SÃO PAULO — Recent Brazilian presidential aspirant Flávio Bolsonaro missed a Tuesday morning deadline to surrender his passports. He has not made any statements or public appearances since Monday, when he effectively conceded his election loss to Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. Calls to his phone returned an out-of-service message all morning.
A question is now preoccupying Brazil: Where is he?
No one knows, or is willing to say, where the right-wing presidential candidate has gone.
Friends and advisers say they don’t know. The Brazilian federal police force, to which the country’s Supreme Court ordered him to surrender his personal and diplomatic passports, says it doesn’t know. The perennially online Bolsonaro’s Instagram account has gone silent. His brother Eduardo — who has been sentenced to prison in Brazil over coercion in judicial proceedings but remains in Texas, beyond the arm of Brazilian law — isn’t picking up his phone.
Unconfirmed reports in the Argentine press indicated that Bolsonaro had crossed the border with the intent of flying to the United States. The federal police said Tuesday that they were monitoring the country’s borders to determine whether Bolsonaro has fled. So far, there is no record of Bolsonaro officially crossing the border from Brazil into Argentina, according to two officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive information. Authorities continue to investigate the matter, including by checking flights between the two countries.
The concerns over his silence are rooted in recent history. After Brazil’s last presidential election, Bolsonaro’s father, then-President Jair Bolsonaro, left the country for the United States while still in office, shortly after losing to Lula.
After a sojourn in Florida, Jair Bolsonaro returned to Brazil and last year was sentenced to more than 27 years in prison for plotting to militarily overthrow the country.
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security and the State Department did not respond immediately to requests for information about the younger Bolsonaro’s whereabouts.
Even before his loss in the election, Bolsonaro’s legal headaches were piling up: He remains under investigation over financial ties to a banker accused of financial misconduct and to a man suspected of money laundering tied to Brazil’s betting industry.
The passport surrender order in connection to a criminal investigation into alleged money laundering — signed by Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes, who oversaw Jair Bolsonaro’s case — terrified Bolsonaro, according to a close adviser to the Bolsonaro family, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to share sensitive details.
Bolsonaro had just emerged from his father’s house, and he found 10 federal police officers waiting for him, the adviser said.
“They surround him, and they gave him a court order,” the adviser said.
The Bolsonaro camp said it viewed the matter as a political prosecution.
“Flávio has given up,” the Bolsonaro adviser said, referring to the election outcome following Bolsonaro’s effective concession Monday. “He’s terrified. He is worried his father will die in jail, that he himself will be jailed this week, and that he may have a long prison term ahead given how young he is.”
Moraes’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the judicial order.
After the electoral returns were announced Sunday evening — which showed that Bolsonaro had lost by more than 4 million votes to Lula — Bolsonaro announced he would seek to annul the election.
But close allies, speaking on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to share details with the media, said Bolsonaro abandoned that plan Monday. He said he would instead organize the opposition in Brazil’s National Congress and lead what he called a “fortress against barbarism.”
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