puerto Iguazú airport since the early hours of the previous morning, when the first reports emerged in Argentinian media that he intended to flee on it.

Bolsonaro, the son of the jailed former Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro, boarded the jet with his wife and two daughters at about 11.30 pm, bound for Guayaquil, reportedly to avoid Brazilian airspace. They made a brief stop in Ecuador, and have continued to the Miami-Opa Locka executive airport. The senator is expected to hold a press conference in the US at some point on Wednesday.

There was confusion about the whereabouts of the defeated presidential candidate after Brazil canceled his passports.

Sources had told the BBC earlier on Tuesday that Bolsonaro had arrived in the US.

But Argentine migration authorities later said he had crossed Brazil's land border with Argentina late on Tuesday night local time.

In a tweet, the migration authorities said that he, his wife and two daughters had boarded a private flight headed towards the city of Guayaquil in Ecuador shortly after crossing the border.

Earlier on Tuesday, a senior US official confirmed the US State Department would issue visas to Bolsonaro and his family and allow them entry into the country, were they to request them.

When reporters asked US President Donald Trump about Bolsonaro and his family's whereabouts later, he said: "I heard he was in Argentina."

Speculation about Bolsonaro's whereabouts started hours after Brazil's Supreme Court ordered Bolsonaro to surrender his passports amid an investigation into alleged money laundering. Bolsonaro has not been charged and has denied the allegations.

The court gave Bolsonaro a deadline of 24 hours to hand over the documents.

At the time, Bolsonaro said he had no plans to leave the country, and insisted that he would stay in Brazil to lead the opposition.

Shortly after the deadline to hand over his passports had expired on Tuesday, his lawyers insisted they were "completely in the dark" about his whereabouts.

Referring to speculation he had left the country, they said that "we knew nothing about this, and we still have no information about what happened," one lawyer said.

After he missed the deadline, Brazilian officials canceled his passport.

Bolsonaro has not made any public statements since Monday afternoon local time, when he posted a video on social media.

He was already under investigation for alleged corruption over the financing of a film about his father, former President Jair Bolsonaro, who was convicted of plotting a coup and is under house arrest.

A separate inquiry involves alleged links to a Brazilian lawyer, who is accused of laundering more than $1bn through a fraud scheme.

Police said earlier this month they had discovered Bolsonaro had access to the bank accounts of a company owned by the lawyer.

Bolsonaro denied doing business with the lawyer, and described the passport confiscation as an attempt to intimidate him.

In addition to that investigation, Brazil's Supreme Court ordered police on Tuesday to examine Bolsonaro's electoral campaign over alleged foreign funding.

The 45-year-old senator suffered a stinging defeat on Sunday when he was beaten by Lula in a presidential run-off, which Bolsonaro had been widely expected to win.

But after an early lead in the count, he was overtaken by the veteran incumbent, who became the first presidential candidate to overturn a first-round loss to win in the second round.

Lula won 51.79% of the vote, compared to Bolsonaro's 48.21%.

Despite trailing by 4.4 million votes, Bolsonaro has not conceded and has called for the election to be annulled.

He argues that he was put at a disadvantage because polling was extended by two hours on election day, even though the extension was requested by both his party and that of his rival.

He called the extension, which was ordered by a Supreme Court justice, a "dirty trick".

However, his Liberal Party has accepted the result, although it did say that the extension of voting "merits investigation".

another ​rigged election."