Flávio Bolsonaro was leaving the gated community where his father is under house arrest, he said, when he decided he’d rather leave Brazil than risk the same fate.
That decision, which Mr. Bolsonaro said he only made the morning after losing Brazil’s presidential election, sent him on a spectacular 5,000-mile escape from criminal investigations, traversing South America to ultimately end up in the United States.
The jet that flew him to Miami was arranged by a White House official and his entry into the United States was granted directly by President Trump, according to U.S. officials. Much remains murky about the trip, which also took Mr. Bolsonaro through Ecuador and Argentina, where one of the Argentine president’s top advisers met him at an airport.
Yet in his first interview since fleeing last week, Mr. Bolsonaro said he pulled off this stunning and secretive voyage entirely on his own. “It was all me,” he told The New York Times on Wednesday afternoon. “There was help from absolutely no one, from no government.”
“How I got here,” he added, “I’ll take that to the grave with me.”
The plan to leave, he said, was spontaneously decided with his wife, though he knew they had friends abroad: “There may have been cheerleading, but nothing else.”
Mr. Bolsonaro, 45, who faces several investigations in relation to money laundering and corruption in Brazil, fled after the Brazilian authorities ordered him to hand over his passports. On Wednesday, Mr. Bolsonaro reasserted his innocence and insisted that, had he remained, he would have faced almost certain conviction.
“I already know that the final outcome will be my imprisonment,” said Mr. Bolsonaro. He called the judiciary overzealous and politically motivated, singling out the Supreme Court justice who jailed his father for trying to stage a coup after losing the 2022 election to President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.
In a 75-minute interview, Mr. Bolsonaro, a right-wing senator, at times acknowledged his family’s current predicament — going from the verge of returning to power in Brazil to sudden exile abroad. Not only does his father, Jair, face a 27-year prison sentence for attempting a coup, his brother Eduardo had also fled to the United States, where he stayed once he was convicted in Brazil for urging the Trump administration to interfere in their father’s trial.
Flávio Bolsonaro has not been charged with any crime; once his term as a senator ends in early 2027, he will lose his parliamentary immunity and could be prosecuted, though.
Even though his own party has accepted the election result, Mr. Bolsonaro was unwavering in rejecting his loss last month to Mr. Lula, which he claimed without evidence was “mathematically impossible.”
“I know it won’t lead to anything,” he said of his frustrations. “I lost to the system.”
He complained at length about government spending during the race, claiming it gave Mr. Lula, a leftist, an unfair advantage. He railed against the digital movement that helped lift his rival. And he drastically expanded his claims of fraud, at times echoing the conspiracy theories his father once peddled about Brazil’s voting machines, a system international experts consider one of the world’s most secure.
“I have my suspicions,” Mr. Bolsonaro said when questioned about his claims. “No one can say with 100 percent certainty that I am right, nor with 100 percent certainty that I am wrong.”
Four years ago, the claims of his father found a captive audience, inspiring supporters to camp outside military barracks across Brazil. Thousands of rioters stormed Brazil’s halls of power on Jan. 8, 2023, demanding that the army overturn the narrow result.
His eldest son faces a starkly different scenario. Mr. Lula won by a wide margin, and key leaders in Mr. Bolsonaro’s party have said there was no evidence of fraud. So far, few Brazilians have taken to the streets over Mr. Bolsonaro’s loss. Even his right-wing Latin American allies have recognized Mr. Lula’s win.
Still, Mr. Bolsonaro said he was cheated out of the presidency.
Until now, Mr. Bolsonaro’s complaints had mostly centered on an extension to voting hours, which he claims was handed down by a politically motivated justice eager.
In fact, both candidates had requested the change because torrential rains and bus delays had impeded voters in some regions. But the court decision granting the extension came near voting’s end, causing confusion as some stations struggled to stay open.
It ultimately affected only 34,000 votes, though, which Brazil’s electoral authorities said was too small to affect the result; Mr. Lula won by 4.4 million ballots.
But Mr. Bolsonaro, who had until now adopted a more moderate tone than his father on many issues, including the electoral system, doubled down on, and widened, his accusations.
He spoke of vote tampering and reasserted claims, which have been debunked, of a security breach at the vault room where computers tally the vote. The extension to voting hours, he claimed without offering evidence, could have served as a cover to illicitly add many more votes to his opponent’s scorecard.
Brazil’s electoral court, which oversees the elections, has dismissed his allegations. International independent observers have also certified the election’s integrity and dozens of countries have recognized the result.
Though the United States is not among the countries to recognize Mr. Lula’s victory, Mr. Trump only suggested Brazil’s elections seemed “strange,” declining to say who won.
Mr. Bolsonaro did not fault him. “He didn’t take sides, which is the right thing to do,” he said, thanking Mr. Trump for allowing him to stay in the United States.
And even after Mr. Trump said last week that he has no plans to meet Mr. Bolsonaro, his team is hopeful for an encounter at the Conservative Political Action Conference at Mar-a-Lago over the coming days.
From abroad, Mr. Bolsonaro said he would seek to legally challenge Mr. Lula’s victory, though he acknowledged that has little chance of success. He also plans to champion allies in Brazil pushing his agenda, including lowering the age of criminal responsibility and seeking amnesty for his father and the Jan. 8 rioters.
At the same time, Mr. Bolsonaro sidestepped questions about whether he also plans to lobby the Trump administration for further U.S. actions targeting Brazil.
The State Department this year designated Brazil’s two largest drug gangs as terrorist groups, and Mr. Trump last year used tariffs and sanctions to try to pressure Brazil to drop the case against Mr. Bolsonaro’s father.
The morning after his electoral defeat, Mr. Bolsonaro said, the authorities approached him as he left his father’s house to tell him he had 24 hours to hand over his passports. The older man, tears welling in his eyes, took aside his son before they parted, according to Mr. Bolsonaro.
“He looked me in the eye and said, ‘You already know where they are going with this, right?’” he recalled.
“I said, ‘Dad, I already know,” he added. “‘And I am prepared, I know what I have to do.’ I turned my back and I left.” Neither spoke of a plan to flee, he said.
A few hours later, Mr. Bolsonaro posted a video on social media saying that he planned to surrender his documents as ordered. “I have never thought about leaving the country,” he said in the video, vowing to lead the opposition after his party achieved major victories in Brazil’s legislature.
Soon after, he vanished — only to turn up in Miami some 42 hours later.
Mr. Bolsonaro, his wife, and two daughters will now be allowed to stay in the United States for at least a year, under an immigration status usually given for humanitarian reasons.
Mr. Bolsonaro said he is not sure yet where his family will settle down. His younger brother, Eduardo, has been living in Texas and was recently granted permanent resident status, known as a green card.
But, after a Democrat flipped Texas’s governorship in this week’s midterm elections, Paulo Figueiredo, one of the Bolsonaros’ close allies, pitched Florida as a natural base for the family.
Mr. Bolsonaro said his family is settling in, though he hopes only temporarily. “I will need to move on with my life from the United States, at least for now,” he said.
Still, he hasn’t ruled out a comeback. “If there are new elections, obviously I will be a candidate again.”
Adam B. Ellick contributed reporting from São Paulo and Lis Moriconi and Isabela Cruz contributed research from Rio de Janeiro.
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