Bolsonaro flees Brazil for US after election defeat

Next, a wanted man on fraud charges in Brazil. The defeated presidential candidate, Flavio Bolsonaro, has resurfaced with his family in the United States. An alert was raised when Bolsonaro failed to report to police in Brazil and hand over his passport on Tuesday. In the wake of his election defeat on Sunday, his legal case was put back in the spotlight. He's charged with fraud and money laundering in a multi-million dollar betting scandal. So, Bolsonaro now in the USA. Tim Vickery joins us from Rio, our correspondent there. Tim, fill us in on the finer details here. How did Flavio Bolsonaro flee the country? Well, it's being said that he crossed the bridge at the frontier of Brazil and Argentina on foot. There is another version that he took a private plane across the frontier. Then from Argentina in the early hours of this morning, he took a plane, a private plane there. you see him and his family getting out on their arrival in Miami and he took a private plane which went over Bolivia uh Peru and Chile before arriving at Guayaquil in Ecuador now that route cautiously they're designed to avoid Brazilian airspace and then maybe refueling in Guayaquil Ecuador and on his way to Miami in the United States now there had been quite a lot of disinformation, a lack of information from the Argentina side and disinformation from the American side, even saying that he'd arrived yesterday. That now seems to have been a deliberate ploy in order to camouflage the real itinerary of his journey, which ended a few hours ago. Flavio Bolsonaro is now in Miami in the United States. It is an incredible tale, this, isn't it? It really is difficult. I mean, as I think we said last night, you couldn't make it up. But if you consider this, a wanted felon, if he was like someone who was picking crops, you know, at a farm and he was a wanted felon from Brazil, it's very likely he'd be swept up by the ICE agents and deported or sent off to some kind of internment. It definitely seems here there's one rule for some and a different rule for others in the United States. Yeah, we have to row back a little bit here, Mark, because at this moment in time, he's not wanted. He's not a fugitive. he hasn't been found guilty of anything yet he is under investigation and the reason that there was a request that came in for his passport to be apprehended was that there was a good reason to consider him a flight risk that would certainly seem to have been confirmed by subsequent events it does seem heavy-handed the instruction to for him to surrender his passports came less than 10 minutes after the confirmation of the election results on Sunday night but Mark it would have been much much more heavy-handed had this request happened before the elections because this is a long-running investigation we still don't know all of the details they haven't been made public, they are still secret. What we do know is that Flavio Bolsonaro has always been the smoke of suspicion of corruption around him. You may remember that in the government of his father, Jair Bolsonaro, the Justice Minister resigned in protest at not being allowed to carry out an investigation into Flavio. Flavio Bolsonaro, and this from a political point of view I think this is the meat in the story, was always a very poor candidate for the right wing to field. He was always vulnerable on these and other issues. And I wonder, politically, the big winner of all of this in the long term could be the governor of São Paulo, Tarcísio de Freitas. Now, Tarcísio, I think he would have won this election against Lula, would have been a better candidate but the the strength of the Bolsonaro family uh means the Bolsonaro clan means that the right are almost have become a hostage to them this moment here of of uh Flavio's flight to the United States such a contrast with what Lula did nearly eight years ago when he contested uh the charges that put him in prison but he went along with with the process This flight from Flavio, politically, is a real chance for Tarcísio de Freitas to become the de facto leader of the right. It's a difficult line that he'll have to walk because he doesn't want to alienate the Bolsonaro support, while also not wanting to alienate support from the centre that deserted Bolsonaro in Sunday's election. But if Tarcísio plays his cards right, long term, he could be the winner of everything that's happening in Brazil at the moment. Tim, the situation as it is then with Flavio Bolsonaro there in the US and the Secretary of State of the US, Marco Rubio, he's actually said that he will be there and he will be the Brazilian opposition from the United States of America. Isn't there something underlined there by the US that they're doubting the actual result of the Brazilian election, which seems, if I understand exactly what happens in Brazil, unfair. It's a free and fair election process. Yes, and very striking that with the exception of Milei in Argentina, who is a right-wing ideologue the other governments in South America all quickly recognized Lula as the president including those right-wing governments who are aligned with Donald Trump this is a very very different situation from the one in Venezuela when Guaidó was uh named the president from the United States and Flavio Bolsonaro is expected to give a press conference in Miami tomorrow i imagine very much that he will declare himself the moral victor because that is very much what the American right wing wants to hear you'd be surprised i think Mark how little traction this issue has in Brazil obviously there are right wingers very unhappy with the results and if you remember Jair Bolsonaro himself described some of his supporters as a band of crazies and they will they will cling on to any any conspiracy theory that they can find but the serious players in right-wing politics including Tarcísio Freitas have accepted the election results and i worked the night for France 24 and from the very first results which came in from abroad because of time zone differences they're coming in earlier this is of Brazilians who've gone in person to embassies and consulates around the world from those very first results you saw a powerful swing towards Lula and you saw an increase in the number of people voting and the analysts looking at that number of those numbers you're thinking if those numbers persist throughout Brazil it is a Lula win by a fairly comfortable margin and there's one polling specialist who managed after three percent of the votes had been counted he managed to predict the final votes with great accuracy. It was a swing to Lula and an increase in the turnout all across the country. So the fraud allegations, they will make them from the United States. But at the moment, this is barely an issue in Brazil. Tim Vickery, as always, thank you very much indeed for the insight you always bring to every story from Brazil. Tim Vickery, our correspondent there, joining us from Rio. Thank you, sir.