Brazil has summoned Argentina’s top diplomat in the country to answer questions about right-wing candidate Flavio Bolsonaro, who fled first to Argentina, then to the United States, after losing Sunday’s presidential election. On Thursday, Brazil’s Foreign Ministry called in Argentina’s charge d’affaires, Maria Emilia Cortes, sources inside the government told the news agency . Argentina’s Foreign Minister Pablo Quirno, however, has denied on social media that his government received a formal request for explanations regarding Bolsonaro’s decision to flee into Argentina late on Tuesday.
The circumstances surrounding Bolsonaro’s departure threaten to further strain relations between Brazil’s recently re-elected President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva and his Argentinian counterpart, libertarian Javier Milei. After Sunday’s election, Bolsonaro was given a deadline to surrender his passports. Officials ordered him to remain in the country as part of an ongoing legal case.
He is part of an ongoing investigation into a money-laundering scheme, known as the Banco Master scandal. Investigators are probing a multimillion-dollar payment Bolsonaro received from Banco Master’s former head, Daniel Vorcaro, allegedly to finance a film about his father, former President Jair Bolsonaro. The younger Bolsonaro has denied any wrongdoing and called the case politically motivated.
A senator since 2019, Bolsonaro ran this year as the right-wing presidential candidate for his father’s political movement, the Liberal Party. But after advancing to the run-off, the senator fell short by more than 4 million votes. Lula won Sunday’s race with 51.8 percent of the vote, securing a historic fourth non-consecutive term.
Bolsonaro, however, has refused to concede, though the Liberal Party has acknowledged Lula’s victory. Instead, he made an unsubstantiated allegation of electoral malfeasance, pointing to a Supreme Court decision to extend voting hours on Sunday. Both candidates’ campaigns had requested extensions, though for different reasons: Bolsonaro’s camp pointed to inclement weather delaying voters in parts of Brazil, while Lula’s party raised concerns about efforts to restrict public transport on election day.
But Bolsonaro argued that the last-minute extension had disadvantaged voters in regions considered right-wing strongholds. After arriving in Miami on Wednesday, he declared himself the “legitimate president-elect” of Brazil. He, his wife and two daughters had travelled from Brazil through northern Argentina, before boarding a chartered aircraft that passed through Ecuador to reach the US.
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